by Robert Adams
“The surviving citizens had been forced into the center of town and were there fighting a losing battle against a horde of looters, lunatic refugees, assorted scum and a pack of well-armed outlaw bikers. Well, I sustained a few completely unnecessary casualties trying to do it according to the book on putting down civil disturbances—I even got nicked myself in that fracas.
“That was when one of my subcommanders took over, a Marine Corps Reserve colonel, Mac Rayford. He and his jarheads went through those buggers like shit through a goose. They killed all of the bikers and one hell of a lot of the others and they took no prisoners, wounded or otherwise, on his orders. I think it safe to say that the few who got away from him and his gyrenes are still running and will until they drop, then they’ll likely crawl.
“But the sad part of it is, no sooner was the town secured than poor old Mac dropped dead of a heart attack. However, he’d shown all the rest of us, especially me, the proper way, the only way that this business can be fought—no kid gloves, only iron fists. Extend no quarter, shoot first, if you intend to live, forget about the civil rights of your enemies and consider everyone an enemy who cannot immediately prove himself a friend.
“I am indeed sorry that I did not have you contacted to let you know that neither I nor the NGs were going to meet you, but I just never thought to radio you, not with all that was going on here in making this place defensible.”
Crippen barked a short, unhumorous laugh. “Even if you had, you couldn’t’ve raised us, general. That radio they issued us up in the capital is a piece of pure antique shit, for which they don’t even make parts anymore. But you should’ve let Sacramento know, at least.
“All that aside, sir, my orders read, in part, to subordinate myself and my command to you at our rendezvous.” He saluted and added, “I do so, now, General Brunelle. What are your orders, sir?”
After squinting at the westering sun, General James Brunelle sighed and shook his head. “Do your men have rations? Good. Have the column drive on into town. They’ll be directed to a place they can bivouac for the night, take turns showering and eat. You stay with me, colonel—we need to talk about a lot of things.”
“The upshot of it, Colonel Moray,” said ragged, dirty Crippen as he devoured with his hungry eyes the rabbit slowly browning on its green-wood spit over a bed of hardwood coals, “was that General Brunelle had more than enough men, already, to defend his perimeter. He and the people he had elected to defend were, however, running low on food and fuel; so low were they, in fact, that he already had cleared it with the commander at Twenty-nine Palms to take in his contingent of Marine Corps Reservists, proven-effective combat troops. So, you see, me and mine, we were the very last thing he needed to try and absorb.
“He did give us a few newer, better trucks and jeeps, but we had to siphon the gas for them out of the old ones; he refused to spare us a single drop of his, though he gave us all the lubricants and water we could carry. He gave us spare tires and some tools, too, but no weapons and no ammo, either, not until I agreed to trade him two of my medium machine guns and the CN grenades we’d gotten from the Air Force. Even then, all we got was a few more light automatics, 9mm submachine guns and a few very old .45 grease guns, M3Als with a single magazine for each one.
“Before he sent us on our way the next morning, he suggested that I find myself an endangered town somewhere and fortify it, then just hunker down until things got back to normal. He also advised me to stay well clear of the Los Angeles and San Diego central areas, for no one knew just what they had been hit with and they could well be virtually glowing with radioactivity.
“For all of the fact that his mechanics and driver, mine and some civilians had worked through the entire night, we were there on those automotive nightmares we had been equipped with in Sacramento, my column lost one truck after another as we drove along on 40 West. All else having failed, with only enough rations for one or maybe two more days, if we stretched it, and not enough ammo for any serious kind of a fight, nor enough gas to keep us all mounted for much longer, I’d just about decided to see if the Twenty-nine Palms Marine Base would take us all in for a while. My thinking was that they had a damned big base with a long perimeter and so might be in need of more bodies to keep it secure.
“We needn’t, it developed, have bothered. Like back at Edwards, they wanted only their own kind, Regular or Reserve, but in any case, Marines only, please. Moreover, they not only would not give us any supplies or gas or ammo, they took from us—at the points of heavy weapons!—our last four medium machine guns, the ammo for them and even the jeeps they were mounted on, saying that it was better for them to be in their hands than in the hands of whoever got around to killing us for them. They took most of our grenades, too, noting in passing that they were far too dangerous to be allowed to remain in the hands of state reserves, war-gamers or Boy Scouts. Then they escorted us back to 40 and advised us to go to hell, if we wished, but to stay away from Twenty-nine Palms.
“It was a little later that we lucked onto a gas plaza that had been neither drained dry nor torched. Not only were we able to fill all of the remaining vehicles and the jerry cans, we found that the place boasted a five-bay shop, an outdoor grease pit, an artesian well, its own electrical generator, an air compressor and a whole mess of tools, parts, fluids and what have you. Even the coffee and soft-drink machines still worked, and we found some cases of beer, juices, candy bars, smoked sausages, jerky, chips and salted nuts. So we just set up camp in and around the place and went to work on our transport … after we’d buried the seven bodies we found. Five men and a woman and a child, dead, without a mark on them.
“The next morning, a dozen of my men were down, violently ill, feverish, unable to hold even water on their stomachs, racked with cramps and diarrhea. Our medics tried everything they knew or had in the ambulances, but nothing worked; every one of those men were dead before the second morning. More turned up sick even as we were getting set to bury the first lot, and included in the new cases were both of our medics, leaving us only one trained man, our battalion surgeon, Captain Weeks.
“That loudmouthed fool of an executive officer, Pat Muldoon, had to remark to me in public that the twelve men all had had a part in burying the dead folks we had found when we got there. After that, those few of us who hadn’t panicked had to wrap the bodies in trash bags and plastic sheeting and, finally, cut-up truck-top canvas before any of the others would dump them into graves. Not only that, but it was damned few of the men who would any longer help Doc Weeks tend the sick. They were dying, really, because he couldn’t save or help any of them.
“Sometime around dawn of our second morning there, two hundred and ninety-two men and officers took the best of the remaining trucks, their weapons, most of the ammo and almost all of the food and split out. Muldoon was stricken by then, and it was his shouts and pleas and screams and curses yelled after them for leaving him behind that woke the rest of us up. From the bastard’s ravings before he died, it seems that he was the prime mover in planning the mutiny and mass desertion. I hope the son of a bitch is roasting in the deepest, foulest pit of hell at this very minute!”
Then the rabbit was done and Colonel David Crippen stopped talking for a while.
Chapter X
Milo and Wahrn turned the skinned, gutted and partially butchered deer carcass over to the women, set about first removing the useful hooves and teeth, cracked open the skull and spooped out the brains for use in tanning the hide, then pegged out the hide itself for fleshing and scraping. Everything done, the two men strolled down to the shallows at the edge of the shrinking lake to lave their bodies of the blood and sweat and squashed insects.
As they washed themselves, standing waist-deep in the sun-warmed water, ignoring the brushings and nippings of fingerling fish busy at feeding on the blood and salt sweat on their calves and thighs, Wahrn beamed, “So, please tell me, Milo, what ever happened to this unfortunate officer, this Colonel Crippen? Did
he and his men all die of the strange disease, too?”
Milo shook his dripping head. “Not during the weeks I stayed with them, Wahrn … though what happened to him and them after that is anybody’s guess, of course. They were the epitome of a hard-luck bunch, but I hope they all got back to Sacramento alive and in one piece.
“I kept them near to where I’d found them, though I did move to a better campsite. Those mountains were aswarm with rabbits that year, so I rigged dozens of rabbit snares, showed them all how to build shelters and bough beds, collected edible wild plants and showed them how to heat rocks in a fire, then use them to simmer a meat-and-plant stew in a green hide. I found a frigid spring-fed stream nearby and badgered them all into washing themselves and their clothing, then did what little I could to aid them in repairing it.
“After a week or so of hot, regular meals, sleep and regular, controlled physical exercise, I marched them slowly, in short stages, south, down to a tiny village I’d swung wide of on my way up into the mountains. The few people still left there were all dead, and animals had been at most of the bodies, so many were by then little more than skeletons, ill concealed by flapping rags. That’s how fast the Great Dyings ran their deadly course, Wahrn; only a week or so before, that village had been active, with armed men standing guard over it, yet bare days later, it was a village of only the dead.
“Dave Crippen made some noises about burials, but I pointed out that his men still might be a little wary of such onerous details and that, in any case, Nature was well on the way to recycling the corpses. The colonel was also stubbornly insistent on contacting his superiors in Sacramento, but all of the village telephones proved to be dead and we could find no way of powering such few radio transmitters as we came across.
“However, the village, small as it was, did provide us with a fair amount of food, some firearms— mostly shotguns, hunting rifles and pistols, though with two or three military-type weapons, as well —modest quantities of ammunition, clothing and boots, tools and utensils, as well as enough rugged vehicles to mount us all and gas to fuel them.
“I headed us south and west, back to the house hidden in the blind canyon. I severely cautioned them all, then led the convoy through my outer defenses, noting as I did so that these defenses had obviously claimed more victims since I had left. But the house, when at last we got to it, proved inviolate; no one had had what it took to get that far in. The blackened, rusting vehicles and the rotted human remnants in my man-traps had vastly impressed the covey of State Military Reserves.
“When we passed one particularly gruesome example of the fate of trespassers on posted land, Crippen gulped and asked, “You built all these things, Mr. Moray? Where in God’s name did you learn to do things this brutal? I’ve figured out days ago that you were ex-military, but I didn’t know that even the Marine Corps would teach such dirty tricks as this to be used in warfare.”
“You learn to do what you have to do to keep your own men alive and kill or incapacitate as many as possible of the enemy in any damned way you can, Crippen,” Milo replied, adding, “I was never a Marine, though I was a U.S. Army Ranger officer … among other things.”
When they finally made it out of the brushy woods and into the clearing and the house was visible, Crippen perked up out of his dark brooding and said, “Why, I know this place. I was once at a small conclave of State Military Reserve officers here. I didn’t recognize the approach because the other time I came in by chopper, from up north. This is General Jerry Noonan’s place. You say everybody was dead when you first got here, Mr. Moray?”
“Jerry Noonan?” asked Milo. “Isn’t he that retired type who has been asshole-deep in politics these last few years? I’ve read about him, I think. But where the hell would a retired Army officer get the kind of loot it must have taken to build and outfit a place like this?”
“From his wife,- Mr. Moray—his second wife was one of the heiresses to the Stiles fortune. But I don’t think that money was the only reason he married her, despite rumors to the contrary; yes, she was a bit older than he was, but they seemed quite happy and devoted to each other nonetheless.”
Milo tried hard to repress a shudder as an icy chill ran down the full length of his spine. Which one? Which of the little girls he had adopted, fathered, raised as his own, was that aging woman he had buried here?
Exercising iron self-control, he asked, “You met her, then, Colonel Crippen? Do you recall her Christian name?”
Crippen wrinkled his brows, then responded, “Why … I believe it was some French name … ahh, Gabrielle, I think. Yes, that was it, Gabrielle Stiles Noonan. Why?”
“Oh, no particular reason, just curiosity,” said Milo, but thinking of little Gaby as she had been when first he saw her, riding in a dog cart at the farm in Loudon County, Virginia, more than fifty years ago. And he remembered her as a gangly thirteen-year-old with an achingly beautiful face, competently handling the reins of the big Thoroughbred she sat so easily, greeting him when he returned from the Korean War.
Her voice still had its little-girl quality, but her words had been those of an adult woman, spoken in the pure, accentless French of her mother. “You, monsieur, are a pure and unadulterated man, and if Mama still did not live, I would make you mine, immediately. Please promise me that when the time comes for me to marry, you will find for me a brave, gentle and tender officer just like you. I so wish that you really were my father by blood, monsieur, for a son like you would be my dearest pride and treasure.”
Gaby’s first husband, a young USMA graduate, had died in Milo’s arms, early on in the country’s involvement in the Vietnam quagmire. That was when she and her brother had gotten involved in the leftist-controlled antiwar movement. Gaby, thankfully, had possessed intelligence, maturity and strength of will to get out of the thing before it irrevocably warped her mind as it did so many others. Her brother, on the other hand—and despite Milo’s attempt to drag him out of it, away from bad companions—had sunk into violently radical Marxism and perversion and had finally taken to the drugs that ended his life so prematurely.
When the Army had brought Milo back from Southeast Asia in the early 1970s and hurriedly retired him because, according to the Department of Defense records, he was far too old a man to remain on the active list, he had gotten involved with various foreign governments that proved more than willing to hire the services of an officer with such impressive credentials, regardless of his official age. Spending, as he had been, more and more time out of the United States and never knowing just what fate the future might hold for a man in such perilous places and situations, he had deposited a largish chunk of fluid assets in a Swiss bank account for personal use and possible emergencies, then instructed the law firm which had handled his and the estate affairs since the mid-1940s to draw up a new document dividing the Stiles fortune and properties among his three living adoptive children—Gaby, Melusine, twin of by then dead Michel, and Per, by then in hospital getting used to a replacement for the leg a landmine had taken.
Once he had signed the documents, made the transfers official, he had taken advantage of certain aspects of his new employment to drop out of sight of all who had known him in his earlier life, even “his” children. He found it quite a relief to thus change identities, for all that the people among whom he now moved never, ever asked questions the answers to which might be embarrassing, lest someone so question the interrogator; not that Milo could have given an intelligent answer to many of the inconsistencies, anyway. He, least of all, understood just why, at an estimated minimum seventy years of age, he looked no whit different from the Milo Moray who had enlisted in the United States Army years before the Second World War.
In the company of his family and those who had known him for long periods of time, his unchanged, unchanging physical appearance had been an embarrassment, to say the least. Here, in this new life, his peers simply assumed that he had had skilled plastic surgery at the same time he had chan
ged his name and obtained new, forged passports and documents, for not a few of them had done one or more of these very things at some time or some place in their checkered pasts.
For some years, until the venerable attorney died of old age and a bad heart, Milo had been able to keep track of the three kids and their ups and downs of life through John Bannister. Per had taught at West Point, briefly, gone out to Montana to personally check on some family holdings there and ended up marrying and settling down in that state; he had taught himself to ride horses again, sired several children and eventually, trading shrewdly on his war record and fortune, entered quite successfully into first state, then national politics.
Poor little Melusine had had a rougher time of it. Her judgment with regard to people had proved almost as faulty as had been that of her deceased twin and had resulted in a succession of unhappy, mercifully short marriages to handsome but shallow men who had all developed to be far more interested in her wealth, the status and material objects it could buy, than in her. Finally, disillusioned and teetering on the verge of insanity, sodden with alcohol and addicted to various drugs, the miserable woman had left a hospital to live in the adjacent convent of the nursing order. After some years, she took holy orders and signed her third of the patrimony over to the church. Bannister had assured Milo that her letters and the single, brief meeting he had had with her had convinced him that Melusine Moray had at last found happiness and true contentment. At the turn of events, Milo had not been able but to wonder just what her true father’s opinion would have been; though deeply religious in his own way, General Jethro Stiles’ opinions of organized religions in general had been unprintable in any known language.