All Fall Down: The Chronicles of Altor, page 24
“Look,” she said quietly, pointing a finger at the screen.
“That’s no jackrabbit, is it?” Nyx asked.
“No,” Harper said in a small voice. She touched a button on her headset and said, “Get me Steele.”
On her screen, a massive army slowly moved toward Dust City.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Scouting
Harve Rankin rode in the pickup truck at the lead of the long caravan of vehicles. From the passenger side, he pointed to a spar road that forked off to the south. “Take that.”
The driver signaled, then turned from the paved road on to the more primitive dirt road.
Harve had a paper map laid out in his lap. He tapped his walkie-talkie. “We should be about six miles from the target. We’ll set up camp here, do our scouting, then prepare the attack.”
Almost immediately, Victor Milken’s voice answered. “Yes, sir.”
They drove another mile until the dirt road became just dirt. Harve’s vehicle stopped and other trucks and SUVs pulled up alongside, eventually forming a semi-circle.
Harve stepped out of the truck and stretched his back, groaning. He went around to the horse trailer they had been towing. To his driver, he said, “Get Thunder out and walk him a bit. If he’s as sore as I am, he’ll need the exercise.”
Victor had been riding in the vehicle behind and approached Harve. “Anything unusual?”
Harve looked at the surrounding landscape, which looked just like the rest of what they had driven through over the previous hour and a half. “No. Just get us set up. I want to send out the scout teams. Normal plan, but this time we want to avoid the front gate. We don’t want them to know we’re coming. Send our three best scouts around the other directions.”
Victor walked away, carrying out Harve’s orders.
These were the hours when Harve felt essentially useless. He had made all the plans there were to make until he got his scouting report back. Camp wasn’t set up yet, so he couldn’t hide in his tent and read a book. He looked at his driver, who was walking Thunder in circles around the area.
“Saddle him up. I’ll do a little scouting on my own.” That wasn’t true, but he always felt better when he was riding, and a commander who sat on a log twiddling his thumbs wasn’t a good look for the troops.
He looked around and saw a small rise of perhaps two hundred feet a few miles behind him. As soon as Thunder was saddled, he mounted him and turned toward the hill.
His instincts had been correct. On Thunder, keeping a nice steady pace with the wind in his face, he felt better. The anxiety that had been building inside him eased.
Harve Rankin had owned a Ford dealership. A few years earlier, if someone had told him he would eventually lead a militia that swept across a great swath of America, killing and displacing people as they went, he would have laughed.
He was a peaceful man, except when he needed to be otherwise. In his judgement, this was the time when he needed to be someone else.
When the lights went out, he had formed his first small group of twelve and headed out to secure enough supplies. They were successful in their first raid and returned to his beautiful house that sat on ten acres of fertile land. He could envision living safely there with the occasional raid on other towns to supply what was needed.
Harve and his friends—they had not adopted the Last Survivor name yet—were not the only raiders who were out in those early days. A roving band had hit his house, stripping it clean and killing his wife and teenage son and daughter. He left his house the next day and vowed never to return.
Now, a year later, he was astride Thunder—the only part of his old life that he still had with him. He found a trail that wound to the top of the hill and within a few minutes was at the highest spot in the surrounding area.
Shielding his eyes against the late afternoon glare, he looked to the southwest. He sucked in his breath in surprise.
He had been told of Altor’s existence. He had no doubt it was real. But seeing it from five or six miles away finally gave him a sense of the immensity of the place. It was immediately evident that Keach had been right. There was no way he could attack that place with a thousand or even ten thousand men.
He fished his binoculars out of his saddlebag and scanned the horizon until he picked out what he knew was Dust City. He nodded to himself. It was much less impressive. It looked like nothing more than a thrown-together shanty town, especially sitting that close to the splendor of the domed city.
He kicked his heels lightly into Thunder’s ribs and the big horse picked its way back down the hill.
By the time Harve returned, they were starting to look like a thrown-together shanty town themselves. He dismounted, handed the reins to the man who always took care of Thunder, then headed for his tent. It wasn’t much, really, but he was the only person in the Last Survivors who had a tent of his own.
Beside his tent was the biggest one in the camp. That was where his twelve lieutenants stayed and where they had their command meetings. Harve pushed the canvas flap aside and stepped inside. There were cots with sleeping bags around the edge of the large tent and in the middle was a rectangular table. The interior was mostly empty, which was how it should be. If his lieutenants were all inside, then there was no one making sure everything got done.
Two of his best men—Victor Milken and Clem Daniels—were bent over a map.
“Scouts out?” Harve asked.
Milken nodded. He used a grease pencil and drew an arrow from their position to three different points on the map. “This is where they’re going. They’ll report back by sunset tomorrow.”
“Good. You break the men up into their normal divisions. Run them through some exercises, or give them a lecture or something. I don’t want them all sitting around overthinking this all night.” Harve turned toward the flap, then stopped and turned around. “Oh, and no booze tonight. Tell them they can all get roaring drunk as soon as we’re inside the walls of that place. Our guy who was inside said they had stills set up, so they should have plenty.”
“You got it, Harve,” Milken said.
Early on, when it became obvious they were going to have to grow larger to survive, Harve had considered using some sort of military titles. Making himself a colonel or even a general. He had abandoned the idea quickly, though. Now everyone just called him by his name.
He went to his own tent and found it was all set up for him. His sleeping bag was already unrolled on his cot, and the small table had food on it. The menu tonight once again included stew. When they were on the road, that was what was always on the menu. He looked forward to getting somewhere more permanent so they could have a little more variety.
He ate the stew, which wasn’t bad, as it came from Farleigh, where the cooks still had enough vegetables and seasonings to make it taste like something other than paste. He poured himself a glass of whiskey and lay down on his cot.
Before he had left Farleigh, he had visited their library and taken a few books with him. He was midway through Lucifer’s Hammer and found himself thinking about it even when he wasn’t reading it. He cracked the book open and read for an hour by the light of the gas lamp before nodding off.
The next day was busy, preparing for the attack. The hundreds of new recruits had to be dispersed to already existing units. Harve broke off a completely new unit, which he labeled MG. The new recruit that he put in charge said that must stand for Mostly Great.
Harve knew that it stood for meat grinder. They would have the honor of leading the frontal attack on the gate of Dust City.
The scouts began trickling back in with their reports around noon.
Harve didn’t like what they had to say.
Not only did they have a perimeter defense, but it was a fence that looked like it might be made of some high-tech material.
That would make their normal shock and awe attack more challenging. They wanted to attack from all sides at once, sending the city into a panic. If they were slowed, or worse, stopped by an electrified fence system, that strategy would fail outside the gate.
Victor sat with Harve and listened to the report. When the scout was dismissed, he said, “I can think of a way around it.”
Harve’s sour mood brightened. “How?”
“Back in Farleigh, there were thousands of pallets at the factories. We could send trucks back right now and start hauling as many of those pallets as we can. We might need to make a few trips to get as many as we need, but that could give us a good supply of wood. We could build strong, wide ladders that would be tall enough for us to go up and over the walls. We could still hit them from all sides at once.”
Harve thought about it, trying to picture it in his mind. He shook his head a little.
Vic leaned forward, miming his plan. “The men carrying the ladders could hold them over their heads. It will provide a little bit of cover like a shield. Then, as soon as they get them in place, the rest of the men could scramble behind them and go up and over. Same effect, just a slight delay.”
Harve was still not buying in, and Victor could see it.
Vic sat back and said, “Or, we could just send all the men to the front gate at the same time and hope that they aren’t able to kill us all before we get inside.”
Harve gave Victor a piercing look.
“I don’t like it, but while we try to come up with a better idea, send as many trucks back to Farleigh as you can. Take a lot of men, too. It’s possible that they’ve already returned to their town and might put up a tussle.”
Vic hurried out of the command tent while Harve stewed.
“We need to just leave,” Daniels said. “Find another place. This one’s gonna be too much for us.”
“Oh, sure,” Harve said. “I hadn’t thought of that.” He returned to the table and pointed at the map. “We’ve got so many options I hardly know which one to pick. So, you do it for me, Daniels. Which attractive town shall we invade instead?”
Daniels looked at Harve deadpan. “Listen, I know there aren’t a lot of other good options. But charging straight into the barrel of a loaded gun is the worst of all.”
It was obvious that Harve was about to lose his temper, but he took a deep breath and said, “I know this isn’t good. But it’s not that we don’t have any other good options, it’s that we don’t have any other options. There’s nowhere else that we have enough fuel and food to get to. Period.”
Daniels shrugged and shut up.
It took four hours for the trucks to return, each piled high with pallets, but even with the extra time, Harve hadn’t managed to come up with a better plan.
He chewed on what Daniels had said. Harve knew that the smartest thing would be to give up the whole attack and look for another target. The challenge was, there weren’t any other available targets, especially now that they had spent so much of their remaining fuel sending trucks back and forth to Farleigh.
The leader of that mission came in to give Harve a report. He was a burly man in his late forties. He was not one of Harve’s original lieutenants but had proven himself to be resourceful and had carried out a few of the dicier missions in the past.
“Any difficulties getting the pallets?” Harve asked.
“Easy as pie. Almost too easy, if you ask me. There were already a bunch of people back there, but they didn’t give us any trouble. Hell, they even helped us load the pallets up. Of course, we encouraged them a little first. Do you need me to make another run?”
“I hope to God not,” Harve said. “I don’t want to burn the fuel.” He looked at Victor. “This is your crazy plan. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
They walked to the spot where the pallets had been offloaded. It was an impressive haul. There were ten stacks of the pallets, each one towered taller than the tallest man.
“This will be plenty,” Victor said. “I’ll get my guys to work on them.”
“This is going to delay us as it is. How long will it take for you to get them built?”
“We’ll work through the night and have them ready tomorrow.”
Harve nodded and went back inside the tent. He had a growing feeling of unease about what they were facing but couldn’t see any alternate solutions.
He began to draw up a new battle plan that included driving the ladders—which would need to be at least ten feet tall—to the various attack spots.
He did his best to draw up a reasonable attack plan over the next few hours, then went to see how the ladders were coming along.
Harve was more impressed than he had expected to be by what he saw. They were, in a way, ladders, but they were each as wide as a pallet. That gave Harve hope that more than one man at a time could climb up them—hopefully three or four in order to get the proper effect.
Harve slapped Victor on the back and said, “I couldn’t see it before, but your damned crazy idea might work.” It was hard to tell if he was trying to convince Victor or himself. Both, probably.
Late that night, when most of the camp was asleep, Daniels started one of the pickups and told the perimeter guard that Harve had sent him back to Farleigh to retrieve something.
The guard waved him past. The red taillights were the last anyone in that camp ever saw of Clem Daniels.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The Massacre at Dust City
John Steele was in what felt to him like a series of endless meetings. This one was to discuss how many new people should be let into Dust City to replace those who had died in the attack months earlier. And what particular skill sets those people should have, and a thousand other details that went along with keeping an impromptu city running in the midst of an apocalyptic event. It wasn’t something they had wanted to dive into immediately after the loss of their friends, but now it was time.
Marshall Benton was going over a flow chart that showed the nutritional needs of adding another two hundred people to the city. Marshall liked his flow charts.
Adrian Pierce looked like he might be regretting living through the apocalypse if it meant more of these kinds of meetings.
A young man who often served as a runner around Dust City pushed through the door, out of breath.
Steele fixed him with a glare for bursting in.
“Sorry! The phones are down.”
“Yes, the phones are down,” Steele said with exasperation. “They’ve been down for more than a week.”
“We’re under attack!”
Steele, Marshall, and Pierce all jumped to their feet.
Marshall looked panicked. “We’re not even close to having the skins ready for the drone. If they can eliminate our drones again, we’ll be in trouble.” He turned to the runner and said, “Go find Lt. Forster and tell him to form up and be ready for an attack.”
The boy nodded and slammed the door shut.
“Bring up our drone cameras onscreen,” Steele said.
There was almost an overwhelming amount of visual information. The large screen on the wall was divided up into twelve sections. Most of them showed nothing except for dirt.
“Maximize drone seven,” Marshall said.
As that picture grew to take up most of the screen, Marshall gasped. “There’s a damned lot of them. We could be in trouble.”
Steele stepped forward and peered at the screen. “Yes, there’s a damned lot of them but look at them. They’re all just carrying guns. There are no tanks, no choppers, no missile launchers. It looks like a bunch of yahoos carrying automatic weapons.”
While Steele examined the big picture, Marshall kept an eye on the minimized drone feeds. “Bring up drone three, eight, and ten.”
Now the big screen was divided into four parts. There were men advancing on Dust City from all four directions.
“What the hell are they carrying?” Pierce asked, pointing to drone images eight and ten.
“I have no idea,” Steele admitted. Then the light dawned. “Wait. I think those are meant to be used to breach the wall.”
“That’s kind of like a medieval knight going up against a tank, isn’t it?” Marshall asked.
“Well, it’s sound in theory. Wood doesn’t conduct electricity, so even though we’ve got the wall electrified, they could potentially lean those things up against it and climb over.”
“But we’ll never let them get close to the wall to begin with,” Pierce said.
“I guess they don’t know that,” Steele said, shaking his head.
Marshall raised his voice slightly and said, “Janus, take back control of all drones.”
“Acknowledged. Eliminate threat?”
“Not yet,” Steele said. “Do not attack without word from us.”
“Acknowledged.”
“There are so many of them,” Marshall marveled. “Must be at least a thousand.”
“More,” Steele said. “But that’s all they’ve got. Sheer numbers. It’s like a suicide charge.”
HARVE RANKIN SAT ASTRIDE Thunder. He had dispatched his teams to the four points of the compass hours earlier. One by one, they checked in that they were ready.
Harve sat behind the front line. He would send the MG in first to get the lay of the land, then follow with his best fighters.
Harve put his walkie-talkie to his mouth and said, “Five minutes.”
His stomach was sour, and he felt like he needed to get down and find a bush somewhere. Thunder whinnied and stamped under him, sensing his nervousness. Harve leaned forward and laid his hand on the big roan’s neck. “Easy, easy. It’s all right.”
He checked his watch. It felt like it was time to move, but only thirty seconds had passed. He wanted to open the channel and say “Screw it! Just go now!” but he managed to stop himself.
No one would respond to a leader in the throes of a panic attack.
He decided he would stay put until he got the first reports back from the attackers on the perimeter. If they were able to breach the wall, then he would know everything was on track. Chaos would ensue and it would end up being just like every other battle they had been in.
