So far, this has been a most interesting day in Rita’s recent life, and now she’s riding down the road on the back of a ten or twenty year old Yamaha V-Star 1700, wind in her hair, and sunshine on her face. They go about ten more miles south, then fifteen or so southwest, and then west some more before sundown approaches. As the bright orange haze descends to touch the tops of the trees on the hills, the cool of day begins. The girl has her legs fast wrapped around his waist, she taps his shoulder, and points out a tired, faded billboard for a park ahead. He pushes the handlebars left. They pull in and find it well abandoned. The courtesy shack is empty, the vending machines turned over, broken; the trashcans are gone, and the markers that indicate where to put your RV have long faded into wordlessness, many completely consumed by the flora. They pick a spot that gives them a view of the incoming road to the front of the bus, sunset to the rear, and a place that has seen a thousand campfires to the right. There are hook-ups for the campers that used to come, but the water doesn’t flow anymore.
Reggie begins looking around the park for the well house, and he finds it right next to an old water tower. There is no electricity, but Reggie has a plan. Returning to the bus, he brings a homemade portable generator, built on a hand truck, connecting it to the well house at the breaker box, he disconnects the park, and especially the well house, from what used to be the power grid. He brings a jug of water from the coach and pours it into the cap valve at the top of the pipe, priming the pump. He starts the little motor, and everyone watches in satisfaction as some of the lights come on, and the pump begins to hum. The could hear the water splash in the tank, but the motor sputters to a stop, the lights go black, and the pump stops its whirring. Reggie goes back to the bus, gets a Mason jar full of fuel and, with a few tugs of a cord . . . brumph, brumph, brumph . . . he starts the generator again. The lights come on, the pump begins to whir, and Reggie climbs to the top of the water tower to open a purge valve.
Water splashes over the edge of the platform at the top of the tower, flushing the lines and sprinkling like raindrops onto the planked platform below, and most of the gang from the bus comes over, dancing in the sprinkle, anxious for a cooling rinse. Everyone seems giddy under the splashing water, clothes and all, rinsing the dust of days from their bodies, and Mark looks on. The water runs for about a minute or two, then Reggie closes the valve, and the tower begins to fill. “Start up some showers,” Reggie hollers down. “See how they run!”
Mark goes to the Johnny house, behind the ghost of a “Men’s Shower” sign, and opens a couple of shower valves. The water comes out brown, then grey, but soon begins to clear. The toilet tanks burp and sputter to fill, so Mark opens the sinks to start cleaning those lines as well. He heads for the bike to get a towel and a dopp kit. He gets back to the showers and they are running clean and clear now, so he empty’s his pockets on a bench, along with his jacket, then he strips down, tossing his clothes under the running water. He steps on them as he showers, patiently folding and unfolding them from time to time, and rinsing them as he washes himself clean.
He reaches into his dopp kit and removes a razor and some lotion, slathering the lotion on his face. He rinses the razor a few times, checks the blade for shine, and begins removing the scruffy surface. He has no mirror, so he has to do it by feel, but in a few minutes, he is smooth again.
On the outside, Rita had been frolicking with friends, but in a few tense minutes, she begins to wonder where Mark has gotten. She realizes he must be in the shower and gets an idea of her own. Rita is not prone to sexual adventure, at least, not since before she was sent on this church retreat. She was thirteen back then and was building a reputation with the wrong people, and for the wrong reasons, at least, that is, for a respectable person. Since then, Rita has grown in form and grace, and more than anyone understands, she knows things – real things – and somehow, she knows Mark.
In a relaxed moment, Mark puts his hands against the wall, reveling in the wafting wetness over his body. Leaning against the wall, he feels a pair of hands on his shoulders, gripping him gently, kneading his muscles, and rubbing the stress from his day away. When he glances over his shoulder, he is happy to see that it is Rita, and even happier to find that her clothes are being washed on the floor as well. She makes her way to being fully under the fountain in his embrace, raking her fingertips through her hair with some shampoo, rinsing the bubbles under her arms and down her sides and around her back. She borrows Mark’s razor for a quick once over as he uses another shower to rinse off, and when he is done, he looks over and sees that she has borrowed the last of his lotion and is soothing her legs and pits from the razor’s harshness. Mark decides to help with that, and in a moment, eye to eye intimacy is what follows.
As they reassemble their attire, Rita asks him, “Where’s the bomb?”
Mark shows her the battery pack in his jacket pocket and a click switch on the pack, with two wires running down his sleeve to the dead-man switch. “There is no bomb,” he says. “I figured out a while back that no one wants to argue with a suicide bomber; so I rigged this up, just to be left alone. It’s worked for me several times.” She finds it humorous and she laughs a little.
As they come from the showers, in clean, wet clothes, and one towel for the two of them, Reggie greets them saying, “You should have waited for the water heaters to really kick in.” They do recall the water seemed to be getting a little warmer, but attributed it to them just growing accustomed to it.
Mark takes Rita back to the bike where he gets her to help in unpacking some of his stuff. The bike is specialized, having an extra fifteen gallons above the lowered headlight in a modified beer keg, and five more behind the passenger seat in a jerry can. The pack, which covers the jerry can and nearly two foot of storage rail, has all manner of useful stuff in it. There is a sidecar on the right, full of something or another, covered with a tonneau encircled by snaps. Rita unsnaps a couple of closures on the tonneau and Mark immediately tells her, “Close that back up!” But what she sees in the meantime is several old school ammo boxes, a med kit, and a milk crate full of MREs in the seat. She snaps it back up quickly, figuring that Mark just doesn’t want the whole world to know. “I’ll show you every little secret when we are alone. Don’t worry.”
A bright red crease tears across the flesh of Rita’s arm, right below her shoulder, slicing a narrow trench through her skin and a splash stains her t-shirt, as a shot rings out from the distance. She stands quickly, releasing the cover of the sidecar, contracting hard, away from the pain. Mark puts his left hand on her head, spinning right, he pushes her behind him and downward, resulting in her falling to the ground behind the motorcycle. His gun is out at the ready as he has crouches behind the sidecar, finding his target in the nearby trees. It is the local boy, the one they left on the road! Leaning into his grip, pushing with his left hand, Mark squeezes the trigger, and a 147-grain projectile flies thirty-five yards to its target, striking the shooter in the right eye, detonating the back of his head, splattering some of the nearby trees. Still, the boy is not alone, so the danger is far from gone. Two more rifles are firing on the camp and Mark turns to see that one of the boys from the bus, a guy named Gus, has taken a shot to the chest and fallen against the side of the motorcoach, and a girl named Terry has been hit in the butt and fallen down under the backend of the coach.grA
Mark spots the other shooters – one boy behind the Johnny house, shooting from around a corner, another standing beside the pump house, one with a black rifle and the other with a lever gun – both in their late teens or early twenties, flannel shirts and jeans, both shooting duck in a barrel. One of the ducks is not going down without a fight.
Mark looks quickly to see that Rita appears only grazed. She sees the worry in his eyes as he hands her his favorite gun, and he reaches into his sidecar, removing an M-4 he had saved from his military days, running to the bus. Moving targets don’t get hit as often, and though Mark draws some fire as he moves, he reaches hi
s objective unharmed. Keeping low, he races, diving and rolling to a position of advantage, hiding under the bus, behind a wheel, pushing the tip of the barrel in front of a wheel. The steel sights are good enough to hit a man at a few hundred yards so this simple shooting should be no problem – and it isn’t.
The youth that shot Gus pops up with the crown of his head just slightly above his cover, maneuvering to get position for another shot, only to get a round straight through his parietal lobe. The top of his head is torn off by the hydrostatic shock of the 75-grain, custom drilled, jacketed hollow point .223, flashing through the flesh at 3600 feet per second upon arrival; and barely any slower going away.
Mark’s advantage is lost, as the other shooter moves to where he can see and shoot under the bus from the front end. The shooter fires quickly, his 30-30 round tearing through the sewn pocket bottom on the backside of Mark’s pants. There is a nick of nearly two inches long, and a mile-wide pain in his ass, as Mark rolls suddenly over the wound to reposition in the prone, facing his enemy, releasing a round in his direction. The bullet shatters on the front edge of the other man’s scope, slamming the gun against his face with the force of a horse kicking, and little shards of bullet decorate his cheeks and neck, all pounding him against the door frame of the little building. Immediately after that, a second round penetrates his chest, lodging in the lumber of the pump house doorframe, having passed through a gelatinized mass that used to be the heart of the guy, now splayed out on the ground; his modified AR-10 laying by his side. For Gus, Mark puts another round into the dead man’s forehead, leaving a terrible mess on the door.
Determining that the threats are neutralized, Mark returns to Rita, to confirm the intensity of her injury. He is relieved to know she will be fine – slightly scarred, but fully functional in every way. His tearful eyes reveal his care . . . his genuine concern for her. Having someone already tending to her wound, he leads a few others in arming up, getting guns, and perimeter search of the rest of the area around the camp, just to make certain that they are once again alone.
The ground is fairly soft as the digging begins. The dead are gathered and their possessions removed for later use as needed, shoes, belts, undamaged pieces of clothing, weapons and bullets, and then into the earth they go. There are keys in one of their pockets, so a couple of kids go to see what the dead guys drove. It is an old Suburban, but the tank is pert near full, and so is the gun rack, and the center console has over a dozen boxes of 7.62X39 and 30.06. That means more to trade with . . . or more to shoot with when needed.
The sun is almost completely gone and the haze of dusk only allows them to do a cursory examination of about thirty or forty feet of woods all around the primary campground. Using the headlights of the Suburban, they get a glance a little farther into the woods. It is enough to give comfort that they are, for the time being, as alone as they can be. Still, they will remember the message of Nehemiah, chapter 4, verse 9 – “But we prayed to our God and posted a guard day and night to meet this threat.” So, that is exactly what they will do; one on the water tower, and one in the Suburban.
Mark is a little new to the whole group prayer thing, but he knows that he is not the boss of the universe, and if possible, if there really is a boss of the universe, he would like a little help from Him.
Darkness has come as Mark and Rita unroll his pack to open up an 8 by 10 tent, with a snap together pole support system and eight straps that bind to the earth with pegs, all of which Mark hammers into the ground. The tent goes up in about ten minutes’ time, by the headlight of the bike. Mark douses the light, tossing his sleeping bag inside, then Rita gets her bag from the bus to toss inside as well, and in about the only fashion available anymore in these days, they become a family. She calls the gang together, and at Mark’s insistence, Reggie says a few words about a promise. Rita is his, Mark is hers, they are together, and life will stay like that, good for them, for now. Reggie concludes with, “I now present Mark and Rita Schwarz.”
During the night, Reggie, who can’t sleep, finds a park sign, and carves into it, “We will greatly miss Gus, but these other three assholes are already in Hell!”
The hard question is still, how did life get this way for everyone?
Tomorrow’s Cities
Yea though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death . . .[2]
E-Day Minus 3 Months
The cities of the “flyover” states are gone, most of the older structures have burned to the ground, or crumbled, all of them pretty much abandoned, and those who live there are scavenging for what may have remained ungleaned by the millions who left, and those who died. It is a terrible thing to see, going into a city anymore. To drive down the streets, seeing the storefronts with their shattered windows, with bent and battered steel bars, and aluminum roll-downs peeled back everywhere. There are towers and fly-overs, rotting to dust, fallen to the streets below, and streets full of random, lose bricks. When people can be heard or seen at all, they are like scurrying rats, speeding along, scampering from place to place in stealth, trying to remain unseen. Like cockroaches, they flee the light, evading the visibility of others, disappearing into the cracks of the city, hoping to remain unnoticed.
Mark had been in Houston, just a couple weeks ago, or what is left of Houston, and he had seen the scurrying creatures, the broken buildings, and the absolute lack of everything anyone wants. The signs entering the south side of the city say, “Lakewood Hell!” Somewhere in the edge of downtown, where the great churches used to be, and even the arenae, there are camps of people creating some sort of economy, working in a dictatorial construct with the farmers in the nearby villages. They get wheat and corn, barley and sorghum, where rice used to grow. Rains being less frequent, rice is not an option. The variance from this is that there are four or five diesel rigs a day pulling into the Astrodome for local distribution. Two trucks a week go to Lakewood, but only because Lakewood provides the service women – and some men – to the dome. They swap forced workers for special projects, mechanical skills, and on Fridays, they even swap fighters for entertainment. The dome culture controls all the supplies, including fuel, by sending a truckload of grain, along with a tanker, out of town for a food for fuel exchange. It’s not as dystopian as Thunderdome but it’s not Swiss Family Robinson either. It is generally a hard set of realities, but the evil is not as easily seen as one might think; nor is it missed.
There is little or no traffic, other than a very few scavengers using hand carts, or vagabonds in pickup trucks, rummaging through whatever they can find, in the warehouses and dumpsters. These people are the least of gatherers – vultures cleaning the bones of the metropolis, as well as can be done anymore – and they root through the leftovers, foraging through basements and attics, any kind of storage places, always taking the shoes and clothes of the dead, whenever they find them. Whenever they find something that may be used, they collect it, returning to their own den, lair, warehouse, or whatever. Some of these people have found places to live where, maybe because they were hoarders to begin with, maybe because nobody has nothin,’ they have stored up vast piles of virtually useless stuff. Real vultures are also feeding very well. Sometimes, when one gatherer finds another, he or she may kill for whatever the other person has acquired.
He had seen a group of people down an alleyway in Houston, carrying something from a building, putting it in their old Chevy C-10. He had stopped a couple of blocks away, to take a look from a distance, just to see what they had, but at the moment they saw him, they tossed whatever it was into the bed and scurried toward the cab. Speeding off westward, he didn’t care what they were doing, partly because they weren’t doing it to him, and partly because there was no way for them to catch him in that ragged ass truck, running on five cylinders. He didn’t know at the time, but the rummagers went the other direction, fearful of being scavenged themselves.
He had only gotten off the highway to see if there was any civilization coming back, but as always, t
he answer is still “no.” This city and its surrounds used to hold over three million people, but now . . . it’s a few hundred most days.
All of the cities in the middle of America are like this now. They used to be the places where people gathered, sharing resources in this thing called a marketplace of goods, never really out of anything, but now . . . now . . . well, they’re out of everything now.
That is, unless they move into the dome or the churches. Mark got to Sabine originally, because he followed a food truck up. It got to town, was waved to the head of the line, as he was stuck in the rear. Traffic seemed to swarm at the speed of a snail, crawling along in the dust, breeze shifting always, air almost choking anyone in the outside. He rolled slowly, goggles down, and a bandana over much of his face. Eventually, he got beside a bus.
They didn’t all leave the cities, though most did. A large number of them stayed around, holding on to the last vestiges of civilization, hoping and praying for restoration, for some semblance of order, and multitudes died of all manner of illness, much of which was related to inconvenience, and disorder. Once electricity ended, police quit, and water treatment failed, the truly terrible things began to happen. Houses built on pier and beam were the most fortunate in that the place where the toilet say could be cut away, and an open path could be found to the underside of the house. Of course, that attracted more roaches and left openings for rats, so cats became more common but even less friendly.
The Warriors' Ends- Soldiers of the Apocalypse Page 3