by Pike, JJ
“Can you get her on the line?” Alice chewed her nail. She hadn’t done that for years.
Bill watched her carefully. She’d want to do the right thing, but he didn’t know which right thing would win out.
“I’m in a truck three vehicles behind her. Next time we stop I’ll get up there and make her call you. If there’s any way for you to come to us, Alice…”
Alice swung her head around and let her eyes sweep over Bill. It wasn’t the gaze of a loving wife. It was a frank appraisal of his condition. He was being sized up. She was leaning towards her crew rather than her family.
“We have an escort who believes we need to be in Springfield,” said Alice. “We’ll lose him and touch base. Find out where you’re going and we’ll see what we can do.” It wasn’t a yes, but it wasn’t a no either.
The two women hung up.
The tank rolled past them, heading in the opposite direction, crunching the asphalt and making the van shake. The vehicle with the howitzer was next. Bill was glad to see that go. They were left with the Humvee driven by one Corporal Jank, who’d held back during the interrogation and who they knew almost nothing about. He sat on his horn for a few seconds, then flipped a U-ey, pulled up behind them, and waited.
“He’ll want us to stay in front of him. Like criminals,” said Alice. She gave each of the dogs a Milk-Bone before she jammed the keys in the ignition and set off.
“What’s the plan?” Bill was still fully awake, every nerve pointing at his wife and waiting to hear what she had to say for herself. It was as if his brain had hit the pause button and wasn’t going to let him feel anything until he knew which way the wind was blowing. Emotionally. A small voice in his head said he should have been worried about the literal wind, but they were far enough from Indian Point that they didn’t need to panic. It was a travesty and a tragedy, but they were well outside the hot zone.
“We need to go at least thirty miles with this chump.” Alice checked her rearview mirror. “We don’t want his tank-owning buddies to be able to back him up. Then we dump him and make our own way.”
“Where?”
Alice frowned. “Home. Where else?”
“I thought you might be tempted to go back to your team.” Bill’s pain index crept up. That meant he’d relaxed. Since when was relief a bad thing? Since he’d chopped his own hand off all the way up to the elbow. He flipped open the glove compartment and tracked down another tramadol. One might help, without putting him to sleep.
“I don’t have a team.” Alice swung around a couple of abandoned cars and checked for her escort again. “There’s nowhere to go back to. Didn’t you hear Fran? They’re on the move.”
“So you’re not going to join them?”
“Christine’s in one of her moods. It’ll take days to calm her down. She has no internal emotional regulators. She can’t calm herself. Once she’s wound up that tight it’ll go on forever. I was able to help her sometimes, but not every time.”
She hadn’t answered the question. Bill knew his wife. She might still go back. With stakes this high—and a problem created by her own firm—it’d be a miracle if she didn’t get sucked back into their drama.
“Trouble ahead.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Reach in the back and grab my rifle.”
She meant trouble in front of them, not in the future. There were three motorbikes headed their way. If they’d been riding single file they wouldn’t have seemed ominous, but three abreast was either a bid for safety or a declaration of malicious intent.
Bill moved as fast as he could—not fast, not smooth, not without wincing and gasping when his seatbelt cut into his stub—but he couldn’t reach the rifle. He got a hand full of Maggie-loo slobber for his trouble.
“Sorry. I should have thought. You can’t…” Alice pulled over to the side of the road, grabbed her rifle, and leaned out of her window aiming her gun at the lead biker’s front tire. She’d have taken his bike out in a heartbeat, if it hadn’t been for the military vehicle honking and pulling forward.
Corporal Jank stopped his Humvee alongside them. “We’ve been hearing reports about these jokers. They’re the forward guard for some biker gang. Roll up your windows and don’t engage. They’re armed and dangerous. They have hundreds of followers. All looking for food. If they see what you’ve got back there, you’re toast.”
Alice rolled up her window but kept her gun at the ready. She wasn’t wrong. One corporal was nowhere near enough to hold off hundreds of bikers.
Maggie-loo was between the front seats, drooling on Alice’s shoulder. Alice seemed not to notice. It couldn’t hurt to have the face of a pitbull in full view. The bikers wouldn’t know she was a velveteen marshmallow. Bill absentmindedly stroked her massive head and told her what a good girl she was.
The bikers slowed as they approached the strange duo of vehicles on the side of the road.
Alice cracked her window so they could listen to the exchange.
Corporal Jank saluted, touching his gun to his hat. “Good morning, gentlemen.”
“We’re not looking for trouble.” They were Hell’s Angel’s imitators. Not the real deal. They had the tats and mutton chops and low-slung bikes with high handles, but they were scrappy and scrawny and barely worth getting bent out of shape over.
Bill smiled. He and Aggie would have made tougher looking road warriors.
“Just aiming to find a place to hunker down until the madness blows over.”
“Got no homes to go to?” Jank cut right to the chase. He’d done this before.
“Evacuated three days ago.”
Jank still had his gun drawn and ready. They all knew he held the cards. What happened next was in his hands. “I’m going to ask you gents to turn around and head back down the road. We’ve been doing sweeps to make sure everyone’s gotten out safely and this road heads east. You won’t want to be going this way.”
“The roads are clogged heading west. There’s no getting through. We figured we’d ride east for a while, swing north when we could, then check out the west-bound roads again.”
That was dumb. They were on bikes. Wasn’t that the whole point of bikers during the apocalypse? They could cut through traffic. Even with three times the recommended dose of tramadol on board, Bill sensed they were full of horse pucky.
“I know it. But I’m still going to ask you boys to head back.”
“We figured we’d find us a nice basement or something out by Worcester or thereabouts.”
Jank didn’t miss a beat. “Sorry, fellas. I’m going to have to insist.”
If they meant trouble, they sure were low key about it. They turned their bikes around and headed back down the road as if they were just regular old law-abiding citizens.
“Take it nice and slow,” said Jank. “They could be waiting for us. I’m going to radio my Sergeant. I’ll be along in a minute.”
Bill found himself warming to Jank. He didn’t sound like a soldier and he’d kept things on an even keel. If he’d been officious or heavy-handed that stand-off with the bikers could have gone south in a hurry.
The military radio on the dashboard crackled to life. They were tuned into Jank’s frequency. His report was short and factual. If he was worried about the bikers it barely registered. Sergeant Pottinger replied in kind, telling Jank to report back every half hour. Their call was unlike Alice and Fran’s. No code. No hidden meaning. They were just a couple of regular joes going about their business.
“Is this when we make a run for it?” said Bill.
“Hardly.” Alice kept her eyes on the road. “Jank is on our tail. Pottinger is less than two miles away. The bikers are probably massing around the next corner. We do exactly as we’re told: nice and slow.”
Had she heard the same exchange? Evidently not. She was still the same, paranoid Alice who saw danger in every dip in the road.
When they reached the intersection, Alice hit the switch on her radio and hailed Ja
nk. “Any thoughts on which way they went?”
“No new reports, Ma’am. Keep to your plan and we’ll protect you. It’s my job to get you back to your people. I won’t let you down.”
Alice looked right and left. There was no GPS and no road signs. If she made a wrong turn would Jank even know? She was faking the meeting point. If he’d been in any fit state to drive, Bill would have driven them all the way home without a second thought. They could lie and say he’d made a call to Fran, that their rendezvous point had moved, and string Jank along until it was time to ditch him.
That wasn’t a bad idea.
“Honey,” he said, “call Fran. Tell her to meet us at home. Make that the meeting place, rather than Springfield. That way we don’t have to come up with some…”
“That would be good if we were going home.” Alice shot him a look. What had he missed? “We’ve been gone long enough that the kids will have bugged out. They’ll have been to the Lodge at Lake Placid at least once and will head there again before the week is out. We trained them well. We’ll find them in a place safer than home.”
Would they? Leave? She was right in as much as that had been the plan, but would they have gone through with it? Aggie would have taken charge. Petra was wrapped up in her new boyfriend and Paul was, well—perhaps home, perhaps not—but even if he was, he’d follow Aggie’s lead because she knew the land around them best, shot best, hunted best, and was all-round the calmest of their children. Would she have gone to Lake Placid Lodge? Once? Twice? How many days had they been gone? Would she have marked the tree with their sign?
“Trouble again,” said Alice. She didn’t need to say more. The roar of engines was overwhelming. Three men on bikes had been mildly disconcerting. One hundred was outright terrifying.
Corporal Jank was on the radio immediately. “Fall back,” he said. “Let me deal with this.”
Alice didn’t argue. She let Jank overtake her.
Bill leaned back. There was going to be bloodshed. He didn’t want to watch. His own blood coursing down his arm had cured him of any desire to see more blood spilled.
Alice backed up, did a three-point turn, and floored it.
“Grab the radio,” she said.
Bill leaned forward. The pothole threw them a measly inch off course and he shrieked.
“Sorry.” Alice didn’t slow or stop. She grabbed the radio herself and hit the switch. “Pottinger? Alice Everlee. They have your man. I repeat, they have your man. Over.”
“Say again. Over.”
“The bikers. Hundreds of them. They have Jank surrounded. Over.”
“Copy that. Over.”
“If you want to see him alive, you need to get back here, now. Over.”
“Wilco. Over.”
Alice took a left as soon as she could. It was a narrow road, with potholes as far as the eye could see. “Damn.” She backed up.
“No. Do it,” said Bill. He took a roll of bandage from the bag at his feet and wedged it between his teeth, then pressed himself back into his seat as hard as he could. It was going to be hell, but he’d weathered worse.
“You sure?” she said.
Bill nodded and she hit the gas.
Four potholes later he was less sure. Didn’t you pass out once the pain hit 50 out of 10? He was due a reprieve. Darkness, do your best. Take me to oblivion and make me your flunky. I don’t care how out of it I need to be in order not to feel the next 10 minutes, do it. Now.
He didn’t pass out. He lived through five minutes of a bone-rattling drive during which time he offered his soul to any demon who’d have it; begged all the angels and saints to put him out of his misery; called on several demigods from other religions to smite him with their wrath; and let loose all the profanity he’d ever heard.
Alice pulled into a farmyard. “Now will you let me give you some real drugs?”
Bill nodded.
Alice found a syringe. Who knows where that came from. A vial. She was a magician. Drew a few mils and sank the needle into his leg.
Sleep had never been so plush and deep. There were no demons, no pokers, no fires. Bill floated on the surface of the lake out by the quarry behind Jo Morgan’s place. He and Aggie would go there when they were doing their “How Can a Bear Not Poop in the Woods?” weekend training trips. Aggie had given the trips their names. They were all about leaving no trace and indulging no whims, including that inclination to have a hot shower or a long bath. Washing was a luxury when you were training for the end of the world. Better to smell like the forest than a giant, walking bar of soap or a stick of stupid deodorant. Hence their midnight swims in the lake.
“People are idiots,” Aggie said. “They want to stand out when all that gets you is trouble. If people can see you, they can mess with you. Under the radar, all the way. That’s my motto.”
“Under the radar,” said Bill. “Away from the bombs.”
They crashed and boomed, rocking his world from side to side, but he stuck with the water and the night sky and floating with Aggie.
“If you could change anything about the world,” he said, “what would it be?”
Aggie was silent for a long while. “I’d invent a pill that could erase the past.”
Bill knew what she was talking about. She’d lived through some tough stuff. He’d erase her past too, if he knew how.
“And I’d give it to Mom, so she’d feel better.”
The lake swirled around the plug hole and emptied everything, Bill included, into a dumpster on the other side of the universe.
When he opened his eyes, he and Alice were in a barn, under a blanket, two dogs wriggling around trying to get Alice to play.
“Quiet,” she whispered. “They’re here.”
CHAPTER TEN
“Thank God it’s just you and me.” Michael settled himself in the passenger seat and blew out the longest breath known to man. “It’s just us, right? You don’t have the car rigged so your idiot colleagues can listen in?”
Jo started the car and fell back in line with the convoy.
“Dang,” he said. “No answer. Okay. I get it. But, Jo, you’re waaaaaaaaaaay too smart to work for the Bureau. Come on over to the dark side. Work with us.” He laughed, then touched every piece of equipment in his reach. He found the miniature camera in the phone holder right away. “Hi, guys. Michael Rayton here, coming to you from sunny New Jersey. My life has been turned inside out by some lunatic who had it in for me, but I’m telling you, I’m not your guy.” He rolled down his window.
“That is an expensive piece of equipment,” said Jo.
Michael sighed. “And there are ten more just like it, right. The whole vehicle is buzzing with listening devices? Look, I’m too tired to mess around. I’ve been straight with you from the start…”
Jo laughed. “You’ve been anything but…”
“Since when do you introduce yourself as an agent?”
Fair point. He was right. You didn’t.
“And in what universe do I tell anyone what I was doing in China? I had clearance at the highest levels. There are going to be people who back me up all the way.”
“Or don’t.”
That seemed not to have occurred to him. He was momentarily deflated and silent. Big miscalculation if he didn’t have some form of insurance.
“Yeah…” He crossed his legs.
“How much of what Fran says is true?”
Rayton opened the glove compartment. He searched for a second, took out the driver’s manual, and closed it. “Got a pen?” he said.
Jo jerked her thumb towards the back seat. “In my laptop case.”
In large letters, large enough that she could read them over the small print of the manual, Rayton had written, “It’s all documented.”
Why not come out and say that? Oh, right. Her people were working on his immunity. That meant they’d be talking to the higher ups. The ones who might give Michael an alibi. Then again, there was every possibility they’d hang him out
to dry. The more she thought about it, the more that seemed the most likely outcome. Michael was smart not to let anyone know he had the dirt on them. In his line of work, people went missing and were never heard from again. If he was telling the truth—if there were people up the chain who’d given him orders—he was playing a high wire version of cat-and-mouse. Who was the cat and who the mouse all depended on who blinked first.