She gulped and squeezed her eyes shut as Michaels patted her knee. Kat gripped his hand in a vice. “God, I’m sorry. I have no right to go to pieces. Not after… well, what you’ve gone through.”
Kat took a deep breath and dried her eyes. “How do you handle the pain? How do you keep it together?”
Michaels squinted. “What are you talking about? What pain?”
“Ah… You know, because of what happened to your family.”
He just stared blankly. Kat cried in frustration. “You know what I mean. When New York was destroyed. With Tina and the baby… I’m sorry.”
Michaels plastered on his same old, lopsided grin. “Nothing happened to New York. Lord, you really do need to get some sleep.”
Kat swooped both his hands into hers. “Don’t you remember Smith’s briefing? The map?”
“Oh, that. He said the meteorite struck near New York, not in it. It’s scary, sure, but thank God, Tina is fine. Don’t worry. We’ll get a ride out of here and back to the States when we get to Baghdad. The captain says it’s only another two or three hour road march in the morning. We’ll both be with our families soon. Just stay focused on the future, okay? So… coffee?” Michaels waved two individual packets of instant crap at her, not a hint of trouble on his face.
They spent a long time sitting in silence, while Kat avoided eye contact. The creepy moaning of the wind washing across the sand dunes didn’t help her mood.
Michaels stuck his head out of the turret and sucked in a gulp of chilly desert night air. “You know, that howling still soothes my nerves. Never gets old, even after six tours in the sandbox. Six years away from…” His hand shook and he spilt half his cold coffee. Michaels’s crazed grin only deepened.
“You know, Marco Polo called that sound ‘the wailing of evil spirits.’ Can you believe it? When I’m home, Tina plays a soundtrack of desert sounds so I can fall asleep. Course, she wears her own headphones…”
He laughed far too hard as his eyes misted over.
Kat laid a gentle hand on his weapon. “We need you tomorrow. There’s no telling what’s between us and Baghdad. You have to keep your shit together. Can we… can I, count on you?”
She was no psychologist, but if he had simply said yes, she would have taken his rifle away. Michaels turned his twitchy, tear-soaked eyes her way. She could barely hear his murmur over the humming fire control computer.
“I don’t know.”
Kat took her grip off his rifle and hugged him close. “That’s good enough. Just remember…”
She put her hands on his cheeks and twisted his face towards her. Kat’s fiery eyes dried his own instantly.
“You aren’t allowed to die unless you’re taking a ton of the bastards with you. We’ll kill one of them for every hair on her head!”
She wasn’t speaking to him, but Michaels nodded anyway.
Day Five
Paradise City
“Ah! What is that crap?”
Neil gagged and lurched away from the pot over Dixon’s campfire. He stumbled twenty feet upwind and leaned against the rickety shack the collective had loaned Dixon for his “experiments.” Even his brief exposure to the soul-churning white fumes made him dizzy. Neil raised his foot to kick a stack of car batteries on the grass but froze, leg in the air. They were all cracked open.
“Dixon, man, come on! You’re boiling battery acid? Cousin, if the stress is too much for you…”
“Not quite to boiling, but almost. I need some concentrated sulfuric acid.” Dixon wiped the sweat from his brow with a thick rubber glove, but kept his back to Neil.
Neil grunted. “Right, of course! Who doesn’t? Well, I got that other thing on your wackadoo bomb maker shopping list.”
Dixon snagged a six-foot pole and hefted the pot of bubbling acid out of the fire. He tenderly rested it on a cold brick stand and dropped his painter’s mask.
“Did you get more urine? I’m almost out.”
“If I didn’t already know you were crazy… I’ll tell you the same thing I told you the last time you asked. You can scoop it out of the latrine yourself. I’ve done my part. Rand thinks I’m as nutty as you are for spending an hour grinding up aluminum foil and filtering it through a mosquito net. This scheme better be worth the trouble.”
Neil handed over a large plastic tub. Dixon slid his mask and goggles back on before opening the container. He ran a wooden spoon through the fine grey powder for a brief moment and snapped the lid back.
“I think it’ll work. I guess that’s fine enough.”
“You guess? Glad to know I’m dealing with a pro here.”
Dixon turned his back again and picked up a bucket full of brown liquid. He poured the thick juice slowly over another bucket with a rag strapped to the top. Neil’s jaw dropped as a fine white powder piled up on the screen as the sludge drained.
“Is this what you’ve been doing with your time? What type of hillbilly cocaine are you whipping up?”
“Relax. It’s just potassium nitrate. Saltpeter, if you prefer.” Dixon jerked his thumb at a wheelbarrow loaded with reeking compost and fine wood ash. A couple empty bottles of rubbing alcohol rested on top.
“We just mix two parts saltpeter powder with one part concentrated sulfuric acid, heat the paste up in a glass jar until you see red vapors, collect the gas with another jar, let it cool and voila! Now we have nitric acid.”
Neil imitated Dixon’s snapping fingers and gazed around the tables full of glass and ceramic ware. “So you turned one acid into another. Am I supposed to faint now?”
Dixon shot him an exhausted wink. “Not just some acid. Nitric acid is the essential ingredient for all sorts of explosives. I now have the raw material to make high-velocity detonators, main charges, secondary’s… more stuff than I can even remember the formulas for.”
Dixon sat the aluminum powder down next to a shelf of fire-stained jars taped together. He went back to his saltpeter strainer. “Hmm, that’s not as many salt crystals as the last batch, but still too many. I’ll have to boil and strain this again to get rid of the impurities. I’m getting better though.”
“Glad you’re having fun.” Neil reached for one of the crimson jars, but thought better and just put his hands in his pockets.
“Look, I don’t mean to question your extensive experience with making the world a shittier place, but why are we doing this the hard way? In my young, idealist days, I remember reading something in the Anarchist’s Cookbook about making bombs from nail polish remover and hydrogen peroxide. I forget the exact mix ratio, but it seemed simple enough.”
“Oh, God. You mean acetone peroxide?”
“Yeah, exactly. Don’t they call it the Mother of Satan?”
“For good reason! Besides the manufacturing process being stupidly dangerous in the field, if you don’t keep that stuff frozen it’s about as stable as the Middle East. No thanks. I can think of easier ways to commit suicide.”
Dixon shed his gloves and wiped his dripping brow. “Hey, this wasn’t my idea. I wanted to make simple ammonium nitrate/fuel oil bombs, like all the cool insurgents use, but you guys refuse to part with any nitrogen-rich fertilizer. So I’m forced to improvise here.”
“You mean the pee? I can sort of wrap my mind around the idea, but why the hell do you need so much piss?”
Dixon downed a liter of water. He turned, unzipped and topped off another jar of yellowish liquid. “Because I have to boil it forever in order to extract the urea minerals. Lose about 90% of the urine that way, but do you have a better substitute for nitrate fertilizer? Sure, by adding antifreeze to the nitric and sulfuric acid I could have made more powerful field-expedient dynamite, but this urea-based stuff stores longer and isn’t so shock sensitive.”
Neil toyed with the tobacco and marijuana mix pouch in his pocket, but fought the urge to light up anywhere near Dixon’s chem lab. “Whatever you say, man. So… do we have something to show off to Rand or not? She’s been calling for a council meetin
g all day. Don’t know how much longer I can stonewall her. Did you know she used to work in the corporate world? Never got the details, but she was some type of project manager. Ever since we put her in charge, Rand’s been falling back on her old habits. It’s been nothing but ‘status reports’ and ‘executive meetings’ all day long. I swear she’ll have us working in cubicles by the end of the week.”
Dixon hummed a tune as he worked. “Really? I knew her hippy routine was an act. Way too over the top. Anyway, I’m almost done here. The first few batches were just small experiments. I only have one pound of finished urea-nitrate crystals. I needed the practice, but I’m now on a production run. Once the urine is boiled down, I’ll add the nitric acid, then strain the mix and let it dry. Then I’ll stir in your aluminum powder as a booster and we’re good to go. Simple as that. Should yield us twenty pounds of high-explosive crystals. From there, we can fill up pipe bombs, land mines, whatever the situation calls for. I even recall plans for a mortar mine that throws… don’t touch that!”
Neil jerked back from a wooden bowl of black powder drying in the sun.
“Sorry, but that’s gunpowder for my homemade blasting caps. Took four runs before I got the mixture pure enough. I’m almost out of Flower of Sulfur. That’s the hardest ingredient to come by. If it wasn’t for all these hippy gals here being so into homeopathic remedies, I wouldn’t even have that little stock of sulfur. I don’t want to start climbing into volcanoes to get more, like Cortez and his conquistadors had to, you know?”
Neil gazed around at Dixon’s elaborate safety precautions. “Whatever. Now, you promised this stuff was safe. Why do I get the feeling that if I fart in the wrong direction this whole place is gonna blow?”
“Oh, the final product is safe and stable. It’s just getting there in the first place that’s tricky. Don’t worry; this campsite is a pretty decent getup. You should have seen some of the ragtag, mom-and-pop bomb factories we raided in Afghanistan. My only real concern is all the nitric acid. I overestimated and made three times more than we need, which is a big problem. The stuff is toxic as hell, so I can’t dump it without poisoning our water supply. It’s also insanely combustible. We’ll have to post a guard here to keep kids and animals away until I can figure out what to do with this crap.”
Neil just stared off at the main commune two hundred yards upwind. At Dixon’s insistence, they happily stuck his mad scientist lab far from everyone else.
“Oh, shit. Here she comes.”
Rand and her usual entourage were on them in a flash. Dixon ignored the others and beamed at Rachel. “Hey, hon. You staying out of trouble?”
The girl had spent the first day in camp sulking and sobbing, but she’d rebounded quickly. So damn fast that he wasn’t sure if it was healthy. Rachel still cried herself to sleep at night, but every morning she awoke refreshed and determined. Meanwhile, Dixon spent the long and lonely dark spells in silent, but “manly” self-pity. Maybe she was on to something.
“Oh, they’re keeping me busy with plenty of homework.”
Rand gave the first pleasant laugh Dixon had ever heard from her. “She’s revolutionizing our way of life and she just calls it homework. Rachel has been designing all sorts of parabolic solar collectors. This young lady is a math-whiz. A natural engineer. She’s pumping out blueprints faster than we can build the prototypes!”
Dixon chuckled as Rachel blushed. She dug up some well of humility that he’d never seen before. “They’re just experiments from the international space station that I’m scaling up for our purposes. All I’m doing is calculating angles and stuff. I don’t know the first thing about welding. Heiko and his mechanics are the real miracle workers.”
“Just? My dear, these solar collectors are game changers. Not only can we now cook without starting a fire, but you’ve saved our greenhouses. With all the ash in the sky, I thought we’d have to abandon the fruits, but now we can focus enough extra sunlight to get a decent harvest. She even had a great idea to combine this new heat source with the absorption coolers in the RV’s. Once we hammer out the kinks—oh! Can you imagine having air conditioning and refrigerators again?”
Dixon puffed out his chest. “I said you wouldn’t regret letting us in. Imagine how many other folks with useful skills you keep turning away.”
Rand’s giddiness drained as she locked eyes with Dixon. “You’re half right. Finding your stepdaughter was a gift from Gaia herself, but it comes with a price. Namely, tolerating your nonsense. Since Neil keeps giving me the run around, I figured I’d come down here and get a status update myself.”
She sniffed at his ad-hoc bomb factory and the heavy ammonia stench of evaporating urine. “So have you at least finished some of your evil toys?”
“Mock all you want, but these fabulous things you’re accomplishing won’t matter if we can’t defend ourselves. The crystals will need to dry overnight, but in the morning I’ll start booby trapping every trail leading up here. I’ll get some field-expedient hand grenades ready as well. By tomorrow night, your neighborhood watch will have some real muscle to back up their bluffs.”
Dixon flashed Neil a curious glance. He just shook his head and mouthed “not now.” Dixon ignored him and charged ahead. “Like I said though, IED’s can only augment our defenses. They’re not enough by themselves. We still need brave men and women with weapons standing watch around the clock, at least if you ever want to sleep peacefully again.”
Rand threw up her hands. “Dixon, you’re a damn broken record. I agreed to let you indulge your silly ‘blow up the world’ fantasies as a security compromise. The whole point of all this is so that we don’t need guns, remember? Besides, where would we get weapons anyway?”
“The same way we get everything else. We trade with the neighbors. There must be hundreds of little towns and independent farmers within fifty miles.”
Rand jingled her jewel-encrusted head. “We’ve tried. Believe it or not, but I caved and had our traders ask around. Everyone laughed in their faces at the idea of swapping firearms and ammo for veggies or even alcohol.”
Dixon shed his rubber gloves and apron. “I’m not surprised. So many have died and it’s still early enough in this surreal apocalypse that there’s plenty of booze and food lying around. It’ll be a different story come winter though. That’s assuming we last so long.” He focused his attention on Rand’s silent entourage rather than her frowning lips.
“Look at everything we have!” Dixon flapped his hands at the windmill pressing flour by the barn. A diesel generator hummed over the squeals of kids playing in the distance.
“This place is Beverly Hills to the rioters out there, and there’s no police around to protect us.”
One of the councilmen spoke up. “That’s not true. Just yesterday I saw a pair of cops at a checkpoint outside of High Springs. Things might be getting back to normal.”
“Did you wonder why a town of a couple thousand people needs a checkpoint? Have you seen any patrol cars outside their little village? It’s dangerous to continue thinking of local cops as law enforcement. They’re now just a uniformed militia interested in protecting their families and community. Things get bad enough and I bet you they will venture out. To forage.”
Dixon met Rachel’s sad eyes. Her mother’s ghost smiled back. “That’s exactly what we should be doing. We have to go shopping before everything is picked cleaned. Loan me a truck and someone to watch my back, and I’ll salvage everything we need from Gainesville. Low risk, high payoff.”
Rand sneered even harder than before. “Looting, you mean. Don’t insult us with childish euphemisms.”
“It’s only stealing if the owner is coming back. I know you haven’t been out there, but do you think all the refugees are lying? Get it through your thick head. This is no hurricane or some disaster that’ll be cleaned up in a hurry. We survived a nuclear war, but what does that matter if we can’t survive the aftermath?”
Another councilman shook his head, but he d
idn’t seem able to convince even himself. “You don’t know what happened or how widespread it is. This is just wild speculation. No one knows what’s going on.”
Dixon took a deep breath and counted to ten. He made it to three. “No, we don’t know what’s up with the rest of the country, but I know too damn well that this area is a warzone. We tramped across fifty miles to get here. Gainesville is a dead city. A no man’s land filled with plenty of weapons and supplies lying around. We aren’t scavenging for fun, but survival. The only thing worse than needing a gun is being the only person around without one.”
Several council members turned their heads towards Rand. She narrowed her eyes and planted her feet.
“So that’s your grand plan? Scavenging, like a vulture. Just descend straight into a Mad Max society? Do you ever listen to yourself? You don’t sound any different than the people you’re always warning us about. We don’t need protection from your imaginary boogiemen. We need to watch out for your twisted ideas. Sure, no doubt there are a few thugs roaming around, but we’re well-hidden. Even if they found us, wouldn’t thieves be looking for easy prey? Three hundred people banding together is no easy target. No, this merciless, dog-eat-dog survival mentality is what destroyed the world in the first place. We can’t rebuild society on such shaky foundations.”
Dixon opened his mouth, but she towered over him on her soapbox. “When order emerges from the chaos, let our new world be built upon reason and compassion. Not death and destruction. Whoever attacked us failed to finish America off despite all their advanced weaponry. That only proves nothing can destroy us but ourselves…”
Rachel squeezed Dixon’s hand while he was still puzzling out why Rand’s face went ghost white. “Peter, tell me you still have that M16 around?”
Dixon spun on his heels just as every bird in the forest took off. The growing roar of diesel engines engulfed their paradise.
The Caliphate Invasion Page 12
