Fail State, page 27
part #2 of End of Days Series
They were not long getting back to the spot where they had left Rick and Tammy with the wounded man. He still drew breath, but his efforts were laboured and a wet rattle accompanied every exhalation.
Fear and loathing hastened their return, but James had no trouble retracing their path along the rim of the Valley. They followed a hiking trail for most of the way and the only fork in that track was signposted with a National Parks Service marker which indicated the direction to the picnic area where they had made camp at the old tree stump a few days before.
They did not speak much on the way back, each lost in their own thoughts. James carried his rifle at the ready the whole way and once or twice he called out directions to keep them on track. Mel replied with one word answers.
“Yeah.”
Or, “okay.”
Before leaving the scene, James did not venture into the campervan to verify what Mel had found. That first scream of outrage and horror was all he needed, and she advised him against going in there, anyway.
“I won’t stop you, mate,” she said quietly. “But if I was you, I wouldn’t.”
So he did not.
By the time they rejoined Rick and Tammy, James had stopped shaking from fear, and instead started shaking from a weird sense of violation and possibly from exhaustion. He had not eaten in nearly sixteen hours and they had burned a lot of energy in a short time. He did not feel hungry, though.
He saw the first dead man before he saw Rick, who had killed him.
One of the Darryls had rolled a good way down slope from the ridge where Rick had shot him. He lay on his back, sightless eyes staring through a break in the overhead canopy directly into the late morning sun, arms flung high over his head. His sleeveless, red checked shirt had ridden up, exposing a fish white belly. Ants and bugs swarmed over the corpse and James could see that a few larger scavengers had already taken small bites from the flanks. He found that he did not care. The thing on the ground was not a man to him anymore.
“Mel and James, coming in,” Mel called out, and Rick’s voice came back from somewhere over the rise.
“Acknowledged. You’re good to come on.”
James wondered if she and Rick had worked out that little call and reply thing before, or if that was just what people like them did. They were different from him. Maybe not so much from Michelle, who seemed to view the world with the hard eye of somebody waiting for it to turn on her. But definitely different to a naive little farm boy who’d gone off to big college to study accountancy. James wondered where that guy had gone.
He scrambled over the last rise, past the other dead men. He noted that the thin corpse must have been the one Tammy Kolchar referred to as Cracker Barrell Darryl. You could tell he was wearing the t-shirt, despite all the blood. The bigger body was just another McGuigan.
James and Mel climbed carefully down the treacherous slope of the dry gully where Rick and Tammy waited a short distance from the lone survivor of the hunting party.
That’s how he thought of them now. A hunting party.
But it was too weird and James shook his head in unconscious imitation of the gesture Mel had made when she emerged from the RV.
He was trying to unsee what she had seen.
To unthink what he already knew.
As they came into the gully Mel lengthened her stride and pushed past James. Not forcefully, but firmly.
“Whoa now!” Rick called out, but to little effect.
She pushed past him too, drawing the pistol at her hip and levelling the weapon at the wounded man, who lay shivering and sweating in the dirt before her.
“You fuckin’ animal,” she spat out at him.
He was delirious with pain or maybe shock.
He muttered, “No, no, don’t,” in a weak voice, but James didn’t think he was actually talking to Mel. He wasn’t talking to anyone.
Still, Mel Baker did pause in her rush towards whatever decision she had made.
She turned around to look at Tammy, who was watching her with wide eyes. More fascinated than frightened.
Mel let the gun fall, before checking it, perhaps to see if the safety was engaged. Satisfied, she walked the few steps over to Tammy.
“You were right,” she said. “I’m sorry. These men would have killed you and your children.”
She handed her the gun.
“I’ll do it, if you want. I used to be an officer of the law. But…”
Tammy cut her off.
“No. It’s for me to do.”
She took the small, black handgun and checked it over like she knew exactly what she was looking for.
She took a few steps to get around Mel and James, flicked off the safety, raised the gun and pulled the trigger without preamble.
The report was loud, but not as loud as James was expecting. He still jumped every time she fired.
Three times in all.
The man’s body arched up and he groaned when the first bullet struck him in the chest, but he absorbed the second and third bullets in stillness and silence.
Nobody said anything.
James was surprised to find he felt nothing.
He hadn’t really felt anything other than sense of creeping desolation since Mel had told him what she found in the RV.
A freezer full of human body parts.
Tiny human body parts.
The big fella they called Rick, led the way back to their camp. He was the quiet type, a lot like Tammy’s dad had been.
He didn’t say much while they were waiting on the other two to get back. The black English girl and the college boy, but Tammy wasn’t much fussed by that. She was used to men who were no good with words. And this guy wasn’t exactly like that anyhow. She got the feeling he would know exactly what needed to be said if the situation arose, but it wouldn’t be much and it wouldn’t be loud.
The college boy, James. He was a talker, she guessed. Or he would be, if the cat hadn’t got his tongue, chewed it good and then swallowed the damn thing.
Cats will do that.
He was cute too, even all dirty and sweaty like he was. He would scrub up nicely, she thought.
The English woman, Mel: she said she was a cop, or had been.
She didn’t look like no cop Tammy Kolchar had ever dealt with, but she supposed they did things different over there.
English cops wore those funny hats after all. And they carried little back billy-clubs instead of guns.
Nobody said much of anything on the way back to the camp. But it wasn’t a hard silence. It wasn’t like they wanted her to go away or anything. Not like those assholes back in Dryfork. Tammy thought these folks had suffered themselves a little shock, just like she had at the door to the McGuigan’s RV. It could put the world into a new light, something like that. Make you see things you could not see before.
Which was all a blessed relief as far as Tammy Kolchar was concerned, because if these folks would have her and her people, she reckoned she might have found her some guardian on the long trek west.
That’s where they were going, Rick said.
West.
33
The Battle of Silverton
Dale Juntii was right. The bikers returned in the dead man's hour. Silverton’s defenders stood ready to receive the enemy, but they stood tired, strung out and fearful. As the night fell it seemed all the terrors of a dark and dying world gathered close around. Jonas, assigned to the Seattle Gate, armed with his own pistol and a Remington bolt action rifle from the village armoury, was both exhausted and wired. He couldn’t stop yawning, and his bladder felt tight, even after pissing half a dozen times.
“Gotta go again,” he groused to the other watchers on the platform. Six men all up. Besides Jonas and Dale, the night’s watch consisted of Andy Eldridge, who ran the town’s major camping supply store. Alex Tewes, the realtor. Dan Meehan, retired master carpenter. And Mark Sangwin, a sales clerk at the arts and crafts shop. Indeed, Jonas was the only one without some sort of military or law enforcement background. Alex Tewes had gone into real estate after ten years as a facilities manager for the navy. Dan Meehan first picked up hammer and saw for the army engineering corps. And Sangwin and Eldridge had nineteen years between them as a military cop and a state trooper, respectively.
They all peered into the night, looking down the road to Seattle.
“Son, for a fella with such a big pair of cast iron balls, you got the littlest bladder on you,” Andy Eldridge chuckled.
“I have the biggest bladder, Andy,” Jonas lobbed back. “Everyone says so. The best bladder. And I keep it that way through regular care and maintenance.”
Somebody chuckled, but Jonas couldn’t tell who in the dark.
Nothing moved out there besides the tops of the trees in a light breeze. The bodies from the firefight had all been cleared away, but nobody had got around to rebuilding the herringbone blockade of old car bodies.
Too busy with all the panty-bunching psychodrama of Darren O’Shannassy’s tilt at Sheriff Muller.
“I’ll come with,” Dale said, shouldering his assault rifle.
“Hey, can you stop by Elaine’s and refill the coffee pot?” Alex Tewes asked.
The realtor passed Jonas a Thermos, shaking it to show that just a few drops remained.
“And maybe get some cookies, too,” Sangwin put in. “We should get something for pulling the graveyard shift.”
“Sure,” Jonas said. Just what he needed, empty carbs and sugary shit and even more coffee to piss up against a wall.
He climbed down from the firing platform to the use the toilets near the barbecue area where Muller and the shop owner had argued their cases the previous day.
“Watch out for the wire,” Dale warned.
“Huh?” Jonas grunted, but he caught himself before he walked into the trap.
Juntii and Dan Meehan had strung baling wire across Main Street, fixed tightly to one of the maple trees in the picnic area and a lampost outside of the S&L. It was just the right height to take the head off any motorcycle rider who came blasting through the gate. A few yards further on, the county engineers had dug a small trench across the road, and Jacques Loubert’s gardening crew had stretched a tarpaulin over the ditch, scattering dirt and leaves on top to disguise the pitfall.
Jonas blinked away the cobwebs in his mind. Might be that he really did need that coffee.
The two men pulled into Elaine Chang’s knick-knack store to top up the thermos. Elaine wasn’t there, and the knick-knacks had all been replaced by boxes of ammunition and medical supplies, but Natalie Bochenski and Melanie Drake were on hand to top up the coffee and cookie rations. Selectwoman Bochenski was sleeping in a fold out cot when Jonas and Dale arrived, meaning they were able to fill their order and get gone without a long and winding conversation, for which Jonas was grateful.
He was just stepping out of the picnic area’s toilet when it happened.
A sudden crack of gunfire from the forested hills that surrounded the town.
The ground rushed up to meet him, and he hit the sidewalk awkwardly, winding himself in the fall. Part of him thought he’d been shot. But he realised Dale had kicked out his legs and crashed tackled him to the ground, even before Jonas had realised they were taking fire.
It was just after 3.34 in the morning.
The sharp crackle and pop of small arms escalated to a bullet storm, centred on the defenders of the Seattle Gate. Streaks of orange and red tracer zipped in from the darkened slopes. Sparks burst where the bullets struck. Dale was already belly crawling towards cover, the concrete picnic table where Muller and O'Shaughnessy had given their speeches. Jonas followed him as quickly as he could. He risked a couple of furtive glances in the direction of the gate, looking back toward the men on the firing platform. He saw one body lying at the foot of the ladder they’d climbed yesterday to confront the bikers. He couldn’t tell who, in the dark. Another man was writhing around on the platform, screaming in pain. It sounded to Jonas like Dan Meehan. The animal pain of the man’s screams made him felt nauseous. Frightened. Meehan was a tough old bastard but he was screaming like a stuck hog.
"Gut shot, sounds like," Dale said. "Come on, follow me."
Jonas was struggling to breathe. Mostly from being tackled by Dale, but also from terror. The hills strobed with seemingly hundreds of muzzle flashes. He couldn't believe the number of guns firing at them. Couldn't believe that he hadn't been hit. How could anyone live through this shit?
Dale Juntii hadn't just lived through the opening onslaught, though: he seemed determined to crawl through the worst of it to lay his actual fucking hands on their attackers.
Jonas would have been paralysed by fear, had he not been even more frightened of Dale leaving him behind. The once-upon-a-time marine seemed to be the only one around there who knew what was happening and what he needed to do about it. Jonas struggled manfully to gain some sort of conscious control over his arms and legs, which seemed made of quivering jelly, and he forced himself to belly crawl along behind Juntii. Mostly he kept his face buried in the dirt. Occasionally a stray round sparked off the road surface nearby, or crashed into a shopfront, shattering glass. But the attackers concentrated their fire on the gate, chewing away at the improvised structure like some mad, crowd-sourced wood chipper.
Jonas heard shouts and return fire coming from the roofline all along Main Street. Muller had stationed rifleman on top of the businesses which offered the best cover and firing solutions. He put most of the local hunters up there, behind the thick stone crenellations atop the Farmers Mutual and the Savings and Loan. Another team worked behind sandbags on the roof of the county building. Some of them would be the same men Jonas had watched breaking down a deer carcass the previous morning. A few had night vision scopes, but he had no idea whether they’d be of any use.
Dale swore under his breath before scrambling up into a crouch, grabbing Jonas by the collar and dragging him violently away from the Gate.
"What the fuck, man?" Jonas protested. They had almost made it back, after all. But he didn’t protest too much.
Instead, as he gave into the animal need to just get the fuck away, as far away as possible, from the thing that was trying to kill him, he became aware of something that wasn't the sound of gunfire. It was a steady, growing thunder. A snarling, industrial rumble that he mistook for the massed engines of dozens, maybe hundreds of motorcycles. But it wasn't. Jonas knew it was something else when he heard something big crashing through the scattered remnants of the herringbone barricade outside the main gate. The metallic crunch took him back to the first day of the Emergency, and the hundreds of road accidents he’d seen back down in Seattle. But the deep, rumbling bass of a massively powerful engine was even more familiar. He knew it well from working at the Amazon warehouse. It was a truck. A big one.
Somebody had put the pedal to the metal and was driving directly at the main gates. His bowels let go in a liquid rush, and he groaned in disgust and self-loathing. Also in terror.
They were going to ram the gate.
It was almost as though imagining the possibility conjured up the reality. Jonas and Dale made it to the cover of the ancient Oregon White Oak which shaded the barbecue area, when the whole of the mountain seemed to heave and shudder underfoot.
Everything slowed down. The gate structure flexed. And exploded inwards, throwing off a lethal shower of splinters and metal shards. He saw bodies launched into space, limbs grasping at nothing. A weird, abstracted part of his mind thought calmly, ‘Hey, I know those guys.’
He even recognised one of the tumbling, flying defenders as Alex, the real estate guy. Jonas had been standing next to him just five minutes earlier. The weird, slow-mo effect suddenly snapped back to real time as flying debris smashed into the trunk of the oak they were sheltered behind. Jonas did not need Dale to pull him into cover this time. He cringed away, instinctively. But as he squeezed his eyes shut, an after-image burned on the back of his retinas. The front of a huge, powerful truck wedged into the shattered remains of the Seattle gate. The attackers, the bikers, whoever the fuck they were, had done something to it, engineered some form of armour or dozer blade to the front to create a sort of spearhead, a metal ram. Jonas could hear shattered timbers squealing and screaming as the driver of the vehicle crunched through the gears to throw it into reverse. The diesel engine wheezed and shrieked. Timbers groaned and cracked. And still the barrage of incoming fire swept in from the hillsides, except now a few lines of tracer had shifted their aim, moving away from suppressing the gate defenders, feeling through the dark, seeking out new targets. The snipers on rooftops. The fire teams on the upper floors of solid brick buildings. Isolated defenders like Jonas and Dale.
None of it stopped Juntii. Not for a second. He leaned into the trunk of the oak tree, and methodically serviced target after target. Jonas had no idea who he was shooting at. But to judge from his fixed, unsmiling expression, and the fierce concentration in his eyes, the small mechanical adjustments he made to his stance and aiming point, Dale obviously knew what he was doing.
Jonas didn't. He’d lost the rifle he'd been assigned earlier and had to scramble to draw his pistol from the holster at his hip.
He loosed off a couple of shots at the truck. It was the only thing he could see or think to shoot at. One round appeared to spark off the windshield and he stupidly wondered what sort of trucker equipped his rig with bullet-proof glass.
He risked a peek around the tree. Amidst the uproar of gunfire, explosions and shouting he could still hear the screaming of the diesel as it tried to free itself from the ruins of the gate. He saw then that whoever had fixed the gigantic steel arrowhead to the grill had also thought to weld some kind of shield in front of the driver's side window. It was probably just a steel barbecue plate, something to give the driver a little extra chance of surviving his suicide run at the gate. The truck engine howled, tyres smoked and finally the great beast freed itself with a lurch, bringing half the gate down with it. He thought he heard cheering.
