by Lundy, W. J.
She turned and disappeared below. James followed her, staying close behind. What Jacob thought was a cellar opened up into a long rectangle with another doorway in the back. The room was over twenty feet wide and thirty feet long with cinderblock walls. Looking up, the high ceiling appeared to be poured concrete. LED lights were draped across steel I-beams, lighting the room.
They moved down and gathered at the bottom of the stairs. Looking around the space, Jacob spotted what appeared to be two of every kind of weapon known to man. On another wall was a long, steel shelf loaded with boxes of ammunition. Near the front was a small utilitarian kitchen, stainless steel counters, and appliances. A small dining area was just across from it.
“Who is this woman?” Jacob whispered.
Eve minced along a wall, stopping beside a bed, where a large, gray-haired, bearded man was asleep; she sat in a chair beside the bed, pulling a thick blanket back from his chest and coaxed the old man awake. He woke coughing profusely before suddenly spotting the men in the room. “Dammit Eve—” His coughing caused him to turn to his side. She handed him a glass of water, which he sipped down. “Get me a cigarette,” he said.
Eve shook her head no and helped him sit up. “Eve, who the hell are they? What did I tell you about bringing back strangers?”
A red door at the back of the room opened. Probably drawn by the voices and the old man’s hacking, a young girl, less than ten years old, peeked out. She looked at the new faces then back to the woman. “Is Grandpa okay?” she asked.
Eve nodded her head. “He’s fine, and I’ll be back in a minute to see you.”
The little girl turned to look at the strangers before pulling back into the room and closing the door. The old man coughed again then pushed himself upright. He shoved the blanket away from his chest and turned in the bed so that he looked like he was about to stand. “So what the hell are they doing here?” he asked her.
“Dad, we need help; you’re sick and the kids can’t stay here in this shelter forever. If these guys have a way out, we should go with them. It’s been over three months—we’ve had enough, Dad.” She turned and moved toward the red door. “I’m going to check on Mom and the others.”
The old man laughed and coughed again. “Three months—I built this place to last three years, and already they're wanting to hang it up. I got a mutiny on my hands.” The man lifted himself to his feet after putting on a pair of slippers. Ignoring the watching men, he shuffled across the floor to a kitchen counter where he poured hot water into a cup and added tea bags. He turned and faced the men.
“Don’t listen to my daughter. I ain’t sick; it’s just a cold, and she ain’t going nowhere.” The man moved closer to the group. As he stood, they all noticed a 1911 stuffed into a paddle holster on his waistband. He waved them to a far end of the shelter where a long wooden table with chairs around it was positioned. The old man found his way and sat down. “Go on, drop your packs and have a seat.”
Eve re-entered the room from the back, quietly closing the door behind her. The old man watched her walk toward them and looked up at her. “Eve, get these fellas something to eat,” he ordered, causing displeasure to cross her face. She shook her head then moved along the wall, leaned against it, and ignored her father’s request.
Marks dropped his pack near the wall and took a seat, smiling. “Sir, it’s quite all right, she's already done plenty.” He scooted in the chair so that he was just across from the old man. He stretched his arm across the table. “I’m Lieutenant Jeffrey Marks, United States Air Force.”
The man took another sip of his tea. “Yeah, I assumed you were military by the uniforms. You can call me Stone. I’m retired Army and this is… well, was my best-kept secret. Now, I’m not sure what you men are doing here, or why she brought you; maybe you could fill me in.”
Marks leaned back in his chair and looked around the room. “Well… to be honest with you, sir, we were doing all right on our own. Making good time on the trail, trying to get to our next way—”
The woman interrupted. “They were on the trail to Denton.”
The old man let out a hacking laugh. “Hell, you’re lucky she came along then. Denton Shore is overrun—hell, worse than that—it’s a hot bed. These things are coming in from all over to get to Denton. You’d a never made it out of there.”
“What do you mean?” Marks asked suspiciously.
Eve pushed off from the counter and moved back to the table. “They’ve been migrating to there by the thousands. Don’t know why, but it started a little over a month ago. They go down to the water and wade out in it, just standing out there before moving on.”
“You got close enough to verify it?” Marks asked.
Eve rolled her eyes. “You were close enough to verify it, if you’d bothered to look around. Didn’t you notice anything unusual on the road? All the traffic moving to the lake?” She shook her head, waiting for his response. “The East Bay, where you all came in”—she slammed a fist on the counter, raising her voice—“is full of them and you idiots damn near drove right down their throats. Then you turned and left, and led the entire pack this way. Hell, didn’t you notice the water is black? I’ve spotted columns of movement every day coming from all directions.” She turned and looked at the old man. “Daddy, we need to leave. They’re getting closer to this place by the hour, and they only made it worse.”
The old man put a hand up; he looked up as the red door opened again. This time, an older woman with blue hair pulled tightly back, wearing oversized clothing and a button-up, dark-blue sweater ushered out, smiling. She held a large pot and was followed by a boy carrying plastic bowls.
“Really, it’s okay, ma’am,” Marks said, putting up a hand, feeling uncomfortable by Eve’s sudden outburst.
The old woman shook off the comment. “Oh no, we feed our guests, young man,” she said, moving forward, placing the large pot on a counter. “The kids already ate and there’s plenty.” She took a ladle from a drawer and filled the bowls. “Remember when we’d have all the guys over for dinner, Henry? It sure has been a while since we had a house full of soldiers,” she said with a smile.
Henry Stone laughed and slid his chair back, reaching for a pot. He added more hot water to his cup. “Been twenty years at least.”
“We take care of our own though, don’t we, Henry?” she said.
The old man grinned. “Yeah, guess we do. Boys, this is my wife, Gloria, and my grandson Billy.”
The men around the table nodded as the boy handed out bowls of potato soup. Marks took a bowl and after a heaping spoonful, he looked back at Stone. “Sir, do you have a radio? We really need to get north and contact our command. Maybe there's something we can do to help.”
The man coughed into a napkin and shook his head, pointing at a black box near a small table in a corner. “Had one, but lost it. Thing cooked itself; probably dirty power from the generator. Still have the receiver if you think you can get it working.”
Marks nodded to Rogers, who wiped his face with a napkin and stepped off toward the radio, taking the bowl with him. Marks looked back to the front. “You seem well armed. How many people you got here?”
The man nodded and, looking at the shelves lining the walls, said, “The guns? Just part of my collection. I have more in the field. Don’t worry about any of that; it’s just the three of us and the five grandkids.
"So tell me, son, where exactly are you headed?” he asked before Marks could follow up with another question.
Marks hesitated, looking back to Stephens, who shrugged. “What harm’s it gonna do now?”
“We need to get to Grayling,” Marks said.
The man licked at his teeth and stroked his gray beard. “Well, you’re on the right track. Take the highway up the west side of the lake and you’ll run right into it. That is, if it weren’t for all the black eyes in the way. Son, I’m not sure you’ll ever get past that lot. To be honest, I’m not sure how you made it this close to the lake
without them getting you.”
Marks shook his head in disagreement. “You seem to be doing okay.”
Stone dipped his head slowly. “Might seem that way. I’ve lost my sons and their wives out there. Eve and the kids are all we got left.” The man looked away. Gloria moved to his side and put a hand on his shoulder. He shook off the feelings and drank the rest of the tea. “If you could cause a big enough distraction—and I mean it would have to be big—you might be able to break away to the north.”
“What exactly do you have in mind?”
Chapter Forty-Three
“So what is it you have to show me?” Marks asked.
They were riding in the passenger compartment of a large crew cab truck. Stone was at the wheel and Stephens was riding shotgun while Jacob was in the backseat with Duke panting away in the space between him and James. Not as nice as the new one they’d left buried in the mud, but this truck was better equipped for the back country where they now weaved in and out of trees and large boulders. The truck was fitted with oversized tires, a raised suspension, and a large tubular steel brush guard that helped Stone force his way through the back trails and dirt tracks. The truck showed the dents and scars of being used in the rough wooded terrain, and Stone showed it no mercy as he fought his way through thick narrows in the trail.
Stone let out a long string of hacking coughs before spitting into a handkerchief. “You okay?” Marks asked him.
“Emphysema. The women don’t know and I want to keep it that way; they got enough to worry about,” Stone said. He slowed to ease the truck onto a gravel county road. After a short distance, he cut the wheel and put them back onto another all-terrain vehicle trail. “Just my luck. I build up this damn doomsday bunker, and by the time anything good happens, I’m too fucking old and sick to use it.”
“Hey, at least you didn’t have to spend your good years doing this. You got to enjoy them, right?” Marks said.
The old man shook his head and laughed. He reached over Marks and popped the glove box, removing a half-smoked cigar, which he placed between his teeth. “Yep, guess that’s one way of looking at it.” He slowed the truck and eased it off the road into a patch of tall grass. “It’s just up here. We walk the rest of the way,” he said.
They left the truck and followed the trail. The old man carried a Hungarian AMD-65 rifle with a short barrel and collapsible stock. He let it hang from his left arm while he navigated the trail. Just ahead, Jacob could see a wide path of cleared brush and exposed churned earth. The man continued on, walking directly into the barren field.
“It came down during the early fighting; mechanical failure would be my guess—never seen one of those black eyes take down an aircraft. I heard the crash from back at the cabin when I was still sleeping above ground,” Stone said as he left the trail and entered the debris field. “I came out here with my boys. We salvaged everything we could from it. The pilot must have ejected; there was no sign of him in the cockpit, but the plane was full of ammo. Couldn’t make use of the 30mm or the bombs. Still, we worked hard at removing everything.”
They followed Stone over a rise and into a depression. Just ahead of them, they saw the destroyed body of an A10 Warthog. Stone sauntered past the aircraft to a relatively flat spot covered in dried and dead tree limbs. The old man lifted the limbs away, revealing a carefully arranged stack of green bombs with yellow tips.
“Well, holy hell. You definitely got yourself some ordnance.” Marks moved close to examine the bombs. “You know these are armed—you could have blown yourself up moving them around.”
Stone grinned while removing a bottle of Schnapps from his back pocket to have a drink. “So do you think this would make enough of a distraction?” He offered the bottle up to the rest of them, all waiving it off but James.
Jacob crept close to the stack of bombs. “L-Tee, this is what we need; the way we can use it against them.”
“Use what?” Marks asked.
“The hunters, how they always attack and each wave gets bigger than the last, drawing in the main body. We could set these up, bury them in the woods and draw them to us. We lay down fire until the horde arrives… when they mass right over these things… boom,” Jacob said.
Stone laughed, causing more of the deep coughs. “Hell, yeah ‘boom’. You’re talking three thousand pounds of boom. That’s enough bang to get you all out of Dodge and then some,” Stone said.
Marks stared at the weapons, a smile slowly building on his face. “Okay, how do we get the bombs into position? These aren’t exactly light.”
“I got a Bobcat back in the barn. I can help you get ’em moved, but there’s something I need from you in exchange.”
James, staying quiet till now, handed the bottle back to Stone before walking away from the bombs and moving closer to the aircraft body, leaning against it. “What do ya need, Stone? Talk to me, brother.”
“I think you already know.” The old man looked away, kicking at the earth with his worn combat boot. “It pains me to say it, but I need you to get my family out of here. This isn’t the end of the world I’d prepared for. Eve's right; I can’t keep the kids locked up in the shelter all day underground, and it’s only a matter of time until they find us here. We were okay until my boys disappeared. Now I just don’t have the help to take care of the place and give the kids the attention they need.”
“So Eve is their mother, then?” James asked, shooting a covert wink at Jacob.
“What? No, she’s their aunt,” Stone answered.
Marks grimaced and stepped ahead thoughtfully. “What happened to them? To your sons, I mean.”
Stone turned away and moved closer to the aircraft before leaning back against it. He took another sip from the bottle before answering. “They went out on a run. Hardware parts to fix the radio, some plumbing supplies for the well. They never came back. It’s as simple as that, I guess. Left us here with the kids and Eve. And now the changes in the way the black-eyed bastards are acting, the numbers of them that keep moving to the lake—I’m worried our time is running out.”
Stone shook his head. “I set this place up to be big enough for my entire family—my two sons, their wives, their kids, and Eve’s family—if she ever slowed down enough to start one. That girl can’t hold still for a minute, always putting more focus on that job of hers than starting a family. She had a serious boyfriend or two but never a husband. She's too damn stubborn for that, I figure.
“We all made it here, but the boys took their wives out salvaging that one morning and never came back. Eve found their truck down by the East Bay. She never found any sign of the boys or my daughters-in-law. Not a damn thing… no blood trails, not a single spent cartridge. I know those boys wouldn’t have been taken without a fight, tough as nails, they were.”
Marks edged closer to the old man, looking him in the eye. “I’m not sure if you realize what you’re asking. There ain’t much out there for them; the camps aren’t ideal for children. As bad as it sounds, you have it better here than anyone in those camps do.”
Stone moved near James and sat on the plane’s wing. “What else can I do? They can’t stay here, not with all of them out there and more moving in,” he said, waving his arm toward the tall pines.
James reached out a hand for the Schnapps and took another long drink then paused; looking up like an idea just came to him. “What about the dioxin?” he said.
“What about it?” Marks asked suspiciously, frowning at James’s mention of it.
“We have plenty of it. Hell, over three gallons—way more than the sample that command asked for. There has to be a tributary feeding that lake; how much would it take to ruin that seed pond, maybe run some of them off?”
Jacob moved to James. “You want to poison the lake? That’s your answer?”
“News flash, hero. The lake is already poisoned. Take a swim in it if you don’t believe me. That oily shit has it all clogged up. I’m just saying, without the lake the Deltas have no r
eason to come here. It might open things up for Stone and his family. Hell, maybe I’ll even stick around and help him manage the place,” he said, shooting another sly wink at Jacob.
“What is this dioxin?” Stone asked.
James smiled, showing his teeth. “It’s like mustard gas, and it messes them up pretty damn bad. If they're coming here for the lake like Eve says, this might be enough to change their minds.”
“And you say you’ve got this stuff with you?” Stone asked.
Marks pursed his lips and dipped his chin. “We’ve got it, but like Jacob says, it’ll poison that lake, kill everything in it. We don’t know the half of what else it could hurt. For all we know, it’s death in a bottle.”
“Then do it, I don’t care,” Stone said. “We’ve got nothing to lose here. If it doesn’t work, I have to leave anyway. If it runs them off, then maybe we can move back above ground. I can get my water upstream; it’s worth the risk.”
James shrugged and slapped the old man on the back. “It’s worth a try, right?”
Marks stood up and stepped closer to the bombs, hesitating before looking back. “Okay— let’s do it.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Working in shifts, they prepared the ambush site. Stone knew the area well and hand-selected a spot just off the main trail, a well-traveled and very dangerous spot to be in. A place where traffic naturally funneled up from the East Bay then broke off onto several different trails. If they poisoned the stream leading into the East Bay, it might be enough to push the entire horde to them. They moved the bombs early in the morning—the time of day when the Deltas were least active.
Jacob was sent far out ahead of the group with James on security, using Duke for early warning. Stone seemed to pick up on James’s attraction to his daughter and sent the bearded Marine off as far from her as possible. From their observation post, they could just make out the faint sounds of the distant Bobcat as it moved and buried the bombs. Using two-way radios, they would call back to the group, ordering them to halt work whenever a Delta was spotted walking the main trail.