The day after: An apocalyptic morning

by Jessy Cruise

  It was quite some time before things settled down. The immediate worry was the two people left in the trees. Though two people, one from Mick's group and one from Skip's, thought they had hit someone in there, they weren't sure enough that Skip felt comfortable just walking in to look. Instead he had all three groups of combatants - his, Mick's, and the Jack, Christine, Maggie combo - converge upon the area at once, their weapons ready.

  They did in fact find someone still alive in there, but he wasn't in good enough shape to put up a fight. Ten feet away from the dead body of Bill, the leader of the ill-fated attack upon the community center, they found a man writhing in pain in the mud and leaves, a bullet through his pelvis. Skip searched him thoroughly, removing a pistol and two hunting knives, and then ordered his group to drag him back to the community center.

  "Put some bandages on that bleeding," he told them. "I don't want him to bleed out before I have a chance to talk to him. Stick him in one of the empty storage rooms and keep him under guard."

  They dragged him off, not being particularly gentle with him as they did so.

  Skip turned to Christine, laying eyes on her for the first time since early that morning. She looked back at him, the hood of her rain slicker pulled back, her blonde hair drenched and dripping, her rifle pointed at the ground. They shared a smile with each other. He wanted to tell her that she had done a good job, that he had worried about her, that he was proud of her. He didn't, not wanting it to seem like he wasn't worried about and proud of the rest of those around him. All the same, she got the message.

  From atop hill 1519, Lieutenant Bracken and Stu had watched the entire battle unfold, from the time the first Raid-bomb was tossed to the time the last shot was fired at the escaping tree people. Stu, when things had seemed to be going well for the invaders, had urged Bracken to take the platoon down to join the battle.

  "We can get fresh recruits down there and we can capture our pick of the women!" he'd pleaded.

  But Bracken insisted upon watching only, seeing how things unfolded. The entire battle, from start to finish, had lasted less than thirty minutes and Bracken was somewhat confused on just what he should think about it. On the one hand, the town had been taken almost completely by surprise. The invaders had already been inside the wall when the sun came up, something that should never have been allowed to happen. But on the other hand, the guards at the near position had reacted well to the attack, preventing their position from falling and, obviously, getting the word out to the community center that an attack was underway.

  "This entire thing," he told Stu now, watching through binoculars as Mick's group emerged from the community center and began heading west, towards the wall, "was a case of two different extremes."

  "What the fuck does that mean?" asked Stu, who, while clever, was not blessed with a terribly large vocabulary.

  "It means there was a mixture of some pretty hideous discipline - such as when the defenders broke and ran from four people shooting at them - and some rather brilliant defenses. The flanking maneuvers were first-rate, performed with precision in exactly the right places at exactly the right times. That final maneuver, flushing those people out of the trees by shooting at them from the baseball diamond, that was planning and execution at it finest. I couldn't have done it better myself. I just don't understand how someone, probably your friend with the kids and the M-16s, could be so smart about these tactical decisions, but so dumb about the basic defense arrangement."

  "Who knows?" Stu asked, watching as another group started piling into the truck they used to gather wood with. It was one of the few that had been undamaged in the battle. Three got in the front of it and four got in the back. It started up and began heading towards the northeast corner, probably to check on the guard position that had been struck in the opening moves. "Listen, Bracken," he said, "this is the perfect time for us to strike. They're all in disarray from the first attack. It will be the last thing that they're expecting. We could go in from the north before they have a chance to replace their guards. We stay off the main road and work our way south and I bet we can be on top of that community center before they even know we're there."

  "No," Bracken said without hesitation.

  "We can take them!" Stu said.

  "I'm sure we could," he replied. "But how many would we lose doing it? Ten maybe, perhaps fifteen if our friend rallies quickly enough. Not only that, we would end up having to kill a lot of the women since they seem to be using them as soldiers."

  "That's the cost of war," Stu said.

  "Yes, but there's no sense paying it if you don't have to. We'll take this town, and soon. But we're not going to do it with a platoon. Tomorrow at first light, we're gonna head back to Auburn. When we come back here, it will be with a company at least. As incompetent as they look on the surface, I don't think we should take any chances with them. When we strike, we'll strike with overwhelming numbers."

  Part 8

  It was nearly two o'clock when a weary and sore Skip found Paul in the community center. Paul had converted one of the empty conference rooms into a makeshift hospital to house the wounded. Dale, Sherri, and Paula were lying on cots in the room, all of them covered with blankets, their various injuries bandaged up as best as possible. None of the three were conscious when he came in. The wounded prisoner had been bandaged up as well, but he was not housed with the others. He was housed in an empty supply room down the hall, two armed guards out front.

  Paul was kneeling next to Dale, examining the wound beneath the trauma dressing. He put the bandage back into place and stood up, stripping off the pair of latex gloves he'd donned and dropping them into a garbage can. He waved Skip over to a small desk, out of earshot of the patients. They sat down.

  "The town is secure," Skip told him. "We've checked everything from one end to the other and there's no sign of any further invaders. Of course that doesn't mean there isn't a force holed up in an empty house or something, but I talked to the prisoner before we went out and he told me that there was only sixteen of them that came in. We have sixteen accounted for; fifteen dead ones and one injured one. They've been watching us for a few days - from the hill overlooking town no less - and they moved in early this morning by scaling the wall across from the guard posts. Their plan was to take out the guard positions quietly with those pesticide bombs and then hit the community center while we were at breakfast. They were going to load our supplies and enough women for all of them onto our vehicles and then head out."

  "Ambitious plan," Paul commented sourly.

  "It would've worked if Paula hadn't spotted them."

  "That's a little too fine of a margin for comfort."

  "My feelings exactly," Skip agreed.

  "Are you sure the prisoner is telling the truth?"

  Skip gave a strange little smile - a smile that told Paul he didn't want to know. "Oh, I'm pretty sure he is," he said.

  "I see," he said, saying nothing further on that subject. "What else?"

  "I've got the guard positions up-staffed again, although I'm using untrained people at the moment. I thought I'd give all of my people and everyone who participated in the battle and the clean up the night off. It seems the least we can do. Especially after... you know... the bodies."

  Paul nodded understandingly. He had been monitoring the progress of the goings-on since the battle on his radio. He had heard about the grisly discovery of Missy, Lenny, and Jeff in guard position 3. "Pretty bad, huh?"

  "It almost made me sick," Skip told him. "It was cans of Raid insect poison exploded in the room with them, just like they tried to do to Paula and Brenda. I'm a veteran cop that has seen some serious shit over the years and I almost puked when I saw and smelled what had become of them. We haven't been able to move the bodies out of there yet; the fumes are still that strong. We've opened all the windows in that house and hopefully it will be aired out enough to make a recovery tomorrow."

  "I take it that you're not using that house as position 3
anymore."

  "No, that's impossible. I've got it located four houses over now, in another two story. I thought under the circumstances I could make such a move without committee approval." He spat these last two words out.

  "Now now," Paul said wearily. "It's not the time for that yet. It's coming soon, but not yet."

  Skip nodded and went on with his report. "Brenda was DOA, as you know. We've recovered her body. It's now in the supply room off the downstairs hallway with Rick's body. As soon as we can get Missy and the others, we'll put them in there too and wrap them up in blankets for burial."

  "What about the invaders' bodies?"

  "I've got them stacked in the back of the wood gathering truck right now. With your permission I'll grab a crew and take them out to the bridge and toss them over. I don't see any reason to waste effort burying those assholes."

  "I agree. Get it done as soon as you can."

  "How are things in here?" Skip asked.

  Paul shook his head, his eyes showing helplessness. "Dale is going to die," he said. "Probably within the next twenty-four hours. He's bleeding internally at a slow but steady rate. I have no way to replace blood or repair the damage the bullet did to him. Even if I did, he would only get peritonitis. His small intestine is pretty ripped up. I can see that just by looking from the outside. That means his large intestine and probably his stomach took a hit as well."

  "What a waste," Skip said, not being the least bit sarcastic. Though he had not liked Dale, not in the least, he had no desire to see one of the townspeople perish. Especially not when it was such a worthless and unnecessary death. "Does anyone know?"

  "Not officially," he answered. "I'm sure that anyone who has looked at him has a pretty good idea though."

  "What about Jessica?"

  Paul made a snort of disgust. "What about her?" he asked.

  "Does she know?"

  "She doesn't know shit," he said. "She hasn't been in here to see him a single time. I have no idea where she is right now. I saw her earlier talking to some of the other women about something and she was making the same old gossip motions, riling them up about something or other. She doesn't change."

  "Oh well," Skip said with a shrug. "Let her rant. She ran away when the shit hit the fan out there. Fucking ran away. What about Paula and Sherri? How are they doing?"

  "Paula will probably be all right," he said. "She was pretty sick when they brought her in. She got a good snootful of that pesticide but if she were going to die from it she would've already done so. She's probably already purged most of it from her body. She's just going to feel sick for a while. Sherri, on the other hand, is a different story."

  "She just has a leg injury, doesn't she?" Skip asked. "What's lethal about that?"

  "Nothing if this were civilization," he said. "But since it isn't, things are a little different. In the first place, she has a broken femur. The bullet tore right through it. I don't know how to set femurs and get them to grow back together right so there's a good possibility that even if she does live, she'll never be able to walk right again. But that's not the main concern here. The main concern is infection. She had a dirty bullet pass through her body. She'll be prone to blood poisoning or some other infection from that. I cleaned the wound out as best I could and I gave her a big dose of penicillin from the supply we have, but I just don't know if its going to be enough to counter something like that. In a hospital, she would've been given a big dose of intravenous antibiotics. Here, I have nothing but Keflex and Amoxicillin that people used to use to treat freakin bladder infections and strep throat. If she does get blood poisoning, what am I supposed to do about it? Do I cut off her leg? I sure as shit don't know how to do that without killing her."

  "You're doing the best you can, Paul," Skip told him. "That's all that you can do. You can't help it that you're not a doctor or that you don't have the right supplies. You work with what you got."

  He nodded, still frowning. "I know," he said. "It just makes me feel so helpless. I've got two gravely wounded people here and one that has been poisoned and all I can do for them is dope them up with Valium and Vicodin and give them some low grade antibiotics in the hope that will work. Strangely enough, Paula would've been the easiest one to treat if I just had the supplies. Paramedics carry atropine as part of their drug inventory. Atropine counteracts the effects of organo-phosphate poison. But I don't have any of it. All I have is the first aid supplies from the fire station and the drugs we got from people's houses."

  "Nobody will fault you, Paul. They know you're doing the best you can. Don't be so hard on yourself."

  "I'll try," he said, looking at his three patients sadly. "I've just never felt as uncivilized as I do right now. Back before the comet when me and my fire-crew responded to shit like this, they didn't die. We just called for the medivac chopper and flew them off to Sacramento or Reno. They went into a nice trauma center and had their injuries patched up and then they went about their lives. They didn't die from peritonitis or blood poisoning because they couldn't get to a doctor or decent medicine."

  "Nope," Skip said. "And they didn't get nerve gassed or shot in a battle over cans of corned beef hash and ravioli either, did they? We live in an uncivilized world now. If anybody in town needs any more proof of that, they can just go look in the supply room around the corner."

  Skip had given firm orders to both Christine and Jack to go home and get some rest. For that reason he was somewhat surprised to find both of them in the armory when he went there after finishing up the distasteful task of dumping the fifteen bodies of the invaders over the railing of the bridge. He had come in to make an inventory of their remaining ammunition supply so he could see how much the battle had consumed. When he entered the room Christine was leaning against a bank of lockers, sipping from a can of warm soda and Jack was curled up on the locker room bench, snoring softly.

  "I thought I told you two to go home," he said, walking over and sitting on the bench across from Christine.

  She shrugged, giving him a tired smile. "We figured that you would want an ammo count done as soon as possible," she said. "So we came in here to do it. I guess Jack didn't realize how tired he was. He laid down there to take a break and never got back up."

  Skip looked at him affectionately. "Poor guy. He did all this after working the night shift. I'll wake him up and send him over to his house in a few minutes. First, I can use a break as well. Did you finish the inventory?"

  "I finished it after he fell asleep," she said. "I don't know how many unfired rounds there are floating around outside this room, but there are 330 less .30 caliber rounds, 212 less 5.65s, and 118 less 7.65s."

  "Is anything approaching critical levels?" he asked.

  She nodded. ". 30 caliber is down to less than 500. That's what most of the hunting rifles fire."

  "Great," he sighed. "More good news." He gave her a smile. "Thanks for taking care of that for me."

  "Sure," she said.

  They sat in silence for a few moments.

  "How are the wounded?" she asked at last.

  He gave her the update that Paul had given him. She frowned as she heard that Dale was for sure going to die and that Sherri was possibly going to. "Those poor people," she said. "I mean, Dale was just Jessica's little puppet and Sherri was almost as bad at talking shit about me as Jessica, but I didn't want this to happen to them. It's horrible."

  "I know. I didn't want it either, but we have to deal with what happens, don't we? There's no way to change the past."

  "No," she said. "I guess there isn't."

  Another silence developed, this one a little more uncomfortable than the first. Skip sensed that she wanted to say something important to him and was working up the nerve. He gave her the time.

  "I almost died out there, Skip," she said at last, her words barely audible.

  "Oh?"

  She nodded. "When I was trying to flush that last guy out of the planter, he took a shot at me. I saw the flash and I rolled up
onto my side. I didn't think about it, I just did it." She took a deep breath. "And the bullet hit right where I had been lying; right there where I'd been less than a second before. If I wouldn't have moved..."

  "But you did," he said. "You did and you're still alive because of it."

  "I almost wasn't though," she said. "I can't get that out of my mind. I could've died out there and it was only a simple little roll that saved me. I could've died."

  He slid down off the bench and joined her on the floor. He put his arm around her, pulling her against him. She didn't protest or pull away. "We all could've died, Chris," he told her gently. "We were in a war. That's what happens in war. People die. This time we didn't. Thanks to you and Jack and Paula and Mick, we were able to rally these people into something approximating an army. It was crude and it bordered on a complete clusterfuck, but we won. We lost five people and we may lose two more, but we won this one. You should be proud of yourself. I certainly am proud of you."

  She snuggled up a little to him, acknowledging for the first time that he was holding her. "You have a way of making me feel better," she said. "You always have."

  He held her tighter, knowing that he probably didn't smell very good at the moment, but Christine didn't seem to mind. After all, she had smelled him under much worse conditions. They simply sat there for a few minutes, enjoying the closeness after so long without it. Skip did not think ahead to what their embrace symbolized. He just enjoyed the now.

  "I'm pregnant," she said at last.

  He felt no particular surprise at her words. Though it was somewhat of a jolt to have his suspicions concerned, he had long since realized that it would have been a miracle for her to not be pregnant after all of the unprotected sex they'd had. "I see," he said slowly. "And how does that make you feel?"

  "It makes me feel attached to you," she told him. "I love you, Skip. I've loved you since maybe our second or third day together. This just makes me love you even more, makes me want you even more. I've been in denial about it for the longest time. I've been telling myself that I was just under stress and that's why my period hasn't come. I've been telling myself that getting sick in the morning is just because I have to get up so early. I've been telling myself that my boobs are sore all the time because of the damp air. But then Paula talked to me last night and just laid it out for me."