Instead, he settled for drumming his fingers on the little ledge of a desk surface that was provided to give radio operators and commanders somewhere to write on as he continued waiting. Finally the circuit came back to life.
“Bravo, Echo.”
“Echo, Bravo.” Peter answered. It was a different voice, a male that sounded much more sure of himself than the previous operator. That probably meant he was more senior.
“How many able bodies do you have there not already in uniform?”
Peter hadn’t thought that far ahead, but he made up a number on the spot. “About fifteen.”
“Only fifteen?”
“Yes, one-five.”
Ellsworth was silent for several seconds, then the new voice spoke again. “Bravo, we are unable to host or shelter non-combatants at this time. Supplies and space are extremely tight. We need action capable adults to correct that.”
Peter was frowning, but he very carefully kept his voice even and modulated. “Echo, this group is barely hanging on as it is. They can’t spare anyone or anything.”
“If they don’t, we can’t guarantee we’ll be in position to help them or anyone else.”
“No ETA for relief?” Peter asked. “At all?”
“Negative Bravo, no ETA.”
“They’re not going to like it. We might not be able to prevent them, or at least some of them, from following us.”
“Bravo, you need to make sure they do not accompany you. We are unable to provide aid to civilians at this time. Do whatever you need to.”
“Say again Echo?” Peter asked, now letting some of his emotions leak into his tone.
“Any means necessary, but only your unit and able volunteers are authorized to join us. All others will be turned away by force.”
“A lot of them will probably be dead before spring if they don’t get help. They’re low on food and have a lot of dependents who can’t do much scavenging or work.” Peter said, taking care to speak slowly and articulate each word for maximum clarity. “They’re not going to hold up much longer.”
“Not our problem Bravo.” Ellsworth said, the voice firm and flat. “We have to stay on the big picture.”
Peter slapped his hand down on the little desk, but he managed to keep his anger out of his tone. “Understood Echo.”
“ETA to our location?”
“Tomorrow latest.”
“Good. Echo out.”
“Bravo clear.”
Peter stripped off the headset and just barely kept himself from throwing it across the compartment. Instead he very carefully laid it into the hooks on the side of the console, then stood up with his fists clenched.
“GODDAMNIT SONOFABITCH MOTHERFUCKING ASSHOLES!” he shouted, feeling the back of his throat and the furthest reaches of his lungs protesting at the volume he was drawing forth. “CHRIST ON A FUCKING CRUTCH!”
“Gunny!”
Breathing hard, Peter turned and saw Whitley and Crawford standing at the front of the Bradley’s troop compartment. The former looked a little concerned, but Crawford’s face wore an expectant expression that bordered on satisfied. He raised a hand and pointed a finger at her. “Don’t.”
“I di—” Crawford began, but Peter shook his head sharply.
“Just don’t.” he repeated, his voice flat with authority and anger.
“They didn’t go for it?” Whitley asked in a neutral tone.
“Their orders were to abandon the civilians and make tracks for Ellsworth.”
“Good thing the civvies were imaginary then.” Crawford said.
“Shut up.” Whitley snapped. “Gunny, ignore her.”
“Hey—” Crawford began.
Whitley rounded on the other woman and put her face very close to hers. “For once, just once, take the hint and leave it alone.”
Crawford blinked, then her eyes narrowed as she glared at Whitley. For several moments, Peter wasn’t sure which way things were going to go. Then Crawford shrugged and pulled out her pack of cigarettes. As she tapped one free, Peter drew a loud noisy breath that was halfway between inhalation and clearing his throat.
“So now we know.” Whitley said, turning back to Peter.
“Yeah.”
“Plan?”
Peter scowled. He had really pinned everything on linking up with the government group and joining the good fight. The plan had been to throw in with whatever organization there was and help however he could to expand and support it, so the clearing and resecuring operation could get underway.
He hadn’t held any illusions that it would have been a quick process, or that things would be over and done without problems; but this hadn’t been on his radar. Not something like this.
“There’s no point in what they claim they’re trying to do if they start sacrificing people, not just individuals but entire groups of people who’ve managed to hang on, in wholesale lots.” Peter said quietly, trying to use lack of volume to force his pulse and anger to begin abating. “The reason, the whole reason to try and win this thing, is to save people. To help stop the dying and get things to a stable place where rebuilding and growth can begin again.”
Crawford snorted all but silently around her cigarette, but her face was blank when Peter’s eyes flicked to her. He sighed unhappily. “After making it this far from Georgia, seeing what we’ve seen, I believe it when people talk about three out of four are dead.”
“Probably more.” Crawford said in a very uninflected voice.
“Yeah, probably more.” Peter reluctantly agreed. “And a lot of them are likely still walking around, part of the problem. Everywhere we’ve looked, people are scrapping to stay alive and not everyone’s going to make it through the winter. The time to help people is now, not in three or six or nine months. Or longer.”
“So . . .” Whitley prodded him.
Peter shrugged. “Well, since we’re up here anyway, let’s head back to Canton.”
“Okay.” she agreed. “Why?”
“I want to see if we can make a deal with them.”
Chapter Nineteen - Heroes
“How’d you get it running?” a tall, lean, and deeply tanned man asked as Peter walked out of the back of the Bradley.
“Yeah, we’ve looked at it twice, even spent some time dipping out the fuel tank and putting in fresh, but it was dead.” another one added.
Peter shrugged. “Some of the fuses were blown. Switched them out, good as new.”
“Huh.” the tall Canton man said, flicking his head in a practiced gesture to flip a long strand of hair back behind his shoulder. A long strand; he had the longest hair Peter had ever seen on anyone, male or female. “Go figure.”
“I want to talk to whoever the deciders are around here.” Peter said, raising his voice a little. A small group of about a dozen Canton locals had approached the Bradley and Dodge as they parked in the little lot on the south side of the town, but he didn’t really recognize any of them. “You have a council or committee or something, right?”
“Why?” someone asked.
“Yeah, what’s wrong?”
Peter shook his head. “I’m not the problem, and neither are you folks. That’s why I need to talk to whoever’s in charge.”
“This is a town, not a kingdom.” a man near the back of the group said.
“I didn’t say what it was. I just need to talk to whoever’s senior or influential or whatever.”
“Well, talk to us then.”
Peter resisted the urge to frown. “Look, it’s been a pretty shitty day and I’m not in the best of moods. What I’ve got to talk about isn’t a secret or anything, but I don’t want to spend the next couple of hours repeating myself. So why don’t we just all do it once with whoever calls the shots?”
The tall man clapped his hands together and spread them out, the gesture looking like something he did as often as Peter might flash a thumbs up or nod his head. “Okay, sure. Come on.” There was some grumbling among the crowd, and the tall man
raised his voice. “Everyone, come on.”
“What about us?” Whitley asked.
“You and Crawford sit tight for now.” Peter said. He trusted Whitley’s judgment the most, and Crawford — well, saying he trusted her the least wasn’t fair, but he would expect her to be the most likely of the four of them to cause some sort of a problem — so that made Smith the logical choice to bring as ‘backup’. Not that Peter expected to need backup, but there was a lot of crap going on these days people hadn’t expected.
“Are we . . .” Whitley’s voice was low, quiet enough to not carry.
“No. Just wait. But hang on to the vehicles until I tell you different.” he said in a normal tone. “Button up so you’re not sitting around in the cold.”
“Got it.”
Smith slung his shotgun, but Peter left his Remington behind as he moved toward the tall townsman. He wasn’t planning on fighting, and with the size of the town’s population it wouldn’t matter much anyway. Either his pistols would be enough, or they wouldn’t; period.
The long haired local nodded at Peter’s look and turned, the whole procession heading out of the parking lot. They went up the same street as before, but one more ‘house’ past the one they’d stayed in the previous night. It was the same as the others, more or less; an already existing structure that had been heavily expanded to provide drastically increased interior space, plus a new second floor.
The inside was the same as well; rough, new construction, some heat to take the chill from the frigid conditions outside, and just enough light to both see by and make it obvious there was power. The tall man went to a stairwell in the original section of the structure and went up.
Still following, Peter emerged out into an enormous room. In fact, it looked like they’d built this second floor without any dividing walls at all; only support pillars for the roof. The nearest pillar had a switch, and the man flipped it. Lights, soft and diffuse white bulbs, came on and cut the gloom back. It wasn’t a full level of normal illumination, but it was enough to see by.
The space had some storage bins — what was being stored Peter could only guess at — installed along some of the wall space. There were also piles and stacks of other supplies, most of it cloth or dry goods. He saw bundles of sheets and blankets, bags of charcoal, construction materials like boxes of nails and screws, and what seemed like at least a hundred other kinds of things. But they were all out of the way, leaving the bulk of the area open.
In the middle, a short distance from where the stairwell emerged, was a very simple dais with a cheap folding table and some metal folding chairs positioned on it. Other than some desk lamps on the table — powered by an extension cord that dropped out of the ceiling directly above the table — they were the only things on the dais.
“Wait here.” the tall man said. “I’ll start spreading the word.”
“Yeah, me too.” a local woman said. “I’ll head up to the gate and start from there.”
Peter looked around as they departed, then sat down on the edge of the dais and simply started waiting. Smith choose a support pillar near him and leaned casually back against it, and the locals just stood around. Over the next fifteen minutes well over two hundred people arrived. There was a quiet buzz of conversation, and a lot of looks at Peter and Smith, but no one bothered them. After a while Peter decided it was the uniforms he and Smith wore that seemed to be drawing most of the attention.
Finally, after several minutes had passed without any new arrivals, a group came up the stairs together. Some of the faces already in the room Peter recognized — the bearded Max, a couple of the so-called ‘Geeks’, a few others who had been present at various points during last night and this morning — but this group had Brenna and also the other woman he vaguely remembered from the initial meeting at the crossroads before coming to Canton. The tall man with the long hair brought up the rear, though he stopped walking and joined the crowd of people waiting around.
Brenna’s group numbered seven, and they made straight for the dais. People parted to let them through, and Peter decided things were about to get moving so he stood up.
“Mr. Gibson.” she greeted him.
“Ma’am.” Peter said, nodding.
She gestured at the others with her. “You wanted to talk to whoever’s in charge. That’s us. Us and everyone here, since this has become as an official of a town meeting as they get around here these days.”
“Great.” Peter said, nodding to the rest of them several times as he moved his gaze from one to the next, making polite eye contact. “I’m Master Gunnery Sergeant Peter Gibson, Marine Corps. And before anyone who hasn’t already heard asks, my people and I are not part of Ellsworth in any capacity.”
“You were headed there though.” a burly man standing next to Max called out.
“That’s right, we were.” Peter agreed. “But we won’t be joining them.”
“Something’s changed.” Brenna observed, moving up the pair of steps to the dais’ floor. The others were joining her, though only a couple sat down.
“I wanted to get a second source on what you told me about Ellsworth and what they’ve been up to.” Peter replied. “So we got the Bradley parked outside working and used its radios to get in touch with the base.”
“What Bradley?” one of the men on the dais asked, a swarthy looking man with a misshapen nose.
“We appropriated one on the outskirts of Sioux Falls a few hours ago.”
“It was just sitting there.” Smith said.
“Wait, you got that thing working?” someone in the crowd asked.
“I clocked over three decades as a mechanic in the Corps.” Peter said. “We didn’t use them a lot, but I know how to work on Brads. Their engines at least.”
There was a little murmuring at that, but Peter returned his attention to the leaders on the platform. “I put a couple of questions to Ellsworth today. Sort of a test.”
“Did they pass?” one of the woman above him asked.
“Were they supposed to?” one of the other men on the dais asked.
“They were supposed to,” Peter nodded, “but they failed.”
“What was the test?” the same woman asked. She had ruddy cheeks and the sort of complexion Peter recognized as belonging to someone who spent a lot of time out in the weather. She didn’t have much of a tan, but this was pretty far north for the States. For all he knew it had been cold up here long enough for her to have lost any sun exposure she might have picked up.
“I’d talked to them before leaving Georgia to head up here. I called and said I was with a group — a large one — in Iowa that needed to come with us to the base. I was ordered to leave them behind, even if it meant they didn’t survive the winter.”
There was an outburst of voices at that, many of them angry and unsettled. A number of heads shook, some people puckered their lips like they wanted to spit, and a couple actually did. The leaders didn’t hold back from joining in; most of them joined in with frowns and head shakes of their own.
“So you believe me about them then?” Brenna said as the noise leveled off.
“I do now.”
“Great soldier boy.” a man sitting at the table behind her said. “So what’s that mean?”
Peter let the remark pass, suppressing his instinctive urge to correct him; he was a Marine, not a soldier. “It means, I have a proposal for you. For all of you.”
There was a fresh outbreak of murmurs. This time most of the leaders didn’t react, but the woman with the florid complexion scowled at him. “If you’re looking for us to back you in some sort of war, forget it.”
“Nothing like that.” Peter said quickly.
“Well, then, we could use your help in case they start one with us.”
“I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
The muttering was louder now, and Brenna waved her arms above her head. “Quiet, let’s listen up.” she called.
“They haven’t been acting too frien
dly.” the woman who’d been on the scouting run with Brenna said.
“Yeah.” someone in the crowd muttered.
“No kidding.” another remarked.
“They haven’t actually said they’re going to do anything, but at this point it wouldn’t be a big shock.” the man with the misshapen nose said.
“My people and I want to join up with you folks.” Peter said. “But with a condition.”
“What’s that?” the last woman on the platform to have remained silent asked, finally speaking up.
“This thing, this whole fucked up thing we’re all stuck in,” Peter said, spreading his arms out and gesturing broadly around the room, “doesn’t look like it’s going to just go away. Does it?”
The muttering was back, but soft now. A few heads shook. Brenna’s eyes held Peter’s, and her voice was mostly even as she spoke. “And?”
“And, that means as long as everyone is just sitting around waiting, nothing is going to change.”
That provoked some voices, as people protested and rumbled unhappily. A couple of people gestured angrily at him. One man moved a little closer to the dais and half shouted as he addressed Peter. “We’re just trying to stay alive.”
“Yeah.” a lot of people said more or less in unison.
Peter raised his voice quickly. “It’s not an accusation. Me and my people have been doing the same, but we’ve seen how it was back around Atlanta, and along the way between there and here, and now we’ve seen how you’re doing and what Ellsworth plans on doing. None of it, all of it, is enough.”
“What’s your point?” the oldest man on the platform asked. His face was heavily lined, but he still had a full shock of hair in stark contrast to Peter’s mostly bald scalp. He also showed no sign that age had robbed any of his mind, because the look in his eyes was intent and alert.
“My point is winter is about to hit, and trust me when I tell you a lot of the people still alive aren’t going to be able to handle it without easy access to food and power and water like they’re used to having. And when Ellsworth starts running around demanding people and supplies, it’s going to get worse.”
Apocalypse Atlanta (Book 4): Apocalypse Asylum Page 29