“The rest of you,” said Danny. “Take off yours too.”
“You’ll kill all of us,” said the researcher. “You can’t ask us to—”
“I’ll kill all of you if I toss this grenade,” said Danny. “That’s definitive. You dying from exposure is a possibility. You have a better chance of surviving if you do as I ask.”
Danny stepped forward and removed the magazines from the semiautomatic rifles and tossed them over his car. They clattered on the far side of the garage. All of the weapons save one were now empty except for the rounds in the chambers. With his free hand, he grabbed a loaded sidearm that one of the soldiers had dropped onto the ground. It was a semiautomatic pistol. Danny didn’t know anything about guns other than how to load them and unload them. But having one pointed at the troops was better than not having one pointed at them. He aimed it at the leader’s chest and stepped back to Maggie’s side.
The leader scanned his team and softly told them to remove their suits. They did as they were told.
Danny stood there watching. When they were finished, he said, “Pile your suits on top of the weapons.” They obeyed.
He ordered them to the other side of the garage, to the parking spots opposite his VW. They slowly shuffled there, all of them, and stood huddled together in their black undergarments. They looked smaller and less intimidating. He could see their faces, their furrowed brows, the collective fear in their eyes.
Had he condemned them to death? No. If he’d survived for four days in the zone, they could too without exposure. He didn’t need to be a government researcher to add two and two.
“Everyone on your knees,” Danny said. “Hands looped behind your heads.”
All of them did as he instructed without question or complaint.
Danny tucked the sidearm into his waistband, certain the safety was on, and strode to the pile of Tyvek suits. He grabbed one of the suits and slid his legs into it one at a time.
He zipped it up to his waist and, one-handed, tied the suit’s arms in a loop around his midsection like a loose belt. He grabbed a hood and tucked it under his arm and whistled for Maggie to follow him.
He took a half dozen steps down the sloping level and stopped. He faced the collected, suitless unit and gave them one last warning.
“Count to one thousand by ones, out loud,” he said. “When you get to one thousand, put your suits back on and go about your business. I’m coming back in three minutes to check on you. If you’re not doing as I’ve instructed, I’ll toss the grenade.”
Danny walked away, Maggie at his side. He rounded the corner and descended to a lower level of the garage, not believing he was walking away from certain capture.
He’d improvised all of it. And he’d stolen from scenes in movies or chapters in books where heroes and heroines used silly commands to facilitate their escapes. Somehow, it had worked.
The fact that most of the unit was likely medical personnel and not military certainly helped. He figured that any soldier who took orders from a government doctor must not be seasoned enough or confident enough in his own abilities to challenge the easy acquiescence of the unit to a lone man with a grenade and a mutt.
He also wondered how motivated any of them were to be there. They were soldiers, true. They were brave and trained. But they were also reserve and forced to leave their families in a time of crisis. Fires, mudslides, and earthquakes were one thing as far as emergency deployment went. Leaving loved ones in the midst of a spreading deadly outbreak of a drug-resistant bacteria was something else altogether.
Then again, it could have been luck. Danny found that luck, or the lack of it in his case, had frequently been the lady who’d directed the course of his life. There was another woman who readily came to mind as a direct influencer, but she was no lady. She’d been his wife.
Now she was the problem of some douchebag in the Bay Area and he was arm in arm with the fickle beauty who’d guided him away from certain capture.
Danny rounded the last corner and saw daylight ahead. He stopped where the light leaked in far enough to illuminate the garage floor.
Danny let go of the grenade and tossed it to the side. The metallic replica, inscribed with the words “Go Ahead, Make My Day,” rolled harmlessly into the corner and came to rest against a concrete pillar.
He loosened the hazmat suit’s arms at his waist, slid his body the rest of the way into the suit, then donned the hood and took the firearm in his right hand. There was still air in the regulator, which was good. It indicated he had about half of his filtered supply left in the suit. He hoped it would be enough to get him past the immediate blockades.
He took a deep breath, and marched into the sunlight, Maggie at his side. They’d somehow managed to escape.
Standing at the entrance to the garage, he looked to his left and then to his right. He glanced down at Maggie, who wagged her tail. She was panting.
“Which way, girl? Which way will get us out of here the fastest and with the least amount of trouble?”
The dog’s ears pricked. She cocked her head to one side. She turned right, walking toward the busier of the two blockaded intersections. Danny figured she had just as much chance of being right as he did, so he followed.
The suit was hotter than he’d anticipated. The strong off-gassing odor of plastic and what he imagined was the previous owner’s sweaty musk was gag-worthy. A couple of times he reached up to rub his nose and thumped his gloved hand against the plastic face shield.
Maggie looked at him both times and Danny swore she smirked at him. He glared at her with that wrinkled warning face parents give their children or their pets, then realized she couldn’t see it. She was smirking at him. No doubt.
They reached the end of the street, Danny trying to walk confidently. He pulled his shoulders back and widened his gait. He carried the handgun as if it were an extension of his right arm.
Ahead of him was a cadre of armed biosuited guards. They stood amongst concrete Jersey barriers set up alternately to force a zigzag queue and prevent vehicles from passing. Danny hadn’t noticed the new iteration of the barriers until now. He remembered them being plastic before.
Although most of the sentries appeared unfazed by Danny’s approach, two of them regarded him with suspicion. They stepped through the barrier maze and blocked the narrow entrance. Danny noticed both of them had their finger on the outside of their rifles’ trigger guards.
He kept his weapon pointed at the ground and waved with his left hand, greeting the men and women through whom he would have to pass convincingly. He decided not to speak unless spoken to, and he imagined they’d speak.
Maggie angled her trot and sidled up against Danny’s leg. She wasn’t smirking anymore, but she tensed. Danny sensed it. She purred. He shushed her and asked her to be calm.
“Where are you headed?” asked one of the two guards blocking the entry.
Danny glanced past the barricade toward a large staging area a block beyond it. There was a hive of activity. Military trucks idled. Yellow suits marched purposefully. People, not in suits, were led around corners or into the backs of some of the trucks.
There was a ten-foot-high chain-link fence topped with concertina wire. The blades were looped across the top of the fence, which, from Danny’s vantage point, appeared to be the walls of a large holding pen.
Danny motioned with his left hand toward the pen. “There,” he said flatly.
His voice echoed inside the hood. His breathing was faster than he’d have liked. He hoped the guards couldn’t hear it.
“What’s with the dog?” asked the other guard, motioning his rifle toward Maggie.
Aware they couldn’t see his eyes, Danny stole another look at the pen. He assumed it was a temporary place to hold people destined for a secure facility.
“She’s trained for drugs, nukes, whatever,” said Danny. “We gotta go sniff people before they get transferred.”
Danny had no idea whether a canine trained
to root out illicit drugs was also capable of detecting radiation. He hoped the two men in front of him didn’t either. He’d have held his breath awaiting their response if he’d been capable. Instead he exhaled, the warmth of his breath condensing on the inside of his visor before evaporating.
“Where’s your rifle?” asked the same one who’d asked about the dog.
“I’ll be in close quarters in that pen up there,” said Danny, thinking more quickly than he’d believed himself to be capable. “Not safe to have a long gun. Too risky. Especially given how jumpy and unpredictable these people are. I’d just as soon be unarmed, but orders are to have my sidearm. So I do what I’m told.”
Danny stepped forward, expecting the men to part and leave an open path through the barricade. They didn’t budge.
The first one who’d questioned Danny’s itinerary bounced from one Tyvek boot to the other and back again. His invisible gaze made Danny swallow hard. He motioned behind Danny as if someone was there.
Danny didn’t take the bait. He stood his ground and kept his head facing forward. Sweat dripped down his back. His pulse was pounding now. He wondered if they might be able to hear that above his breathing it was so loud in his head.
“Where’s the rest of your unit?” asked the guard. “We’re not supposed to travel alone on foot.”
“I’m not alone,” said Danny. “Maggie here is worth five of you. No doubt.”
Both men angled their hoods toward the dog. As if on cue, Maggie licked her chops and exposed her teeth, her shoulders squared.
“She hasn’t eaten in a while,” said Danny. “She’s hungry.”
One of the men flinched.
The other stepped to the side, but the entry was still blocked. He tightened his grip on his rifle and stiffened.
“I need to go, gentlemen,” said Danny. “She has a job to do. I have a job to do. I’d hate for somebody to get on one of those transports and make a mess of things because you two, with nothing better to do than guard concrete, kept us from where we have to be.”
The guards awkwardly turned toward each other, eying one another through their shields. From Danny’s perspective in front of them, a funhouse image of one reflected in the face mask of the other.
“I wouldn’t confuse your rank with my authority,” pressed Danny.
“All right,” one of them said. “Go ahead. Keep that dog away from me, though.”
The men stepped apart and left the entry open for Danny to enter the concrete maze and weave his way through the queue to the opposite end. He clicked his tongue at Maggie and she followed him.
“Hey,” called a guard to the others protecting nothing on the other side of the maze, “let him through. He’s headed to the pen.”
A few of the others acknowledged the orders with muffled grunts or nods. None of them hassled or blocked Danny as he led Maggie beyond the Jersey barriers to the short stretch of open street that separated the barriers from the heavy foot traffic and the awaiting trucks.
Danny sighed with relief as he threaded his way perpendicular to the flow of the crowds moving hurriedly, or reluctantly, toward an awaiting pool of military personnel transports. When he emerged from the thick of it, he stopped for a moment to soak in the surreality evolving around him. He patted his left thigh and Maggie sat at his side while he observed.
To his right, Danny saw several white and green tents erected from one edge of the street to the other. The green ones looked like the kind of canvas structures he’d seen portrayed on battlefields. The white ones looked like they were plastic and more akin to the ones depicted in news reports about refugee camps in Syria or Ukraine. The tents were guarded much as the Jersey barricade was, with men or women in yellow suits standing at the ready with their semiautomatic rifles at their waists and aimed at the ground.
The flow of people through which he swam came from those tents. Clusters of men and women led by pairs or quartets of armed escorts trudged from the makeshift clinics or processing centers, whatever they were, and made their way to Danny’s left and the awaiting rows of trucks. Suited clerks with clipboards stood waiting at the rear of the trucks with handheld scanners. As new people approached, the clerk would scan what Danny guessed were coded bracelets on their wrists. The clerks would check the scanner and then wave the people aboard the trucks. Some of the vehicles appeared to be standard military transports. Others looked to be little more than extended-bed pickup trucks.
It was an endless parade of men, women, and children passing by Danny. The men and women wore backpacks or carried duffel bags. A few rolled compact suitcases. The children toted stuffed animals or plastic dolls.
A shriek drew his attention back to the trucks, and for the first time he noticed guards separating the people from their belongings. The suitcases, duffels, and backpacks represented what Danny imagined were the most important belongings people had taken with them when they’d been “evacuated” from their homes.
Now they were being separated from them. Even the stuffed animals weren’t getting on those trucks. It was a child’s shriek that had drawn his attention. Now the child’s father was involved. Both of his hands gripped the shoulder straps of a heavy pack on his back. His knuckles were white. His face was red.
“We were told we could take what we could carry!” he shouted above the ambient din. “They told us to bring it.”
A guard was responding, but Danny couldn’t hear him. Two other guards had moved in position behind the father. The man hadn’t noticed them. His wife and daughter stood to the side. The girl was still clutching a plush, floppy-eared rabbit and keeping it pressed against her chest.
“We’re not handing them over,” said the father, spit flying from his mouth. “We’re not doing it.”
The guard said something and took a menacing step closer to the man. Two more comrades appeared from nowhere and joined the pair already closing ranks on the family of three. The girl leaned into her mother’s leg and buried her face. The mother wrapped her arm around her daughter’s shoulder and pulled her close, tears streaming down her face. She was trembling as her husband resisted.
Then the man made a mistake. He let go of the pack strap with one hand and jabbed a finger at the guard in front of him, using words not meant for his daughter to hear and admonishing the guards for their inhumanity.
He was mid-profanity, his finger still jabbing like a jackhammer, when the guard put an end to the burgeoning insurrection. In a move so quick that Danny wasn’t even sure he’d seen it, the guard reached out with a free hand and snatched the hammer finger out of the air.
He twisted it to the right and then, stepping into a well-practiced motion, looped the man’s arm around and behind his back. The man was now facing his wife and child, his face crimson and contorted with pain. He looked up at the sky, wailing, as the guard pressed and applied upward pressure on the man’s arm. He still had a grip on the man’s finger.
An instant later two guards separated the mother and daughter from one another. The girl was lifted from the ground, her feet kicking. She reached out for her mother and lost hold of the rabbit, which dropped to the ground. She was squealing and inconsolable. The guard who held her kept her at arm’s length as if holding something explosive or toxic.
The mother, held in place by two guards, who stood beside her and held her biceps tight beneath her armpits, cried out for her child, strings of spittle stretching across the space of her wide-open mouth. She pleaded with the guards to let her child free.
The father struggled futilely until he dropped to his knees in surrender. He was drooling, his eyes watering, and he’d bitten his lip. Blood trickled from his mouth and mixed with the watery spittle on his chin.
The guards removed the pack from the father’s back and heaved it into a growing heap of belongings piled alongside the last of the trucks. One of them picked up the rabbit and did the same.
The family was forcibly led, or carried, to the back of a truck on the far right of the row. The
y disappeared beyond the tailgate and into its dark space. Danny couldn’t hear them anymore.
Within a minute three of half a dozen trucks had pulled away. A bucket loader moved into place and maneuvered to the pile of confiscated belongings. Danny stood there watching the operator fill its lift and then dump them into one of the pickups. He was mesmerized by the operation that didn’t in any way resemble something that would happen in his country, let alone southern California within walking distance of his home.
He was driven from the daydream by a thump on the back of his shoulder. Then another.
“Hey, you,” called a muffled voice from behind him.
Another yellow-suited Cal Guard enforcer was standing in front of him. He was armed like most of the others at this checkpoint, or distribution point, or blockade, whatever it was. Everyone looked the same, and the muffled voices were virtually indistinguishable aside from gender. He cursed himself for having gotten lost in the moment.
“What?” said Danny.
Maggie turned with him. She was behaving herself and sat next to him, waiting for a cue.
“Didn’t you have somewhere to be?” It was one of the two guards who’d questioned him at the barricade. “At the pen, was it?”
Danny stared at the reflection of his own mask in the one facing him. He looked like one of them. It startled him for an instant before he composed himself and shot back his response.
“What’s it to you? Didn’t you see that altercation over there? I was standing by in support. If that father had caused more trouble…”
“You’d have what?” asked the nosy guard. “Were you gonna sic your dog on him?”
The question dripped cynicism. Danny didn’t like it. He didn’t think he owed the guard any answers.
“I don’t owe you any explanation,” he said. “Go back to babysitting an empty street.”
Danny had already taken a step away from the guard when the man grabbed his shoulder to stop him. Danny shrugged him off, turned back and, without thinking about the consequences of his actions, brought up his right arm, swinging it in a wide arc, and slammed the butt of the handgun into the side of the guard’s head.
The Alt Apocalypse (Book 4): Affliction Page 15