Fourth Quadrant: The Wyoming Chronicles: Book Two, page 16
“Yeah,” one of the privates told her. “South from I-80 on Wyo 217, then across Porter Creek.”
“Then get to it. Be sure your wheels are gassed up and you’ve got water and rations. We’ll try and get relief out there in a couple of days. And, hey, stay frosty. No one’s tried The Line that far east yet, but they’re going to get around to it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” one of the privates told her as they both saluted, turned and headed for the door.
At sight of Lauren, the first elbowed his friend, whispering, “You know who that is?”
“Breeze Tappan?” The other was giving Lauren a wide-eyed stare of wonder.
“Lauren Davis, you idiot.” The first grabbed his friend by the sleeve, almost jerking the private off his feet as he headed for the door.
Lauren caught herself, forcing icy control. Kept her hands from shaking. Managed to step up to where Lieutenant Barrow was scowling at the wall map.
“It’ll fade,” Barrow said softly. “They’ll forget as other events pile up.” She gave Lauren a sidelong appraisal. “What can I do for you, Ms. Davis?”
“Tell me about being a line rider.”
Barrow turned when a crackle came over the radio and a voice called, “FOB? This is Cramer out at OP Charlie Echo. We’ve got a guy on horseback here, says he’s a rancher from off Owl Canyon Road south of the line. He and his family want to bring sixty-five head of cattle across the The Line. Says we can have them if we’ll let him pass.”
Barrow stepped over to where Private Brenda Smith sat at the radio and took the mic. “Charlie Echo, this is FOB. Let them pass. Repeat, let them pass. Tell them they can keep their cattle and graze their way north on highway right-of-way until we can find them pasture.”
“Roger that. Let them pass.”
Barrow turned back to Lauren. “That’s the second time. Word’s getting around that Colorado ranchers can bring their stock north in return for safe passage. Beats having their cattle and horses shot or being shot themselves fighting to protect them. And the raiders are getting a lot better at killing ranchers and farmers before looting their places. Now what was I saying?”
“Line riders. Tell me what to do.” Lauren crossed her arms, adopting a defiant stance as Barrow—a woman in her thirties with dark-brown eyes and a much-too-delicate-looking face—studied her.
“Lauren,” her voice dropped, “you’ve done enough. The riot down at Buffalo Camp almost killed you. The captain would have my ass if I sent you out and anything happened to you.”
“Well, the captain tells me that you were in Afghanistan during the pullout. That you were recommended for a medal after you went into Kabul and brought a bunch of trapped Americans out from under the Taliban’s noses. Why didn’t you just go home to Lingle? Go back to work in the auto parts store with your family? Why’d you immediately enlist in the Guard?”
Barrow’s brown-eyed stare seemed to look right through to Lauren’s backbone. “I guess I couldn’t let it go.”
“Neither can I.”
At that moment a building roar could be heard, then the entire building shook as an airplane—something big and way too loud—thundered low over the roof.
Lauren couldn’t help herself, she ducked, shoulders hunched, waiting for the crash. But the sound just faded.
“What the hell?”
Lieutenant Barrow had barely flinched. “Governor Agar and Colonel Steadman. You know who Steadman is?”
“Yeah, he’s in command of the 153rd Airlift Wing. They fly Wyoming National Guard C-130s out of the Cheyenne airport. That was him?”
“Them. The colonel and Governor Agar,” Lieutenant Barrow told her as she reached back and rubbed the nape of her neck. “They’re taking another reconnaissance flight down south. After the firefight at the I-25 checkpoint last night, it’s probably even more important to know what’s happening down yonder. See if they’re regrouping to hit us again.”
Lauren had resumed her crossed-arm stance, trying to adopt an adamant expression. “You didn’t stay away, why should I?”
Barrow cracked a weary smile, turned, yelling, “Hey, Steve? What have you got?”
“OP Alpha X-Ray, LT. Battery’s dead on the Humvee. One of the yo-yos forgot to turn everything off. They need one of the portable jump-start chargers.”
“Roger that.” Barrow turned back to the map, pointing for Lauren’s benefit. “Here’s the layout. Starting at the Nebraska border is OP Alpha Alpha, then Alpha Bravo, Alpha Charlie, Alpha Delta and so on until you get here, at Thunder Basin Road, where the next OP is Bravo Alpha, Bravo Bravo, Bravo Delta, and on west to where the Charlie OPs start and run through the call signs all the way over to Delta, and so on.”
“Got it.”
“Each one is placed on a road, choke point, or elevation with an overlapping field of view with the next post.”
“I see.”
“Think you can find Alpha X-Ray? They’re here, south of Carpenter Reservoir on Dump Road.”
“Piece of cake. Where do I find a battery charger?”
“Stores. Take one of the portable units. It ought to strap on the back of your bike.”
“What about my boogie bag?”
“I’ll lock it up here until you get back.”
Lauren knocked off a salute. “Thanks, LT. Tell the guys I’m on the way.”
Walking out, Lauren stared up at the brown-hazed skies. She was a Line Rider. Maybe now, having a purpose, the nightmares would go away. The memories of Buffalo Camp would fade. All she needed to do was keep busy. Keep the ghosts at bay.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Another day, another mission. Lauren leaned through the curves, riding her bike toward Observation Post Charlie Able with cases of bottled water and MREs strapped to the back. Lauren’s thoughts were on Tyrell. His M4 hung from her left shoulder. His pistol was holstered on the top of her tank bag where all she had to do was yank it free with her left hand.
Down in the dead part of her heart—where horror festered—she’d convinced herself Tyrell was dead. It was her way of protecting herself. If she kept thinking that, maybe it wouldn’t be so hard when the news finally came.
If the news finally came.
Cell service was just as dead as ever. To the point that even the most die-hard phone-obsessed among them no longer bothered to pull their devices and try to scroll through text messages or email.
Her mind kept trying to imagine different possible futures. A future if he came home, and four or five if he didn’t. Which way would she go? What would she do without him? After the firefight at Buffalo Camp, she’d been trying to figure out who she was and her place in this new world. She still didn’t have a fricking clue.
Only one thing for certain: supporting the troops, making sure they had food and water, made her feel useful and needed. And that was something. Without which, there was nothing.
It also comforted her to talk with the men and women on The Line. Fragments of news from the West Coast continually filtered through the ranks. Snippets heard on shortwave radios, or from refugees, or Express Riders.
People were supposedly eating each other in the Sierras—just like the Donner Party in the 1800s—while the U.S. battled North Koreans or Chinese or Iranians. Maybe Russians, too. Nobody knew how much was true. But if any of it was, Tyrell was sure to be right in the middle of it.
Lauren’s eyes scanned the green pastures on either side of the barbed wire fences. Her skin prickled; a nervous energy added just a tickle of adrenaline to her muscles. The KTM’s front tire searched slightly on the gravel, and periodically the bike squirmed on the loose stuff. Behind her, her path was marked by a rooster tail of curling dust.
She still felt raw, like her insides had been clawed bloody. No matter how exhausted she was, she couldn’t sleep. Just as soon as she started to drift off, she was back in the truck with Mike and Hutch, fighting for her life. Each night she gunned those same people down. Watched their faces as bullets tore their bodies apart; so filled with terror and adrenaline that she had to get up. So, she wandered her room half of every night, listening to her heart pound.
Instinctively, she knew this craving for action stemmed from the emptiness that plagued her. Doctors at the hospital called it the “soldier’s curse”. PTSD. Survivor’s guilt.
Hutch was dead. Mike had lost a lung. But she was fine. Why? There was no one looking out for her. God was dead, just as dead as the people she’d shot down at the camp.
Cresting a rise, she saw six people walking along the roadside. Three men, middle-aged, two women, maybe in their thirties, and a teenage boy. Somehow they’d made it past the border guards and into Wyoming.
When they waved their hands and yelled at her to stop, Lauren downshifted and veered wide to go around them. Before she could speed up again, two men ran into the center of the road. One pulled a handgun from his waistband.
“Stop, or I’ll shoot you!”
She barely fixed an image of a red-bearded young man, clothes in rags, face hollow and filthy. His companion, taller, older, wore a torn suit coat, dirt-splotched dress shirt unbuttoned to the navel. His Dockers would have horrified a homeless bum.
Probably wouldn’t shoot her. Just trying to feed their family, but she had no way to know that for sure.
The old familiar tension tightened her chest; the pounding of her heart energizing her muscles. Would it work? She clamped on the brakes, slid the rear tire to a halt. In one fluid motion she slipped the M4 off her shoulder and brought it up to her cheek. Fire control flipped to semi-auto, she fired two rounds past the young guy’s right ear.
He shrieked, tossed the handgun, and outraced his companion to the fence. The wires bent and vibrated as he scrambled his way through the slicing barbs. The second man nearly tore what was left of his pants off his body as he, too, scaled the fence in clumsy panic. Then they were off, pounding their way down the grassy slope.
The women and teenager fell to the ground screaming, their hands over their heads.
Lauren gunned the bike and sailed past them.
On the other side of the hill, she passed a ranch house set back from the road. Lettering on the mailbox proclaimed Johnson Ranch. The hand-painted sign at the gate bluntly stated: Keep Out! Trespassers Will Be Shot! No Warning Will Be Given!
Ten minutes later, she pulled into OP Charlie Sierra and killed her engine. The post was located on a ridge top with a clear view across the drainage below and south to the next ridge, which lay in Colorado. Purple wildflowers dotted the green grass.
What passed for the OP consisted of two foxholes hammered down through the sandstone bedrock, each manned by four people. Two Humvees—with M249 5.56 machine guns mounted on top—were parked to either side with overlapping fields of fire that covered all approaches to the OP. At the thumping sound of her engine, the four men had risen from their foxhole and waved to her. Binoculars hung from the sergeant’s neck.
A woman sat atop the Humvee, scanning the valley below with a pair of binoculars.
“Who’re you?” a private with Edmond stenciled on his shirt asked.
“Lauren Davis. Captain Ragnovich sent me out. He said you were running out of food and water. I’m your resupply.”
“You’re the one from the fight at Buffalo Camp.” The second private—Fanta on his right pocket—was grinning. He was in his twenties, blond, with a lady-killer smile.
The kickstand snapped down under her heel, and Lauren stepped off. She started to unstrap the case of bottled water and MREs from the back.
“Captain wants you to save the bottles, so we can refill them,” she told them. “Won’t be any more after these are gone.”
“Got it,” the third man, Tully, replied. Like the others, a thin film of dirt coated his face and uniform.
Fanta trotted over and carried the crate of water and MREs to the foxhole.
While they chowed down and joked with each other, Lauren walked to the edge of the bluff and looked over the valley. Scattered Ponderosa pines whiskered the slopes to the west as the divide rose toward a summit that gave way to the Laramie Basin. With her bare eyes, she could just make out a glint in the distant trees. If she remembered the map in Ragnovich’s office, that would be OP Charlie Tango.
To the south, the next ridge gave way to yet another, stretching all the way to the high hogbacks that guarded the tree-dark slopes of the Medicine Bow Range with its snow-capped peaks. The same peaks she’d been looking at from the west when Butch Masterson had rudely interrupted her by calling, “Nice ass.”
It might have been a different lifetime.
Looking southeast, she could just see the high smokestack from the Rawhide Energy Plant in the distance. Governor Agar had sent a full company of WNG down to hold it no matter what. Essentially, Wyoming had annexed the electricity generating plant to keep the lights on in Cheyenne and Laramie.
“Any action?” she asked, stepping back from the edge to look down into the foxhole. Every man had a mouthful of food or was gulping water.
“Heard some shots from up north,” Fanta slurred around a mouthful of food. “Maybe ten minutes ago. Was that you?”
“Yeah, two guys jumped me near the turn off from Goose Creek Road.”
“You kill ’em?”
“No. Just scared ’em off.”
Odd how routine that sounded. Just an ordinary day at the office, dear. I shot at a man who pointed a pistol at me.
She gazed south again. Colorado was morphing into something alien and dangerous. Where it had just been another state—the place a person went when they needed to go to the big city—now it instilled terror. Somehow Colorado and its citizens had become the “enemy”.
“You hear how long we’re going to have to be out here?” the man with Muirhead stenciled on his pocket asked.
“No idea, sorry.”
“So, like, what’s your place in all this?”
“Just a delivery girl.” She made a dismissive gesture. “Like the rest of the line riders, I shuttle emergency supplies out to the OPs.”
“Good old Ragnovich,” Fanta started, “he’s...”
Something snapped and tore the air off to one side. A half second later the distant crack of a rifle sounded; Lauren hit the ground on her belly, scrambling head-first into the foxhole with the other soldiers.
“Shit,” Edmund muttered as he squirmed up to the rim of the berm and raised his binoculars to glass the south. “Vasquez? Where’d that come from?”
“Way out there. Other ridge, I think,” the woman who’d been sitting atop the Humvee answered, then she leaped off the vehicle and ran to dive into the other foxhole.
“Took the sound of the shot a half second to get here, didn’t it?” Tully asked.
Edmund said, “Yeah, ’bout that. Shooter must be around five hundred yards away.”
A bullet made ping-whup sound as it splattered on one of the Humvees. A fragment of the copper jacket danced across the trampled soil and bounced into the foxhole no more than a foot in front of Lauren’s nose.
Fanta picked it up, howled, and dropped it. “Fuck! That’s hot!”
Edmund leaned down and looked at it. “Thirty caliber. Wish I had a 300 Win Mag. With, like, a four-by-twenty scope on it. I could knock something down way out there.”
Another bullet blew over Lauren’s head, followed a half-second later by the rifle’s distant report.
“What are they doing?” Lauren asked.
“It’s suppressing fire. Supposed to keep us down while a party makes a try for the border. That, or sometimes they feel lucky, like they can tag one of us, or make us so miserable that we’ll change our minds and decide to just let them pass by.”
A bullet whacked dully into dirt just under the crest of the foxhole.
Tully muttered “fucking son of a bitch” under his breath, crawled up and glared. “You know what the hottest trade is out here? It’s a 6.5mm Creedmoor.”
“A what?” Lauren asked as another bullet cracked past in its supersonic path.
“Long-distance cartridge,” Vasquez told her. “Hell, I’d never heard of one either. The good news is that there’s no shortage of them among civvies. Lots of makers. Remington, Ruger, Savage, Winchester, you name it. And most folks put big scopes on ’em. Now, if we had a 6.5 Creedmoor or Weatherby we could take that evil little son of a bitch out.”
Edmund searched the hills through his binoculars. “There they are. Yellow ATV. About halfway between us and Charlie Tango.”
“All right,” Tully said. “Who’s going?”
“I am.” Vasquez leaped out of the foxhole and scurried for the closest Humvee, opened the door, and jumped inside.
Lauren heard her key the radio and call, “Charlie Tango, Charlie Tango. This is Charlie Sierra. We’ve got a shooter about five hundred yards at two-hundred-sixty-five degrees from our position, and a scooter trying to split the difference between us. Request a rebuke from Ma Deuce. Over.”
“Roger that. We’re on him. Clear.”
“Watch this, Ms. Davis,” Fanta called.
She lifted a hand to shade her eyes from the haze-choked sunlight. The yellow side-by-side ATV was racing north across the grass-filled valley.
Dirt erupted in a flurry just in front of the distant vehicle. The driver jacked his wheel, almost flipped the ATV as he made the turn on two wheels.
Lauren heard the popping of a far-off machine gun mixing with the barely audible putter of exhaust as the ATV raced for safety. Moments later, it climbed the ridge and disappeared.
“Gotta love a .50 caliber,” Tully said with envy. “Wish we had one.”
“Thought you wanted a 6.5 Creedmoor?” Lauren reminded.
“One of them, too,” Tully told her.
Another angry bullet tore overhead. Maybe as a rejoinder.
“Why do they keep trying?” Lauren asked.
“’Cause they’ve got nothing left,” Fanta replied. “Last refugee we captured said it’s mob rule down there. Nobody goes out after dark. Power’s off. Stores have all been looted. He said people are sitting in their houses in the dark starving.”
