All Fall Down: The Chronicles of Altor, page 19
“Hold on. Maybe we’re not using the right tool for the job.”
“If you’re about to suggest we dynamite it, I don’t think that’s the solution,” Emmanuel said. “Though it is tempting.”
“We’ve got some old dynamite back at the prison, but that’s not what I’m thinking about.” Jack hurried to his truck and looked behind the driver’s seat. A moment later, he emerged with a ten-pound sledgehammer held high.
“If this doesn’t do it, we’ll have to regroup and try again. We’ve got an ARC welder at the prison, but no way to get power to it all the way out here.” He paused, then said, “Let’s just hope this works.”
Emmanuel and Nyx stood back away from the rock. Jack approached, spit on his hands, and raised the sledge high above his head. He brought it down against the rock in a vicious arc.
A tiny sliver of the rock flew off.
“Victory!” Jack said. Then he looked at Nyx and Emmanuel’s faces and said, “How much of this did you say you needed?”
“Ten pounds,” Nyx said. She jumped forward and picked up the tiny sliver. “And that’s maybe an ounce of it.”
“Then we better get to work,” Emmanuel said.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Ballad of Dickie Spahn
Dickie Spahn crept through the woods between New City and Covington.
It had been less than a year since he had run away from the Covington invaders. That day, he had been nothing so much as a young boy, confused and scared. He had pled for help, crying and shivering. Kane had made the snap decision to take Dickie in, even though it went against the policy of New City that he himself had put in place.
Much had changed since then, for both Dickie and the relationship between Covington and New City.
The Battle for Covington had been intense for the first twenty-four hours. The citizens who had remained behind fought as if they were defending the lives of those they loved, which they were. As June and Kane had predicted, though, it was too difficult to force a fight on a single front. There were too many ways into Covington, and too few citizens to properly defend them.
Even if the citizens of New City had stayed behind, it wouldn’t have made a real difference. There just would have been more corpses to dispose of.
That first day, Dickie’s parents had been killed and Dickie had run for New City. Not long after Dickie made his escape, half a dozen people saw that the invaders would win and headed the same way. Kane had once again decided to let those people in, but the chasing army of the invaders caught and killed them before they could get inside.
There had been an attempt at an uneasy peace for a few days after that. The invaders recognized that New City was easy to defend. They couldn’t get around the sides or back to attack and running up that hill against a fortified wall was suicide.
The man in charge of this militia, Dick Curtis, knew that unless they did something radical, his army would eventually meet the same end as the original citizens had.
His solution was to make two of the three ways into Covington impassable. To the north, he sent a team of men to blow up the big bridge. Then, as they retreated, they stopped and felled huge trees across the road. There would be no vehicles attacking from that direction.
To the south, there was no bridge to blow, but they did take some of the town’s heavy construction equipment and dug up the road for a long stretch, then once again felled trees across the road as they retreated toward town.
It wasn’t foolproof, but no one would be able to do what Curtis’s army had done and attack from three directions at once. Even so, he put a watch at the end of each road so he would know if anyone was snooping around the area.
There was still the issue of having New City in his backyard.
The gate that led from New City was rarely opened after the fall of Covington. The mechanism to both open and close it was slow. Kane didn’t want to show a vulnerability to the outside for even the few minutes it took to do that.
For the most part, everyone just stayed inside the wall. They were safe there. They had what they needed. They had gardens and a number of homes with solar power. It wasn’t life in the before time, but it was life and relative safety.
From time to time, someone wanted to go outside. Primarily to hunt, but Dickie had only vengeance on his mind. He wanted to kill those who had killed his family.
A strong rope ladder was tossed over the side on those occasions. It wasn’t ideal, and took a certain amount of skill to climb up and down, especially when carrying something heavy, but they managed.
The hunting parties generally consisted of eight people. Once they brought down a black bear or a mule deer, whatever presented itself first, four of the hunters spread on watch. Though it hadn’t happened, they were wary that the army that occupied Covington would send someone out in the direction of a gunshot. The other four hunters field-dressed the animal and then everyone packed their share to take back to New City.
What Dickie did was different. He went over the wall on the rope ladder all alone.
What kind of a burgeoning civilization lets a thirteen-year-old boy out on his own with a gun to hunt other humans? A civilization born after the Rage Wars, where the strong killed the weak and sometimes the weak sought slow vengeance on the strong.
The first time Dickie went over the wall, he lied and told the watch that he had Kane’s permission to go over. He didn’t return for two days, but when he finally did, Kane was waiting for him.
“Dickie, this isn’t how we do things.”
Dickie, who had hit his growth spurt, looked like a gangly teenager as he stood in front of the stout Kane. He did not, however, back down.
“They killed my family,” Dickie said simply. “Now I’m going to kill them.” He looked up at Kane. “If you won’t let me do that, then I’ll leave now, but I can’t stay behind the wall while they are right there.”
It was another dilemma for Kane and June. Should they kick out the murderous boy with vengeance in his heart? Should they try to control him? Or should they allow him to be a weapon against their enemies?
June had come to love Dickie as one of her own, so she was particularly torn. In the end, she did what millions of mothers—and mother stand-ins—had done for centuries. She let him go and prayed that he would safely return.
Those first few trips outside the wall, Dickie never took his rifle off his back. He had played in the woods between Covington and what was now New City since he was old enough to walk. He knew where the briars and brambles appeared to be impassable but really were not. He was aware of every hiding spot that would put him in a good position to observe without being seen and where the animal trails were that allowed him to move silently and leave very little sign.
Over time, he spread out his movements and found the spots where the Covington army set up watches over the alternate roads that led into town. They were smart. They didn’t stand in the obvious places. Instead, they had done what Dickie had done and found spots where they could see but not be seen.
Their mistake was that they focused all their attention forward, thinking that their rear flank was safe.
It was not.
There were three men standing guard. They had obviously been there often without any danger and they had become comfortable. Their rifles leaned against trees. They were all eating something out of a communal bag and drinking from a shared Thermos.
They were not alert.
Dickie had been taught to hunt by his father, but when they found more than one target in a glade, they hadn’t cared if the others sprang away at the first shot. In this case, Dickie cared.
He looked at the men through his binoculars, remembering the faces of those who had broken into his house. If any of these three had been responsible, he would be the first one down.
Dickie was disappointed to see that he didn’t recognize any of the three men. Now that he knew where they set up, he considered leaving them for another day. Maybe the men he most wanted to kill would be there then.
He sat for a long time in his little blind, contemplating.
Then Dickie aimed at the breast bone of the man in the middle. He let his breath out, pulled the trigger and a moment later, the man stumbled backward and fell over a log.
The rest of the scene didn’t play out like Dickie had imagined it. He had envisioned neatly picking the men off, 1, 2, 3.
Instead, his adrenaline got the best of him and his second shot was wild, taking the tip of the second man’s ear off. That man’s hand flew to the side of his head and he jumped over and behind the same log the first man had fallen over.
The third man chose to fight, which was a questionable decision against an unseen and unknown number of enemies. He grabbed his rifle and pointed it about twenty degrees to Dickie’s right.
Dickie, seeing that the man was going to stand there like a mannequin, took careful aim and knocked him over with a bullet through the sternum.
Dickie thought of waiting for the other man to poke his head over the log but decided against it. It was likely that he had called for reinforcements and would stay down and hidden until they arrived.
Dickie backed out of the blind and hurried back along an animal path to New City.
When the watch saw him coming, they dropped the rope over the side. Dickie scrambled up and over the wall.
Kane was waiting for him again. He grabbed him by the shoulders and looked him over from head to toe.
Dickie was a little out of breath from his sprint and climb but otherwise no worse for wear.
“Tell me what happened out there.”
“I killed two of them, missed the third.”
Kane laid his hand on Dickie’s shoulder, unsure of what to say. The boy had just gone hunting human beings and had succeeded. Did it matter that those humans were considered the enemy of New City?
It did.
Kane made a decision. “You’ll need to be careful out there now. You caught them by surprise, but from now on, they’ll be looking for you.”
Dickie nodded. He tried to look serious but couldn’t quite keep the smile off his face.
Kane hugged him tight, as though he might be able to squeeze that bloodlust, that thirst for revenge out of him. “I want you to stay inside the wall for a few days. Let things calm down.”
Dickie nodded as though he didn’t care, and perhaps at that moment, he didn’t.
A few hours later, the first real force from the city of Covington showed up at New City. As long as Kane and June had kept their people behind the wall, an uneasy truce might have been possible. That was gone now.
The people who now lived in Covington did not come to talk. They spread out across the tree line a hundred yards down the hill from the wall.
“Keep your heads down,” Kane said. “That’s the only way they can get at us.”
The guards along the wall ducked down, but one man said, “But I feel like I’m blind.”
“Better blind and alive,” Kane said.
For a time rifle fire echoed from below and bullets hit the wall. Standing on the other side, Kane could feel the vibrations but was unconcerned.
Then something else hit the wall and penetrated through. It passed right beside the man who had spoken, putting a hole through the sleeve of his jacket. The shot missed, but it knocked the man off balance. He pinwheeled his arms and fell backward thirty feet to impact the hard ground.
From below, a man’s voice came from a bullhorn.
“We’ve left you alone to live your lives. If you kill any more of our men, we will put you down. This is your only warning.”
It was, perhaps not the only warning, as another boom echoed from below and another bullet ripped right through the wall.
“Everybody get down!” Kane shouted.
Fifteen seconds later, the catwalk behind the top of the wall was clear and people scattered for cover.
June, Ric, and Dickie ran from town toward Kane and the wall.
Kane saw them coming and waved them back.
“Someone said they have something that can shoot through the wall.”
“They’ve got a .50 caliber gun down there,” Kane said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. “It can punch right through. We shouldn’t have stirred up the hornet’s nest.” He looked at Dickie and said, “They’ve got us outgunned. No more hunting trips.”
Dickie shrugged and said what he did before. “I’ll go live in the woods, then.”
Under normal circumstances, Kane would have let him go, get good and hungry or cold, then let him come back. These were anything but normal circumstances, though.
“I can’t let you do that, Dickie. If you hunt down more of them, they’ll come and attack us here.”
Dickie didn’t answer but just turned and walked away.
“What are we going to do?” June asked.
“Leave it to me,” Kane answered. “I’ll take care of it.”
There was a flurry of activity in New City over the next few days. Kane did everything he could to reinforce the wall, but he knew the only way to make sure it would stand against the .50 caliber gun was to be shot at. He preferred not to have that stress test.
There were a number of gasoline-powered cars and trucks in New City that would likely never be of use again. Kane ordered them scrapped and used the metal to reinforce the wall. He thought that the places where they had put two layers of big logs that were reinforced with steel would probably withstand the big bullets.
Kane made sure Dickie was as busy as possible, hoping to keep him inside the wall.
It didn’t work.
Four days after his initial foray into the woods, Dickie told Kane and June that he was leaving again, and that there was nothing they could do to stop him.
He grabbed his rifle, boxes of ammo, and a few other things that he stuffed into a backpack.
Kane walked him to the wall and told the watch to lower the ladder and let him go.
They did and without another word, Dickie scrambled over. At the bottom, he looked back up at Kane and said, “I’ll get a bunch of ‘em for you.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Kane mumbled to himself.
Dickie turned and started down the hill.
Kane sighted down the barrel of his rifle. He said a prayer asking for forgiveness and pulled the trigger.
The top of Dickie Spahn’s head flew off and a red mist spread through the air.
Kane turned to the young man on watch beside him and said, “Go retrieve his rifle and pack and bring it in. Leave the body.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Conversations with Janus:
Young Tom
The homeless population of the United States had swelled since the beginning of the Rage Wars. Those who were unhoused now outnumbered those who lay their heads down in the same place every night. Normal, everyday houses in previously safe towns were targets in the new world brought about by the Rage Wars. Those who stubbornly clung to the idea that the deed they possessed meant no one could take their home away from them typically found that not to be true. Many phases of ownership were passed from one to another at the receiving end of a pistol or rifle shot.
Those who left often did so because they had an idea that they had a safe spot. That had been the case for Hendu and April Wilkins and their family. They thought their cabin was so remote that they would be safe there. It was remote in that it’s-ten-miles-to-the-nearest-gas-station sort of way. Not nearly remote enough to be safe from the wandering bands of raiders.
April and Hendu were killed at that cabin. If their spirits hung around to see what happened after, they would have seen dozens more gun battles that led, more often than not, to new occupants of the cabin.
If those who clung to their homes were killed, and those who split for what they hoped would be safer spots were also killed, there was a third category. The transient homeless of the post-Rage Wars world.
They had once had a home but were either evicted by force or chose to leave on their own when they saw the handwriting on the wall. Now their home was a van, or an SUV, or a tent they carried on their back.
The challenge with motorized vehicles was that the gasoline, diesel, or electricity that was required to make them go was in scarce supply.
Many people drove them until they dropped, then carried what possessions they had on their back for as far as they could before setting up stakes.
Many of those were also killed by others who wanted what they carried. Those who were not, often banded together into the same type of tent cities that they had once hurried past as part of the urban blight they despised.
Circumstances changed for everyone.
For Tom Newell, who had been known as Young Tom to those in his circle of acquaintances, those circumstances appeared to be much improved. On this day, he looked much different than he had when Nyx had plucked him out of the filthy alley he had thought would be his home for the rest of his life. His clothes were clean, as were his body and hair. That was something that could not have been said about him for several years before entering Altor.
If it wasn’t for his weathered face and slightly rheumy eyes, he could have passed for a banker or insurance salesman in the before times.
When he lived on the streets, his hair hung down his back and over his face in dirty yellow tangles.
In Altor, a stylist had shown up at his door. After ninety minutes, Tom stared almost open-mouthed at his image in the mirror staring back at him. A rinse of some sort had removed the yellow and now his hair swooped back from his forehead in a way that said he was a person of some importance, which he had once been.
To Tom’s eye, he looked like that important person. A published poet. A person who attended cocktail parties and was invited to speak at ladies’ luncheons, regaling them with witty stories.
Not the person who became overwhelmed with alcohol and began a slow downward spiral that had eventually landed him in that stinking alley.
