Fail State, page 24
part #2 of End of Days Series
"Reckon so," Mel said, and this time she led off. Her hand drifted to the pistol at her waist, but she did not draw the weapon.
James forced himself to ease up his grip on the rifle. He was tense; they both were. Their footsteps seemed very loud in the stillness as they strode along in the dead centre of the road. Once or twice he looked down and saw the solid white line of the median divider beneath his boots. It was another data point marking a greater change. Two weeks ago he would never have done this, no matter how remote or deserted the route. The chance of being mowed down by a speeding car, perhaps by a fast moving, almost silent electric vehicle like one of the high-end Teslas, would be too great.
Now, it seemed not just unlikely but impossible that any sort of car might appear. He wasn't sure whether he wanted one to or not.
"What do we do?” he asked, causing Mel to turn around, but not to stop. “Like, if we meet someone,” he added.
"If we meet up with anybody, and they're friendly, we can be friendly," Mel said. "But that doesn't mean we let our guard down, James."
She stopped talking for a moment, but kept walking, resuming a few steps further on, “Honestly, mate, if things feel bad to you, you can be pretty sure that's because they are. And if that happens, we do what we got to, right?”
She did stop then, coming to a halt in the middle of the tarmac.
"You gonna be right with that? If you have to point that thing at someone and use it?”
She nodded at the rifle.
James did not answer straight away.
"I don't know," he said, eventually. "I couldn't tell you until it happened, Mel."
She surprised him by smiling.
"That's the right answer," she said. "But I reckon you'll be okay."
They set off again.
The campsite, a roadside rest stop with some basic facilities like a coin operated barbecue and a small toilet block, was another few minutes walk. As soon as they caught sight of the big, white RV and Tammy's very well-maintained Oldsmobile they both slowed. Melissa did draw her weapon then, motioning for James to fall in behind her. She advanced in a cautious shooter’s stance, almost crab-walking sideways, with the pistol held low in both hands. James tried to imitate her obviously practiced gait, but he felt like an idiot. His own breath sounded like the bellows of a dragon in his ear, and every footfall seemed to crash down like an elephant’s stomp. His limbs felt loose and every inch of his skin prickled with sweat, like he already knew he was going to screw this up.
To his surprise, she increased the speed of their approach as they got closer, eventually hurrying to take cover behind the solid concrete fortification of the barbecue. He hurried in behind her, his heart speeding up and a weird, sort of flattening effect seeming to press all of the depth out of the world around him.
Was this how Rick had spent all of his years in the Army, he wondered. He honestly didn’t know how anybody could endure this as part of their everyday life.
Next to him, squatting down on one knee, peering at the campervan as though through x-ray eyes, James could see Mel was doing that thing that Michelle did so often; threat assessment. Her eyes swept over the campsite, traversing it from end to end, and peering into the woods beyond, before returning to the two vehicles.
The Oldsmobile was secured, the doors closed, the windows rolled up. The RV’s driver-side door stood open, and two swing doors at the back of the vehicle had been thrown wide the previous night and left that way. James started to pay attention to his other senses, smelling the rank, foetid stink of meat gone bad in the sun, and the bitter, hoppy tang of spilled beer. Something rattled in the back of the RV and they both dropped down out of sight. James's mouth was dry and his heart hammered with force enough to make him dizzy. Mel pressed one hand down on his shoulder, indicating she wanted him to keep his head down. Neither of them moved for nearly a minute. James was beginning to doubt he had heard anything when a metallic crash from inside the van, louder than the first, set his nerves to jangling. Mel risked a peek around the corner of the barbecue, snorted, smiled and stood up. She still held her pistol in a shooter's grip, but she advanced on the vehicle with confidence. James took a deep breath and followed her, just in time to see a raccoon darting out of the back carrying what looked like a heavy, metal soup ladle away in its jaws.
"There's nobody in there," Mel announced.
She didn't drop her aim any further, and she advanced on the RV with all of the caution she had displayed previously, but she was not putting out the same furious, dangerous waves of dark energy she had emitted on their first approach. She raised the gun as they drew closer, and James finally thought to bring his own weapon to bear. At least he didn't sweep her with the business end of the barrel. His father had taught him that much.
"Anybody in there?" Mel called out. "You can come on out now. We are armed, but we’re not dangerous. We don't mean you any harm."
Nothing. No movement, no sound. Nothing.
With the departure of the raccoon, the whole site had taken on the air of a truly abandoned place. James kept his rifle at the ready, still not certain he could shoot anybody with it.
“Mate, can you keep a look out while I have a poke around inside?” Mel said. “I reckon it’s clear. That giant skunk or whatever it was wouldn’t have been making off with the silverware otherwise.”
“Sure,” he replied.
Mel approached the rear of the RV as though a gang of armed robbers could be hiding in there; slowly, quietly, gun ready to snap up and start laying down fire. James tip-toed the short distance to a picnic table, stepped up onto the bench seating, and then the tabletop, thinking it would give him coverage of the surrounding area. He quickly hopped down when he realised that all it did was expose him to the fire of anybody laying in ambush.
Jeez this stuff was hard.
He tried not to get distracted by the scatter of items laying around. He did not have a trained eye for these things, but he could see a few kids’ toys lying in the dust. Mel would undoubtedly be able to put the whole story together for them.
He heard her moving around inside the RV, opening and closing doors, searching for… whatever.
He forced himself to turn through three hundred and sixty degrees, scanning for movement or colour or whatever the hell he was supposed to be looking for. But there was nothing. Just a warm breeze and bird song.
Did the birds mean they were alone here?
He never finished the thought.
Mel’s scream cut him off.
29
A deep-fried clusterfuckturducken
Of course, it was Leo Vaulk who spoiled everything, pounding on the door of the cabin while Tomi was still sucking down the last few drops of Jonas Murdoch’s much diminished supply of love yoghurt.
“Jonas? You in there,” he yelled. “You gotta come man. You gotta come now.”
“Too fucking late for that,” Jonas sighed, but happily, almost chuckling.
He was done.
He pushed against Tomi’s shoulders and stood up from where he’d been sitting on the edge of the tub. Truth be told, he was kind of glad to escape the ravenous bitch and was starting to understand why her boyfriend had taken a football scholarship on the other side of the country. She was like something out of a Grimm’s fairytale porno. Ignoring Tomi’s protests, Jonas wrapped a towel around his waist and answered the door.
Leo was briefly taken aback to find him wet and mostly naked, and he couldn’t help trying to catch a sneak peak of Tomi as she climbed out of the tub. Jonas moved to block his view. No fucking way was that skeevy douchebag testing the video quality of his imagination by jerking off to any gash belonging to Clan Murdoch.
“Help you, bro?” he asked pointedly.
Leo came back with a shake of the head.
“Yeah, Jonas. Get dressed man. There’s a big meeting. O’Shannassy’s moving on Muller like a bitch.”
The fat security contractor tried again to catch a glimpse of Tomi in the cabin, but Jonas was having none of that shit. He’d been holding the towel closed but now he let the towel fall, freeing his hand to gently but firmly move Leo away from the door.
Jonas stood at least four inches taller than Leo Vaulk, and he massed out at well over two hundred pounds of hard-packed muscle and thick dinosaur bone. He didn’t have to shove. Standing there naked, laying a closed fist on one of Leo’s jiggling man-boobs and simply pressing, while smiling, was enough to send him shuffling backwards.
“Thanks, man,” Jonas said, keeping it pleasant. “Appreciate the heads up. Just let me get dressed. But wait for me. We’ll go together.”
That seemed to please Leo almost as much as nearly copping a peep of some quality bush. The sort of quality he could only imagine.
Closing the door on him, Jonas plucked a relatively fresh pair of jeans from the pile of clothes on the floor, and buttoned himself into one of the shirts Tomi had given him. Her boyfriend, Todd, had left them at her place when he left for college.
Big dude.
Tomi liked ‘em big.
“Sorry babe,” he said. “I gotta do this. Some shit about O’Shannassy and Muller feuding again. Gonna punch it out, Leo reckons. Like right now.”
Tomi was pulling on yoga pants and a sports bra. She seemed a lot more settled than before.
“Coolio,” she said. “Don’t go getting into something you can’t get out of, though. That Darren O’Shannassy’s a prick, but Dave Muller’s no pussy-ass bitch neither. You side with one of them, the other will remember.”
Jonas showed her his open hands.
“I’m an outsider, T. Just passing through. On which matter…”
He stepped over and put his hands on her shoulders, digging the fingers in just enough to make her wince before easing off.
“That thing we talked about before,” he said. “That’s between us. Don’t go yapping to anyone else about it.”
She shook him off, annoyed.
“I’m not an idiot, Jonas.”
“Not saying that, babe. I’m saying shit is for real now. It’s dangerous. Not just here. Everywhere.”
“I know,” she said. Softening and stepping back into his arms.
She hugged him.
“Be careful. Find me later.”
He didn’t think to ask where the fuck she might be going.
Too busy planning his next move to see Tomi’s.
Before Jonas Murdoch launched The Centurion into America’s top fifty podcasts, he had another show, much more conventional and much less successful, which attempted to explain the political moment. Specifically, he was trying to unpack that moment for the great mass of his fellow citizens who couldn’t be fucked pulling themselves out of a bath full of blazing hobo liquor to escape third degree burns, if it meant they might also have to drag their lazy asses to a voting booth. Jonas had this stupid plan to capture that hundred million strong demographic of broke-dick sloths and sell it to political consultants from both parties — but the pod tanked after three episodes and forty-seven downloads.
One of those eps, however, Jonas did recall fondly. He’d thrown together a short, potted history of the American town hall meeting - only he’d collected the worst, most disastrous examples; such as the gathering of 1837 in Barnstable, Massachusetts, during which somewhere between thirty and fifty feral hogs crashed through the slab-walled hut that served as Barnstable’s Meeting Hall, gored the chief constable and carried off the good lady wife of Deputy Mayor Purchase Dunderland, never to be seen again.
It sort of reminded Jonas of this deep-fried clusterfuck-turducken, right here.
Most of Silverton had crowded into the small park just inside the Seattle Gate. The green patch was not as well suited to being dug up for cultivation as the main stretch of the town Common, being shaded by three unusually large trees, two Big Leaf maples and an Oregon White Oak. Jacques Loubert had pronounced their extensive root systems too strong and deeply entangled to make the effort of digging them out worth the calories the labor would burn. An old fountain which had stopped working twenty years ago and never been repaired took up more of the space, but a concrete table next to a coin-operated gas barbecue did provide a convenient platform for speeches. Darren O’Shannassy was roaring like a bear over the heads of the eight or nine hundred onlookers.
“It’s not business as usual, it can’t be business as usual, but Sheriff Muller is trying to pretend that nothing has changed. That deputising a couple more folks to walk the beat will keep us safe when those animals come back here and try to take the town.”
The ragged roar that greeted this was half outraged, half spurring him on. Muller, standing on the stone table, but as far away from O’Shannassy as he could without falling off, rolled his eyes theatrically. He was carrying a shotgun and a wearing a ballistic vest. He hefted the firearm and lifted his shoulders, as if to demonstrate that nothing about this was business as usual.
“We get one shot at this,” O’Shannassy thundered. “And if we screw it up, we’re dead. All of us.”
The roars were louder this time, both the catcalls and the jeers.
Weaving his way around the edge of the gathering, leading Leo Vaulk like a lost dog, Jonas anxiously checked on the lookouts manning the Gate. He counted seven, including two of Wolfenden’s militia guys, all of them armed with some of the heaviest weapons the town could supply. That was good, but half of those morons had turned their backs on the road coming up the mountain to follow the action at the rally. He also worried about how many guns they had on the Cascade Gate and strung around the Wall. If those bikers could see this shit, they’d roll on the place now and take it apart like a roadhouse chicken.
A sudden, disturbing thought occurred to him. What if they had a drone?
He craned his head back and scanned the airspace over Main Street. Nothing but blue sky and a few wisps of cloud.
The cellphone networks were still down and he wondered if you could even use a drone for surveillance without phone cover.
“We need to stand up the Watch,” Darren O’Shannassy shouted out, dragging his attention back to earth. “Three shifts, fully manned, heavily armed, and aggressive patrols out to a mile beyond the wire. We can’t have them coming up on us by surprise.”
More cheers, but also more booing.
Jonas saw Dale Juntii at the rear of the action, leaned up against a post outside the Savings and Loan, smoking a hand rolled cigarette. He’d changed his clothes and now wore a ballistic vest like Muller, except Dale’s looked as if it had done a few laps around Fillintheblankistan. All the way around. Jonas was impressed that he could still snap it closed. A lot of guys went to seed when they got out of the service, but Juntii looked as tough as a two-dollar steak, and cold with it. Like one of those private military contractors you saw on the news. Or in that movie about Benghazi.
Those guys had their shit tight.
“Hey Leo,” he said out the side of his mouth. “I reckon these idiots might have left the back gate open. I can’t see anyone standing watch. You reckon you could check the perimeter? Assess the exposure. You’re the pro here.”
“Sure,” Leo replied. “You’re right. This looks like a wide open shithouse door on a sinking tuna boat to me.”
“Thanks,” Jonas said. “I’ll meet you at the Cascade Gate in about fifteen.”
Vaulk saluted him, like a perfect assclown, and trooped off to inspect the defences, freeing Jonas to join Dale Juntii in the shade under the awning of the S&L.
“Hey,” he said. The mercury was trying to break the century again and it was a merciful relief to get out of the sun. Cooler away from the close pressed body heat of that crowd too.
“What d’you think about this?” Jonas asked.
At this distance it was difficult to make out what O’Shannassy was yelling over the crowd noise.
Dale shook his head.
“Can’t be fucking around when you got Haji at the wire,” he said quietly. “They’ll cut your head off and piss down your neck-hole before you know what happened.”
“Testify,” Jonas said quietly. “You think Muller’s got this?”
That shake of the head again.
“Don’t matter, bro. This is going bad. If it’s not the next attack, it’ll be the one after. There’s no command chain. No resupply. No chance of reinforcement.”
Jonas held his breath. He hadn’t told Dale about his escape plan. Only Brad Rausch and Chad Moffat were up on the deets.
Oh, and Tomi of course. Having literally sucked it out of him.
He was planning to bring Leo Vaulk into the program before the end of the day; if only because the dude was sure to have a stockpile of guns and ammo he was keeping to himself.
Dale though, he’d be an asset.
Jonas was actually dry mouthed, worrying about whether he should trust him. The two men said nothing more for a while, watching as Muller took over the speaker’s table from his rival. He had the booming command voice of man who used it professionally. He started by pointing out that having more people on guard out patrolling the forest approaches meant less working on food production, but he pivoted quickly to the vote.
“Before we even take this poll,” he bellowed, “we need to settle to who gets a say.”
That brought forth competing choruses of applause and abuse, but Muller just rode on over the top of it all.
“We got some hundred and thirty folks from outside the town, all of them here because we let them in to serve our ends. Doc Cornwell’s medical staff. All outsiders. Joe Wolfenden’s men, who walked up the first day and have stood watch over Silverton every minute since. Them too.”
Just as Jonas was wondering if he might get a shout out, he did.
“Jonas Murdoch,” Muller called out, even pointing him out over the heads of the crowd, “who saved Al Barrett’s life on day one, and who stood up at the Gate this morning.”
