Violent Peace: The War With China: Aftermath of Armageddon

by David Poyer

  If he was stranded out here for any length of time—say, from running out of gas and having to walk—he could easily absorb a really dangerous, even a fatal, dose. For the hundredth time he wished for some kind of dosimeter or counter. But aside from the staff at the evacuee camp, who’d worn badges, he hadn’t seen anything like that since leaving the ship.

  At long last, west of Butte, he spied a sign for a truck stop. He swung off at Ramsay. As he coasted in, though, a heavy stink of death, of sweetish rotten meat, met his nostrils. A miasma so massive and choking he could barely breathe.

  The truck stop building was locked, so he rolled on through the town, a small, rectilinear burg of neatly kept homes. Modest houses with attached garages, a nice mid-American town, but oddly lacking any stores or factories or other visible sign of economic activity.

  But no one was home. The short hairs rose on the back of his neck. He was remembering old films, old shows. Zombies and body snatchers, Stranger Things and The Postman and The Walking Dead. A weird combination of the frightening and the long-familiar. The absolute silence didn’t help, nor did the thick, cloying stench. No dogs barked as he chugged down the main street, keeping it under forty, made a right, and rolled past the high school. He spotted a black-and-yellow shelter sign, and pulled into the principal’s space. A sign taped to the inside of the front office window read LEFT FOR SISTER EVAC CITY ROCK SPRINGS WY and gave a phone number.

  The door with the shelter sign was closed but unlocked. He groped his way down concrete steps to the basement, but had to halt there. No light, but the dank nose-twitching smells of mildew and long-dead mice were at least a change from the rotten-meat stink up in the sunlight.

  Back in the saddle … rolling past a soccer field, its grass deserted, the nets hanging limply in the quiet sunlight. The only movement anywhere was that of the crows, who fluttered up from the pavement as he approached, and cackled noisily back down, cursing him out behind his back after he passed. They were eating what had at first looked like spilled grain on the road. But when he got closer he saw it was the carcass of some large animal, so flattened and smeared out he couldn’t even tell what it had been. Not human. At least, he didn’t think so.

  He’d expected to leave the rotting scent behind as he got out onto the highway again, but instead it grew even heavier. He pushed on a mile or two, suppressing his gag reflex. The odor kept thickening, until it seemed to be physically slowing the bike, the air itself denser and more resistant to any passage.

  Until he saw its source at last.

  They lay in rows, as if felled that way. Penned in wire enclosures, overlooked by elevated walkways. Grotesquely swollen, red-brown and white hides puffed out like balloons, mouths gaping open. Black clouds of flies milled above them, the massed buzzing audible even over the mutter of his engine as he puttered past. He couldn’t tell if they’d been shot, or gassed, or killed in some other way, but the cattle lay in windrows, hundreds of them, thousands, past a sign that proudly proclaimed MONTANA’S PREMIER CATTLE AUCTION HOUSE, open Tuesday with sales on Friday for feeder calf and yearling steers and heifers in the fall, October through December.

  Okay, so it had to be the truck stop. He bumped across the divider, U-turned, and headed back.

  The doors were shatterproof Lucite, but a heaved-with-a-grunt concrete block got him through a plate glass window overlooking the fuel pumps. The interior smelled dank, and the floor tiles were stained, as if something had leaked and dried and never been cleaned up. He used the toilet, though there was no water pressure to wash with, then browsed the sale aisle. Motor oil. Plastic jerricans that would fit in the saddlebags. Yeah, he needed to extend his range. Tire pump. Blue plastic tarp. Bungees. Patch kit. Maps. Flares. He didn’t want to be a looter, but he needed this stuff, and no one seemed to be around.

  He jimmied open the manager’s desk with a screwdriver, found a loaded stainless Ruger .38, and tucked it into his belt. Montana seemed more deserted than threatening, but still he felt more secure with the revolver’s weight dragging at his pants.

  The food aisle … somebody had plundered it before evacuating, but he found canned Vienna sausages and onion Pringles. He munched them sitting at the table in the little café, washing it down with a warm Pepsi. Shades of The Road … He tried the telephone on the wall, hoping to call Blair, but the line was dead. And of course his cell registered no bars.

  By now it was dark outside. He wished again for some way to measure the radiation he must be accumulating. The contamination here had been so severe the authorities had put down thousands of valuable cattle. But he couldn’t think of any detection method.

  The same protective measures you applied on shipboard, then. Keep to interior spaces. Close the doors. The building had been locked up, sealed against the fine radioactive dust to that extent, at least. A roll of duct tape and some cardboard patched the window he’d broken.

  He discovered a discreet little bunkroom in back that long-haul truckers must have rented by the night, before the big freights had gone full driverless. The bunk beds were sagging, obviously hard-used, but better than the concrete floor. He wedged towels under the door. Covered himself with a thick layer of on-sale sweatshirts. And lay there in the dark until it took him as well.

  * * *

  THE next day he rose at dawn, and shaved with bottled water. He deployed a hand pump from the store to fill his tank and two of the jerricans with gas from the buried fuel tanks. He crammed the Honda’s top case with quarts of oil and Slim Jims and Lance ToastChee and Little Debbie fig bars. He left two of the tissue-thin hundreds on the counter to pay for his purchases, though it seemed a meaningless gesture.

  The sun greeted him in long golden glints across the mountains, glowing off the dew-shining pavement as he hit sixty and then seventy. More confident now on the bike, pushing it harder.

  Butte looked as deserted and abandoned as Spokane had been. The strikes on the missile fields to the north must have smeared a deadly plume across some of the most productive grazing lands in the country. No doubt the cattle in his wake weren’t the only livestock to be put down. There’d be meatless days for a lot of Americans in the year to come. Maybe grainless days as well.

  But in every nuclear-disaster movie he’d ever seen, hadn’t food been scarce? The gaunt survivors reduced to an endless crawl across a desert, fighting over each scrap of sustenance, each mouthful of drinkable water?

  Maybe science fiction had forecast the future all too accurately.

  The spray-painted readings stayed steady for an hour, then started to rise again. Two hundred an hour. Two fifty. Not long after, an irregular structure poked up ahead. He rolled off the throttle, steered to center lane, and coasted in.

  The roadblock was makeshift, two trailers parked across the lanes. Large hand-lettered signs read ROUTE 90 CLOSED. DETOUR. Crooked arrows pointed to the right. But that turnoff was blocked as well. A few yards up the hill behind it, an American flag hung fluttering from a MECO boom truck. A dark bundle swayed gently in the breeze below it.

  As he rolled to a halt men spilled from a faded green mobile home parked on the berm. They were in civilian clothes, sheepskin coats and cowboy hats, and carried hunting rifles. Some had huge Western-style hoglegs in holsters strapped to their thighs. All wore flu masks and the red, white, and blue–blazoned armband of the Mobilized Militia.

  A bearded older man with wild white hair stepped out last. He held up a palm and slashed a finger across his throat, pointing to the bike. Dan kicked the stand down and cut the ignition. The throaty roar of eighteen hundred cubic centimeters died, leaving an echoing silence and a high keening in his ears.

  “Mornin’, amigo,” the old man said, ambling up. He scanned him up and down with a white phone-sized device, gaze lingering on his boots, while Dan waited. At last he snapped the counter off. “Warm, but not hot. ID, if you don’t mind. Sorry to tell ya, 90’s closed between here and Hardin. Heavy alpha contamination. Where we bound today?”

&n
bsp; “I’m headed cross-country.”

  “I see that. Nice old bike. Headed where?”

  “Basically, just east from the Seattle area. I’m due in Washington in a few days.”

  Two more men with shotguns came out of the mobile home and ranged themselves behind the trailer. They leaned against it, watching him, pulling their masks down, and lighting up what looked like hand-rolled smokes.

  “Goin’ in the wrong direction for Washington,” the old man observed mildly, examining his ID.

  “I mean Washington, DC.”

  “ID says Navy. That a Navy uniform you got on under there?”

  He was still in khakis, though the windbreaker was from the truck stop. “That’s right.”

  “Got orders? Registration for that there machine?”

  “I’m traveling under message orders. Nothing on paper I can show you, if that’s what you want. And the bike, I uh—bought it.” For the first time, he wondered if he should have asked for some kind of receipt. But it hadn’t seemed like anyone would be asking, in the aftermath of a nuclear laydown.

  “Bought it. Says here you’re a captain. Captain of what?”

  A younger man joined them, in a tan barn coat and an Army battle dress cap, though he was in jeans and boots. Actually Dan was still an admiral, though only for the duration, but there didn’t seem any point in explaining that. His ID, indeed, still carried him as an O-6. “Captain is a rank,” he said patiently. “Equivalent to an army colonel. I’m headed for DC for my next assignment, and looking for my daughter on the way. Last anyone saw of her, she was leaving Seattle with a load of medicine, headed east on 90. In a truck. A lot of motorcyclists were riding with her. I’m not sure why. Seen anything like that?”

  The old man tucked Dan’s ID into his own side pocket and gestured to the mobile home. “No sir, can’t say I have. We carrying today?”

  “Got a .38 in the saddlebag. I’d like my ID back?”

  “Actually, I ’spect you might could be a deserter,” the old man said mildly.

  “We hang deserters,” said the younger one, unzipping his coat and suddenly fast-drawing a .45 from a leather holster. He pointed it and thumbed the hammer back. “Let’s have the gun, mister. Carefully. Slow.”

  Suddenly the bundle hanging limply from the boom truck made sense. Close up, Dan could make out a boot hanging off one of its feet.

  He raised his hands and nodded to the saddlebag. “The one on the right. You can take it out. But I’m not a deserter. I’m Captain Daniel Lenson, US Navy, on compassionate leave, looking for my daughter. I’ve been fighting in the Pacific for the last four years. You sure none of your men have seen her? She was in a refrigerator truck with about thirty Berzerkers. Kind of hard to miss, I would think.”

  “Oh, we don’t miss much out here,” said the old man equably. He nodded to the mobile home again. “Lot’s changed since the war, Captain. I’m Colonel Rutter, Silverbow M&Ms. Come on, get down off that hog. Keep your hands where we can see ’em. We’ll get you checked out, see if you’re who you say you are.”

  “Better hope so,” the younger man said.

  “Take it slow, Derek,” the old man told the younger one. “Not everybody’s a antiwa or a looter. Captain here could be just who he allows to be.”

  Moving carefully, keeping his hands in sight, Dan dismounted and followed the old man. The “colonel.” He lurched a bit, unused to walking after the hours of riding. The younger man, Derek, fell in behind. From time to time the muzzle of the .45 dug into Dan’s back. “I hope you have that safety on,” he said over his shoulder. But the guy didn’t answer, just prodded him again, harder.

  For the first time it occurred to him that though the old man sounded country friendly, he might really be in shit city here.

  Inside a radio was tuned to the Patriot News. The announcer was blustering, bullying, pouring contempt on someone whose name Dan didn’t recognize. Through a window, he glimpsed a solar array sparkling in the sun behind the trailer. A woman sat at a notebook computer. Smoke from one of the hand-rolleds curled up from a tray. “Can we run this boy, please, Angela,” Rutter said, handing her Dan’s ID. “Says he’s on leave from the service.”

  Dan started over to the desk, curious what database they were accessing, but was steered away by Derek’s pincer-grip on his shoulder and pushed down onto a plastic chair that looked like it had come out of a waiting room. The younger man stood over him, still pointing the .45.

  “Y’like some coffee?” Rutter said, pouring himself a cup at a side table. “Guess we can spare a mug, for one of our fightin’ men.”

  “If he really is one,” Derek said, hovering like a concerned parent. Only he looked more threatening than concerned.

  Dan said, “Sure, I could use a cup. Black is fine.”

  It was hot and strong and for a moment the little cramped trailer seemed almost hospitable. Until he looked out the window again, and saw more clearly what was swinging in the wind behind the array. Traitors. Deserters. Looters—with his top case jammed to the brim with what he’d taken from the truck stop …

  “Fugitive from the Zone,” the old man said, letting himself down into a worn armchair opposite Dan. “Guy out there, I mean. He showed up on the list, we judged him, took the appropriate action. Now. You said, your daughter.”

  Dan cleared his throat and looked away from the window. “… Yeah. She’s a medical researcher. From Seattle. She rescued a production run of a new antiflu drug—”

  “For the Chinese flu?” Rutter said. “That’s hittin’ pretty hard some places, I hear. About time they come up with something for that.”

  “—For the Chinese flu. Yeah. She’s taking it east for distribution, I think. The pharma manager said she was being escorted by a local motorcycle gang. Only apparently she never arrived wherever she was going. According to FEMA, and Archipelago, and whoever else ought to know. I’m trying to find her, or find out what happened to her.”

  The woman at the computer murmured something inaudible. Rutter twisted in his chair, then turned back to Dan. “Sounds like you’re not where you’re supposed to be, Captain. This says you’re aboard a USS Savo Island, out of Norfolk, Virginia.”

  “Your database is way out of date. Savo left the East Coast before the war, and I left her about a year after the war started. I’m on leave now. I told you that.”

  The old man nodded understandingly. “But all we got is your word for it.”

  “Then contact the CNO’s office. The chief of naval operations. They know me and where I am. That’s who I’m reporting to in DC.” A suspicion flared. “Do you really have connectivity? Or is that a freestanding database?”

  He started to get up, but Derek moved menacingly to block him. “Don’t worry about any of that, Captain,” Rutter said. “We make our own minds up, out here.”

  One of the guys from outside pushed in through the door. He wasn’t quite as gray as Rutter, but wasn’t all that much younger. Actually, though he was more weathered, he looked to be about Dan’s age. He leaned his shotgun in a corner and came over, taking off his hat. Regarding Dan with a bemused gaze from above his mask.

  Dan nodded back, but the guy kept staring. Finally he said, “Lenson.”

  “Right. And you’re—?”

  “Simo Hardin.” The man pulled down his mask. “From Reynolds Ryan. You were my division officer. First Division.”

  “Holy smoke. Hardin,” Dan said, taking his hand as a rush of memory overwhelmed him.

  His very first ship. The old destroyer, worn even beyond her many years, laboring in the terrifying seas north of the Arctic Circle. Intercepting a submarine that shouldn’t have been there. And at last, torn apart and sinking, when her sick and fatigued captain had made one single wrong rudder order.

  It might have seemed coincidental, running into a member of that old crew here. But it happened often enough that when you ran into old shipmates, guys you’d served with or under or had commanded, it wasn’t a shock. He clea
red his throat. “That’s right. Hardin. You were from out West, weren’t you?”

  “From Wyoming, but I live here now. Got out as a first class, and took over my dad’s construction business. Until the war, anyway.” To Rutter, Hardin said, “We were on a tin can that went down after a carrier ran over her. Why’re you holding him, Colonel? This guy’s the real deal. A senior officer, now, I hear. Pretty much a hero.”

  “Also a looter, and maybe a deserter,” Derek sneered.

  “Not this guy,” Hardin told him. “He doesn’t have it in him. He was the fucking straightest arrow aboard. We all hated him, back then. But we respected him too. Whatever he tells you, you can count on. Saw his name in the news, over the years. He’s been everywhere. Shit, this guy’s got the Medal of Honor. You assholes should be kissing his feet.”

  “Thanks … Simo,” Dan said, a little overwhelmed. Remembering the moments of terror as Ryan had been torn apart, flaming, destroyed by her own, because of her deadly cargo.

  Remembering, too, what he’d always wanted to know from back then. Such as, who’d tried to kill him on an icy deck one black and freezing night. He’d always suspected Slick Lassard and his pot-smoking deck gang. And hadn’t Hardin been one of them?

  But maybe this wasn’t a good time to bring that up. “Yeah, great to see you. And thanks for your service. In the Navy, and, uh, the Mobilized Militia.”

  The woman at the computer murmured something else. Rutter squinted, face darkening under the white beard. He sighed heavily. Got up, hoisted his pants over his gut, and glanced toward the door. “Guess we don’t have enough to hold you on. Since Simo here vouches for you. I’ll put a pass notification up on our chat. If you hit another roadblock that might help.

  “See, we got our own network. When the government dies, citizens got to step up. Like it was in the old days. But I might have some bad news for you too.”

  Dan rose. “Bad news,” he repeated.

  Rutter looked away. “From some ways east of here. Angela here did a search for what you told her. They found a woman … midtwenties … a body, over near Chadron. Suspected murdered by a guy on a motorcycle. They’re still looking for him.”