by Joe McKinney
Nobody spoke. There were nervous glances around the table.
“All of it?” Jacob said. “You’re sure?”
“I am,” Taylor said. “And don’t worry, I got us covered. Shortly after you got the council’s permission to organize this trip I went to Billy Evans over at the machine shop and asked him to gather up all the damaged shell casings he could find. He got a whole mess load of ’em from the school’s shooting range and he’s been retooling them ever since. I’m told he’s reloaded enough to give us seven hundred rounds apiece.”
“Seven hundred?” said Barry. “You’re kidding. That’s amazing.”
“Well, most of us will have fourteen boxes of fifty rounds each.” Taylor pointed at Eli Sherman and Max Donavan, two groomers from Walter Mayfield’s livery. Neither man had turned twenty yet, but both were known to be equally good with horses, fists, and rifles. They were along for muscle, mainly, and to help Bree Cheney care for the horses. “You two,” Taylor said. “I’m told both you men are crack shots. That true?”
The two men stiffened.
“Uh, yes, sir,” they both stammered as one.
“Good. I set aside a thousand rounds each for the two of you.”
Eli and Max looked at each other with equal parts delight and shock. The notion that the Great Sheriff Taylor had just publicly complimented them had left them both a little starstruck.
“I expect you’ll make every round count.”
“Yes, sir!” Eli said.
And from Max: “You can count on it, sir.”
“Good.” Taylor glanced across the table to Jacob. “And, what’s more, Billy tells me he was able to make the rounds subsonic.”
Jacob’s eyebrows went up.
“What’s that mean?” Bree asked.
“Slower than the speed of sound,” Eli said, and slapped Max on the shoulder as the two shared a grin.
Bree gave him the finger. “I know what subsonic means, you little jerk. I mean why is it important that a bullet is subsonic?”
Jacob started to answer, but Frank Hartwell interrupted. His tone was quiet and patient, and to Jacob at least, who knew how gruff the man could be in the field, it was pretty obvious he had taken a shine to Bree.
“When you fire a gun,” he said, “it sounds like it makes one loud bang, but it actually makes two. The first is the explosion that happens when the firing pin hits the detonator and the charge explodes. The second one, the loud crack that carries for miles, is the sonic boom that comes with the bullet breaking the sound barrier.”
“So it’ll be like having a silencer or something?” Bree asked.
“Not quite,” Frank said. “But at least the sound won’t carry for miles. It’s definitely a good thing, even if it does decrease the range of our weapons a bit.”
That brought appreciative smiles and nods from the others around the table. Jacob felt relieved as well, but he was troubled by the way Taylor had chosen to unveil his information. Jacob had shared everything with Taylor. He’d held nothing back, but clearly information wasn’t flowing both ways. If they were supposed to be coleaders of this expedition, this wasn’t the best kind of start Jacob could think of.
He felt like he had to retake control of the meeting.
“Is everybody ready to begin?” he asked the group.
Nods all the way around the table. The mood had turned light again.
Jacob surveyed the group. “So, this is what I want to do tonight. Most of you know each other quite well, or at least know of each other. That’s good. But I want to lay out officially why you’re all here and what you’ll be doing. I thought we’d go around the table and introduce ourselves.”
Jacob turned to Nick seated at his right.
“You want to start us off?”
“Uh, sure,” Nick said. “So, yeah, I’m Nick Carroll. I draw pretty good, so they hired me on to make maps.” He looked at Jacob with his patented wicked grin and shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess that’s about it.”
Jacob shook his head. “Don’t let him fool you, folks. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Nick here actually has a brain. Most of you probably know already that he’s pretty good at drawing, but he’s also got a thing for maps, so I’m hiring him on as our cartographer. On top of that, he’s got some expertise outside the wall. Sheriff Taylor and I have worked closely with him, and with Frank over there, to figure out our route, which we’re gonna go over here in a sec.”
He turned to Kelly. “You want to go next?”
Kelly smiled at the room. “I know most of you already. I’m Kelly.” She gave a little wave. “This is my husband, Barry.” Barry dutifully raised his hand in a drunken salute. “We supervise production and research over at Howth Farm, which I guess makes us as close to botanists as anybody you’re gonna find here in this town. Obviously, we won’t be able to carry all the food we need for the trip, so our job will be to tell you what stuff is safe to eat. Also, we’re going to be doing frequent soil samples for CDHL levels.” She gave Nick’s shoulder a pat. “We’ll be tabulating our data with Nick here, and hopefully, after we’re done, we’ll know the right direction for expansion.”
“Excellent.” Jacob pointed to Kelly’s right and said, “Frank . . .”
“Yeah. Thanks, Jacob. Okay. My name is Frank Hartwell. I was Jacob’s boss about ten years ago, before he went off and left me for the law. My specialty is salvage. I take what’s gone bad and make it new again. At least in theory. I’ll be working with Jacob and Sheriff Taylor to see if there’s anything we encounter out in the wasteland that Arbella can use.”
“Like what?” asked Max.
Frank shrugged. “Well, anything. Motors, gasoline, door knobs.”
“Door knobs?” Max said.
“A joke, son. The point is we have no idea what might prove valuable. I’ve been collecting a list of requests, and we’ll try to find that stuff, but salvage is all about thinking out of the box. There’s no telling what can be repurposed into what. You just take it as it comes.”
“Yeah, but it’s a question of who takes it, if you know what I mean. I didn’t sign on to carry a bunch of junk all over the wasteland.”
Frank turned in his chair and looked like he was about to read the kid the riot act. Jacob stepped in before that had a chance to happen. “It doesn’t work that way, Max,” he said. “When you do salvage like this, if it’s something there’s no way you can carry, you just record the location of the find, hide it or disguise it if you can, and then report back to town for the proper resources to go back out and get it. We don’t have a whole lot of gas, but we’ve got enough to power a truck to go out and bring something back, provided it’s worth it.”
Max mulled that over. “So, I’m not gonna be carrying a bunch of junk all over zombie country, right?”
“Right,” Jacob said. “We’re not bringing you along as a pack mule, don’t worry.”
“Oh. Well, okay then.”
They worked their way through the rest of the introductions—Owen Webb, anthropologist; Andy Dawson, the town’s main reporter—before Jacob ordered the table cleared so they could unveil a giant map of Missouri.
“Nick,” Jacob said, “you want to start us off?”
Nick cleared his throat. “Yeah, you bet.” He ran a finger down the right side of the map. “Obviously, this is the river, and this bend here, where it says New Madrid, that’s us. The first leg of the journey is to take Highway 55 here up to where it meets Interstate 55. From there, we’ll follow the interstate up to Sikeston. We’re figuring that should take about a week.”
“A week?” said Andy Dawson. “Why a week? That looks like a straight shot to me. What is it, about thirty miles?”
Andy was a talented carpenter. He’d actually rebuilt the front steps of Jacob’s mother’s house, which is why Jacob thought of him for this expedition—though not in his capacity as carpenter, but as a journalist. On the recommendation of David Sachs, Jacob had read the Journals of Lewis and Clark
and had come away with an appreciation for the fact that they were going to need someone to chronicle the expedition. Jacob could barely force himself to write a full police report, much less something book length, so he’d turned to Andy Dawson, one of four part-time journalists for the Arbella Weekly News.
“It’s closer to fifty miles,” Jacob said. “But it’s hard country. I remember there were places so overgrown that you couldn’t even tell where the highway used to be. You’d see these big eighteen-wheelers standing in the middle of a sea of grass like shipwrecks and that was about the only clue there was ever a road there.” Jacob glanced across the table at Frank Hartwell. “You’ve been out there recently. Is it still that bad?”
“It’s gotten a lot worse, actually,” said Frank. “Once nature starts taking over, the rate of encroachment speeds up exponentially every year. In some places the grass grows shoulder high. Fires happen every once in a while, usually near the end of summer, so there won’t be that much scrub brush to contend with, but the grass and the sunflowers come back pretty fast, especially after a rainy spring like we’ve had. It may not look all that far, but we’ll need that week.”
“And remember,” Jacob said. “This isn’t a race. We’re doing this to get a good look around. I want to take our time, give everybody a chance to get used to living on the trail.”
“What about zombies?” Bree asked. She looked around the table nervously.
“There’s always a chance,” Frank said, his baritone softening just a little. He pointed to Sikeston on the map. “I was up in these parts about three years ago, and we ran into a herd of seven of them. And then there’s the really big herd that Jacob fought back last month. So, yeah, they’re out there. We’ll have to be on our toes.”
“What do we do if we see them?”
“Just fall back on the training you got in school,” Frank said. “We avoid them as long as we can, and we only fight them if we absolutely have to.”
“Silent running is the rule here,” Jacob added. “I want you guys to take this first week to acclimatize yourself to life in the wasteland. Get comfortable on the trail. But keep in mind that comfortable is not the same thing as having a party out there. We’ll exercise noise discipline the entire time we’re outside the wall. Use the hand signals you were taught in school whenever possible. Talk only when necessary, or when it’s obvious we’re alone. But if you do talk, do so quietly. Remember: Anything can happen, and it often does.”
Bree glanced down at the map, clearly nervous.
“Look,” said Frank, softening his voice another notch, “we’re not trying to scare anybody. I think you’ll find, once you get out there, that the wasteland isn’t all that bad. Parts of it are, yeah, but most of it is actually kind of beautiful. The fish have made a tremendous comeback, for example. There are streams so thick with trout you could almost walk on their backs to cross to the other side. Plus”—he drew an imaginary circle on the map with his index finger—“this part in through here is all a known element. We’ve been exploring it for years, so I’m not planning on any huge surprises.”
“What about this area here?” asked Andy, his finger on the open country north of Sikeston.
Frank nodded thoughtfully, as though considering how to answer. He stroked his beard and heaved his broad shoulders. “Well, that’s kind of the point of this whole expedition, isn’t it? This is Highway 60,” he said, and drew a line across the map. “Once we get out beyond that point, we’re in undiscovered country. Nobody I know has been beyond there.”
They all regarded the map with a newfound respect.
Jacob looked around the table and realized the full measure of what they were about to do was finally sinking in. “But we’re ready for that,” he said. “Everybody at this table has been trained to take care of themselves, and each other. That’s our Code. Everybody works, everybody watches the other guy’s back. Just remember that, and we’re gonna make this expedition as big a success as Arbella herself.”
Frank Hartwell nodded.
Max and Eli traded huge grins.
Even Bree seemed to relax a little.
“Well, I want another drink,” said Barry. “Anybody else want some?”
A few held out their glasses, including Jacob. Barry rose to collect them, but before he could leave the table, Owen Webb spoke for the first time.
“I have a question,” he said.
He seemed intensely serious, his frown in marked contrast to the rest of the room. Those few who were standing sat back down and listened. Owen was coming along as the expedition’s anthropologist. He had been a brand new anthropology professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock when the First Days happened, but since coming to Arbella he’d settled into teaching reading and candle making to the children over at the school. Out of the entire group he was the only one Jacob had not personally recruited. In fact, he came to Jacob, and over the course of one long discussion while he helped Jacob mop the floors in the constabulary’s jail cells he made a convincing case that he could offer a unique perspective on the world they were likely to find. Only two other members of the group, he reminded Jacob, were old enough to remember the world before the First Days. The younger members would undoubtedly have questions about the ruins they saw. Who better to answer those questions than a professor who taught about the way people used to live?
It was a convincing argument, and it had grabbed Jacob the same way Owen had grabbed the group at the table.
Once he had everyone’s attention Owen said, “What about first contact?”
“What do you mean, first contact?” asked Max. He looked around the table. “What’s that mean?”
“You know,” Owen said, “with other people. We can’t be the only Arbella out there. Surely others have survived, and thrived, just as we have. What happens when we make first contact with them?”
Jacob looked around the table. “That’s a good question,” he said. “Any thoughts?”
“Well,” said Frank, “we’ve never run into anybody, and my crews and I have spent a lot of time out there.”
“But it is possible,” Owen said. “Even likely. It’s like looking up at the stars and wondering if there’s someone else out there. It’s just not statistically possible that we are the only pocket of civilization to have survived. I think we need a plan for if, and when, we make that contact.”
“I think we should probably try to avoid any settlements, don’t you think?” Kelly said.
“Absolutely,” Barry said.
“Yeah, me, too. I think that’s a good policy in general,” Nick said. “I’ll, of course, record the location of any settlements we find. We could always arrange a future expedition to make the first contact.”
“But it might be an opportunity to open trade,” suggested Bree. “And if they’ve survived like we have, they’re probably not the kind of people who would want to hurt us. I mean, right? They’d know that survival is a team effort, right? They’d welcome more team members.”
Sheriff Taylor stood up.
All discussion stopped, and all eyes turned on him.
He leaned over the table and met the gaze of every person in the room. “Listen up,” he said. “These are the ground rules. We make first contact only if we have to. We will record the locations of any settlements, as Nick suggested, but we will avoid first contact if at all possible.”
Owen Webb started to object, but Taylor held up a hand to silence him.
“And I want to make sure that each of you understands this one thing. Under no circumstances are any of you to say a word about Arbella to anyone outside our circle. Not a single word. I will die before I give away the location of our home, and if you are going on this expedition, you better damn well do the same.”
He scanned the room again, his gaze unflinching, the matchstick clenched tightly in his teeth.
“Is that absolutely clear?”
A few nodded right away, clearly cowed. Others, including Owen, Jacob, and F
rank, slowly nodded a moment later.
8
They left Arbella on April 21st, and for that first week on the trail it seemed to Jacob more like a vacation than exploration. For one thing, his headaches were gone. There was no one else to make asinine suggestions that etiquette demanded he listen to. And all the public pressure of what to do and how to do it were finally a matter for the record. He’d taken action. He’d made the decisions. Now, finally, he was alone with the consequences of those choices. And he felt pretty damn good about it.
The last of the hard freezes were behind them, and spring had come upon them quietly as a cat. The mornings were cool and usually foggy, but the afternoons were mild. It got cold at night, but not even that had been much of an issue. Working closely with Nick and Frank, he’d charted out their course so that they always ended up close to some sort of structure by nightfall.
At night, they kept up a rotating guard, which had seemed a little silly that first night out, but proved useful during the second night.
Just before dawn, Owen Webb woke Jacob in a panic.
“Outside,” he said. “Three of them coming up the road.”
“Shhh,” Jacob said, instantly awake.
He went to hand signals. Just three. You’re sure?
Owen nodded.
They’d taken shelter inside an abandoned store that had once sold propane tanks. Frank Hartwell and his salvage teams had long since drained the tanks, but it was still one of the salvage teams’ most popular stops on their treks outward from Arbella. It was set back from the highway by a good distance and offered some excellent places to hide the horses. It was also easily defended and afforded a fairly good view of anything coming up the highway in either direction.
Jacob went to the edge of the lot, keeping low between two large rusting tanks, and scanned the road where Owen pointed.
There were way more than three. Jacob picked shapes out of the darkness, eventually counting fourteen in all.
A fairly decent-sized herd.
There were only three before, Owen signed to him. I promise.