Darrel flushed. “Screw you! I was busy handling things in my area, making sure everyone was away from where the truck was going to hit and then helping with the wounded.”
“Well then you should've had someone else do that so you could coordinate everything for the entire town, like you should be doing.” Lenny spat off to one side. “Serves us right for letting the Mayor's idiot cousin lead our defenses. Talk about nepotism.”
“Nepotism?” Darrel practically shouted. “I stepped up to do the job because you were all too lazy or chicken to do it. And I've worked my tail off ever since, keeping this town safe.” He shoved a finger in Lenny's chest. “What have you done besides sit around pissing and moaning?”
The older man refused to back down. “It doesn't matter how hard you work when you suck at your job. Our lives are in your hands, and you're dropping the ball.”
The leader of Stanberry's defenses scowled. “Well you know what, Lenny? You suck as a doorstop, never mind any more useful jobs. So you're one to ta-”
Lenny finally seemed to have had enough, because even while Darrel was talking he abruptly jerked his fist back, as if winding up for the mother of all roundhouse punches.
Darrel, not seeming surprised by the sudden attack, snapped out his fist and popped the bigger man right on the nose. Lenny stumbled back, punch forgotten, his anger replaced by stunned bafflement.
“Did you just try to sucker punch me with the most telegraphed roundhouse in the world?” Darrel demanded. “You can't even lose your cool right.”
Lenny snarled and started forward again, fists bunched.
Then Darby was there, holding his arms out between the two men to hold them back. “Enough, both of you!” he snapped, snatching his megaphone back from Darrel. “We're in the middle of a crisis here. Darrel, go organize your fighters on the barricade. Lenny, if you want to be useful start helping clear debris and bringing in more stuff to fill in the holes.”
He turned back to the crowd and raised the bullhorn. “Same goes for all of you! The medical staff need supplies, we need to get to work rebuilding the barricades, we need to man the sentry posts keeping an eye out for further threats, and all the volunteers need to eat. There's plenty of things we need to do, and working together to get them done is more useful than standing around here ragging on people who are doing their best.”
Gen thought that was perfectly reasonable, but apparently the crowd disagreed.
Lenny had regained some of his belligerence and stepped forward again. “That's easy to say, but your voters here have things to discuss about how things are being done. If you ask me, Darrel has seriously dropped the ball throughout this entire mess, and you've dropped the ball by playing favorites and keeping him in charge. And now here we are, with people who hate our guts driving bombs into our defenses thanks to his big mouth.”
The crowd roared their agreement, more voices shouting to be heard.
Darrel, who'd strode over to the dozen or so fighters guarding the gaps in the barricade, whirled and started back towards the barrel-chested man, swearing a blue streak. “You want another fist to the face, Lenny? We're under attack and you're here rabble rousing!”
Darby's bullhorn suddenly screeched at max volume. “I said enough, everyone!” he boomed, drowning out the rumble of the crowd. “You want to have a town meeting right now, fine! Gather round, calm down and get yourselves organized, and let's do it.”
He turned and stormed towards the barricade, climbing up onto the walkway. From there he made his way to a sentry position that stuck out from the makeshift wall near the holes Jay's trucks had made; it provided an ideal platform to address the crowd below.
Darrel moved to stand beside him, although at the moment Gen wondered if the surly man's support was a help or a hindrance to his cousin.
Since they were on the platform and she was on the walkway a bit farther down, she had a pretty good view of them, at least in profile, as well as of the gathering crowd. Front row seats for the circus. Which was exactly what she considered this since there were wounded a stone's throw away, the barricade wasn't secure, and there might be another attack at any moment.
Darby seemed to be thinking the same thing, judging by the way he glared down at the crowd as he lifted the bullhorn. “All right, let's call this town meeting to order. Anything to finish up from last meeting's agenda?” There was a tense ripple of laughter at his slightly sarcastic tone. “No? All right then, let's move on to the first topic.”
“Why don't we start off by talking about the quarantine camp?” a woman's voice shouted. Gen tensed, afraid the discussion was going to turn against her friends and all the innocent refugees out there, but to her relief the woman continued. “With all of us staying inside town to protect ourselves from Zolos, Darrel's been pretty much our only spokesman from the town, and he's treated them like dirt!”
Darrel scowled. “Stop pretending this isn't personal, Debbie. Just because I didn't let you bring your friend in from the camps even though she's gone through her 21 days, a policy we all agreed on with the recent outbreak and Jay's war against the town, that doesn't mean I've been-”
“You expect us to believe you've been polite and agreeable with them?” another woman shouted. “You treat all of us like dirt, for no reason! Talking down to us, insulting us, saying the most awful things just because Darby lets you get away with it.”
“We need the camp on our side!” the first woman chimed in. “And not just because they're patrolling outside the barricade and protecting us from Jay. There's a lot of people out there in those tents, people who hate Jay as much as we do, and all they need to stay on our side is that we treat them with some respect and basic human decency.”
“Basic human decency as in giving them all our food?” a man at the front, Lenny as it turned out, called out. “You know what? I think we should talk about the camp too, but for the opposite reason! There are a lot of people out there, thousands, and they're all mouths to feed when we're struggling ourselves. And even if Darrel does treat them bad, that's not enough to explain how resentful they are of us in spite of everything we've done for them.”
Gen was so angry she spoke up before thinking about it. “What do you want to do?” she shouted down from the walkway. “Kick them all out to go starve or catch Zolos and die? In case you forgot, a lot of the food they're eating is food they got themselves from the Federal relief stockpile. Not to mention they scavenged a lot of the food the town is relying on to survive. ”
Lenny sneered up at her. “Some of us more than others . . . you've got plenty of meat on your bones for someone going through a disaster, just because Statton likes that junk in your trunk.”
She flinched as if slapped, wondering where that attack had even come from. Then her face flushed with embarrassment and renewed fury. “That has nothing to do with-”
“People!” Darby cut in. “This is a town meeting, not a barroom brawl. Let's try to discuss things calmly and reasonably, without petty squabbling or personal attacks.”
“Then you'd better put a muzzle on your out of control cousin!” a man at the back of the crowd shouted.
At Darby's side Darrel flushed. “Hey screw you, Barret! You think I don't recognize you back there?”
“See, this is exactly what I'm talking about!” Barret shouted back. “Not only is he an idiot who's going to get us all killed with his incompetence, but he's also an a-hole about it.”
Darrel's face darkened another shade. “You want to blame me? I've got a bunch of half-trained volunteers who mostly signed up at the beginning to make sure random people didn't wander into town and infect us! We don't have the training or resources to handle people who sneak around burning down houses in the night, attack us with improvised bombs, and can kill us all with Zolos if they get too close.”
“So you're saying you're not up to the task of defending us?” the woman who'd brought up the subject of the quarantine camp yelled, seeming happy with jumping in on this s
ubject.
Darby scowled and thumped the mic of his bullhorn, making everyone wince at the deafening screech. Silence grudgingly settled, and he stared around sternly. “Let me stress, as I repeatedly have, that the threat presented by Jay Corey and his thugs has been completely overblown. It's a few dozen people, maybe a dozen at most actually fighters, who are making a nuisance of themselves. They've got some tricks up their sleeves, sure, but in any real fight they're no threat.”
Gen frowned. She could appreciate that the man wanted to prevent a panic, but that claim flew in the face of what had been happening recently.
She wasn't the only one who seemed to have a problem with that. “Are you joking, he just blew up half our barricades!” another woman in the crowd shouted. There was a rumble of agreement from the people behind her.
“And he's got us completely pinned down, so the scavengers can't go out and get food!” Lenny added to another rumble of agreement.
The Mayor lifted his bullhorn. “People, people!” he boomed through it until he had some semblance of silence again. “Anything he's managed to do to us has been due to the element of surprise, or the fact that his group can operate autonomously without fear of Zolos. But in the end it's a few dozen thugs against hundreds of volunteer fighters in Stanberry, and a hundred and fifty in the quarantine camp.”
“And they have Zolos!” Mr. Gerson called. Considering he was one of the few in town who'd lost a loved one to the virus, it was no surprise he'd be quick to bring it up. “It just takes one to spread the disease to us all!”
This rumble of agreement was loudest of all. “Especially since he's already used it!” Barret called. “They've already killed hundreds of people in the quarantine camp.”
There was a far louder rumble of alarm from the crowd at that reminder.
“That's why we have the town locked down behind a barricade!” Darrel bellowed over the commotion. “Believe me, they won't get close enough to us to do anything!”
Darby rested a calming hand on his cousin's shoulder, although he nodded in agreement as he raised his bullhorn again. “Jay and his thugs have only got this far because they're willing to do things we didn't think they'd stoop to. But now that we're prepared, we can easily stop any-”
Darrel abruptly lurched sideways, clutched at the Mayor's shoulder as he reeled, then started to fall. It was only then that the distant crack of a rifle reached Gen's ears.
The leader of the town's defenses dropped off the barricade to the ground below with a sickening thump and began to twitch, blood spreading across the front of his shirt. Dead silence settled as everyone stared in shock, Darby looking down at his cousin with an almost baffled expression.
Then his expression twisted in horror and he moved to dive down behind the cover of the barricade, in case another bullet was coming his way.
Too late. Midair he jerked with a strangled grunt, curling up in pain as he fell off the barricade. A few men nearby caught him before he could hit, gently laying him on the ground beside the wall as he clutched his shoulder and screamed in pain.
Gen dropped to her stomach on the walkway, heart thundering in her ears; in her panic she didn't even think of trying to use her rifle to find and shoot whoever the sniper was. The man standing next to her dropped down as well, covering her as he tried to shield her with his body.
The crowd erupted with screams and scattered in every direction, fleeing in terror towards any sort of cover or just directly towards the safety of their homes. The racket made it impossible to hear whether any more gunshots sounded.
She spotted a knot of Darrel's men thundering up onto the walkway, ducking low behind the sandbags and other cover as they ran along it. A few of the patrol leaders shouted desperate orders, demanding to know if anyone had eyes on the sniper.
They were also shouting for everyone still sprawled on the walkway to either get up and fight or get out of the way. With a start Gen realized that meant her; she was only seconds away from either being trampled or holding up the fighters.
The man covering her seemed to realize the same thing. He hastily scrambled up to a crouch, offering her his hand.
Gen hesitated, then shook her head and gripped the side of the walkway instead, clumsily dropping down to the ground below. She felt like a coward, but whatever fantasies she'd had of fighting Jay's thugs had vanished when she saw Darrel and Darby go down.
She hoped they were okay, and that the enemy gunman didn't escape to hurt anyone else. But right now she wasn't interested in anything but getting home to Billy.
At least there she could be more confident that if enemies threatened them, she'd be able to find the courage to defend her son.
Chapter Eight
Too Far
“Fan out!” Nick shouted, motioning to his patrol. “If they've got more snipers hidden out here we need to find them before they can shoot anyone else!”
“What if they shoot us?” Chase muttered, uneasily gripping his rifle.
“Stick to cover, cover each other, and keep your eyes peeled for any movement,” Charlie snapped, holding his own rifle in steady hands. At his side Val nodded her agreement, although she was clutching Lila's shotgun with white knuckles.
“Any sniper that tries to shoot at us has to know he's going to get hunted down and shot,” Nick said. “But keep your guard up. And at this point I think it's safe to say shoot to kill.”
“Isn't that always the rule in a firefight?” Chet asked, tone more harsh than sarcastic.
“Only if they're shooting at us or present a clear threat. If they surrender we'll capture them and bring them back to camp.”
His patrol fanned out to a distance of ten feet apart, moving cautiously from cover to cover northwards from the southwest corner of Stanberry, out at a distance of three hundred yards from the barricade at the center of their line. Nick had a hard time seeing any snipers being farther out than that, unless they were expert marksmen with excellent scopes and large caliber rifles.
Then again, he was going on his own limited experience shooting with Ben's hunting rifle, as an amateur with only a decent scope and average eyesight. Hitting near the bullseye at a hundred yards hadn't been too challenging, but at a hundred and fifty he was at least a foot off, and at two hundred he was all over the place.
Hopefully most of Jay's people were equally inexperienced, and their only real sniper had been on the opposite side of town. He just hoped the search party Denny had swiftly gathered to pursue whoever had shot Darrel and Darby had some luck catching him.
Tense minutes passed as they searched around the spot where the truck bomb had struck the barricade on its southwest end, Nick gripping his gun tight and jumping at every rustle of noise or squirrel scurrying away out of the corner of his eye. He hoped he wasn't making a mistake, spreading his patrol out like this to search for enemies.
But he wasn't about to let any other snipers creep up and take potshots at Stanberry's sentries on the barricade. Gen might be up there right now; while she usually took shifts on the south wall, she'd sometimes taken shifts on the west wall when she knew he was patrolling the area.
He wasn't letting Jay or any of those other psychos get within a mile of her.
After what seemed like forever, they finally passed far enough from the hole in the barricade that Nick doubted even the best sniper could hit anyone. From there they relaxed a bit and picked up their pace, soon reaching the northwest edge of town. At that point they finally stopped at a distance where snipers wouldn't be in range to even target the corner of the barricade.
His patrol abandoned their line and began clumping up at the center, and he waved them into a huddle around him. “All right,” he said grimly. “One last sweep at five hundred yards. It's more risky, so let's all stick together for this one.”
Everyone nodded grimly and followed him as they headed out again.
As they walked Nick slung his rifle and lifted his radio. “Statton here. West side is clear at three hundred yards
.”
“Copy that,” Starr snapped. “Keep searching.”
The older man was obviously done with the conversation, but Nick wasn't. “What's going on?” he asked. “Do we have news?”
“Sure we do . . . bad, bad, and more bad. Denny's group found the sniper's nest two hundred or so yards from the east wall, but Jay had already abandoned it and gotten away from them.”
Nick frowned. That wasn't surprising, but it was still disappointing to hear; the sniper didn't deserve to get away after what he'd done. “You sure it was Jay?”
The leader of the camp's fighters hesitated. “Well no. Denny called in to our guys searching in vehicles and they swung around wide of his position. They spotted some gunman running away in the distance, but just before they could surround him a truck picked him up and tore off to safety. Our people didn't want to risk driving into a trap so they broke off the pursuit there.”
So once again Jay had gotten away with it. “What about Mayor Darby? Is he okay?”
“Alive,” Starr said gruffly. “Took a bullet to the shoulder, but Stanberry's doctors are patching him up and he should pull through. Darrel wasn't so lucky . . . he bled out a few minutes ago.”
It was a shame to hear that. Nick hadn't really liked the man, more of the opposite really, but if nothing else Darrel had seemed committed to protecting his town and his neighbors.
He hadn't deserved this.
Nick signed off, half surprised Jay hadn't chimed in to taunt them like he often did when they resorted to using the radio. Not that he was complaining as he focused on searching the area with his patrol.
“Glad to hear Darby's going to make it,” Chase said. “He never seemed to care about us aside from what we were doing for him and the town, but at least he genuinely seemed to be doing his best for everyone. I'm glad Jay whiffed on his first shot.”
They all stared at him; Chase had been part of the second team, who hadn't been with Nick and the others while they'd been listening to the chaos just after the shooting. He must've had his radio off.
Isolation | Book 4 | Holding On Page 12
