Earthfall (Book 2): Earthfall 2 [The Mission Continues]

by Knight, Stephen

  “I’m good to go, Sarmajor. Really.”

  Mulligan smiled down at her and gave her shoulder a quick pat. “If that changes, you let us know.” He then withdrew and turned back to the display. “Okay, I see the entry point. Looks like they use the same one, and they’ve been here more than a few times.” He pointed at the drone’s feed, indicating several sets of tire tracks leading to and from the grave site and the collection of five-ton trucks.

  “They come down to pull parts from the trucks,” Leona said. “Look at that one on the far end ... the mirrors are gone. And one of the bed side rails.”

  “Those are drop-side beds, and the sides are pretty heavy,” Mulligan said. “Means we’re not talking about one or two guys, we’re talking a good dozen or so. And do I see footprints there?”

  Leona worked the touchpad on her station’s console. The real-time video camera zoomed in, and sure enough, through the grass and mud surrounding the trucks, they could clearly see a slew of footprints coming and going from where the survivor’s own vehicle was parked.

  “Yep, those are definitely quite a few people,” Andrews said excitedly.

  “Well, more than one, anyway,” Leona replied. “Unless the same guy spent a lot of time walking back and forth.”

  “Let’s follow those tracks, Lee.”

  The view pulled back again. The vehicle had entered and exited to the north and used Knott Road as the high-speed approach. It had left a trail of mud after making its initial exit, but after that, the trail went cold.

  “So north on Knott,” Andrews said. “Let’s fly that route for a bit, see what we can see.”

  “Roger that,” Leona said. She had a moving map open on one of her displays, and she touched it several times, dropping waypoints for the drone to fly. There was really nothing to see, especially not an old Army five-ton truck bumping along the road. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but Andrews reasoned that since the surrounding areas weren’t heavily built up, there was always a chance of catching something.

  And ten minutes later, they did. A set of tire tracks cut through the median around what appeared to be a mall or a shopping complex. Leona dutifully zoomed in on the tracks, and Andrews could see there was freshly churned mud visible on the pavement nearby, where the truck had left the grass and driven into the parking lot. The parking lot itself was full of old tents, RVs, motor homes, and other vehicles—a displacement camp, or something similar. There were no defenses erected around the area, but everything had been in place for a long, long time. There were more Red Cross tents and even a bus sporting the organization’s name and logo, as well as local police cruisers and trucks. A few ambulances were present as well. Andrews ordered the drone to orbit overhead as it scanned the area with its sensors. The millimeter wave radar was able to penetrate the tents and several of the vehicles. There was little worth nothing, aside from the presence of corpses aplenty. That this was the second relief station that had been erected in the city told the SCEV crew that the people of Bend, Oregon, had survived the initial onslaught of the war, and had been trying to help themselves. That their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful was not a surprise.

  “More tracks on the other side of the complex,” Mulligan said as the drone hovered over the site and executed a slow pirouette. “These look like they’re heading south. So if our friends were here on the same day they were at the burial site, then it indicates a southerly course of travel.”

  “Which means they likely came from the north,” Leona said. “I agree—higher elevations to the north and especially the northwest. It makes more sense, the terrain is more defensible.”

  “Against who?” KC asked. “No one left to fight.”

  “Well, not here maybe, but that’s relative,” Andrews told her. “We’re obviously not the only people to put rubber wheels on the ground, and maybe our friends here aren’t alone out there. Could be some competition for whatever resources are left.” He glanced at the drone’s remaining battery charge. It was just over sixty percent. “Lee, let’s send the drone northwest. Overfly ...” He tapped on his tablet and called up the area map. “Overfly Highway 20. It leads to a town called Sisters. If we don’t see anything there, continue along the highway for another ten miles, then bring the drone back to recharge. I’m sending you the course now.” With a tap of a soft key, he forwarded the course to Leona’s station. A second window opened up in the flight display she was looking at.

  “Got it.” She dragged the waypoint to Sisters and instructed the drone to fly alongside the highway at an altitude of one thousand five hundred feet above ground level. As the terrain began to rise, the drone might elevate into cloud cover but would be safe from any land-based obstacles. The drone received the new instructions and broke station. It accelerated up to sixty miles per hour and buzzed off, descending to maintain the new altitude. If for any reason it lost the link to the SCEV, it would elevate in an attempt to reacquire the signal up to an altitude of three thousand feet. If it wasn’t able to reconnect, it would execute the last commands it received and then return to the rig.

  As the drone rolled onto its new course and flew over the highway, the crew remained glued to the display. In general, the flight was unremarkable. The surrounding terrain was mostly green, as plant life was rebounding nicely. One surprise was a momentary glimpse of a bird of prey—perhaps a hawk—gliding between the Ponderosa pines several hundred feet below. The bird must’ve heard the drone’s approach, for it rolled into a steep bank and flew away.

  “So there’s enough game to support raptors,” Leona muttered.

  “There’s apparently enough to support people, so that’s not such a surprise,” Mulligan noted.

  “We can’t be sure they’re eating game, Sam.”

  Mulligan rolled his eyes. “For the love of God, woman—stop calling me that. And if these folks aren’t eating wild game yet, how the hell have they managed to live all this time? Who stores a couple of decades of food?”

  “Well, we did, Sarmajor,” KC offered.

  “Yes, Winters ... in a three-billion dollar-underground installation in western Kansas. I’m going out on a limb here, but I doubt there’s a similar facility out here in the Ochoco Mountains.”

  “We may yet be surprised, Sarmajor,” Andrews said.

  Mulligan grunted and leaned against a padded bulkhead, watching the display.

  The miles slowly incremented as the drone approached the town of Sister, located in the rising Ochoco Mountains. The mountains themselves weren’t as impressive as the Rockies or even the Cascades. They were more or less dotted with groves of Ponderosa and juniper trees, with substantive gaps between the copses. The vegetation covering them was brown and green in color; clearly, the mountains had seen some moisture, but perhaps less than the territory around Bend.

  The town of Sisters was a small establishment northwest of Bend, probably close enough to be considered a suburb of the city but far enough away that residents could forget that more established civilization was only thirty minutes away. It hadn’t survived the war any better than its larger neighbor. The pavement of the streets was cracked and dotted with vegetation that was sprouting through the openings, and several buildings had collapsed. Andrews wondered if that was from snow accumulation, be it from Mother Nature herself or the man-made nuclear variety. There was some indication that the local population had survived for some time after the war. Vehicles which would have been rendered inoperable had been removed from the roads. Some buildings showed signs of old repairs; boarded over windows, roofs that had a patchwork quality to them from the air, stumps where trees had been felled for their lumber and the heat it might be able to provide. There was an open area kitchen, where a large fire pit had once stood, surrounded by rotting picnic tables. Either a mudslide or localized flooding had taken out a small part of the town, and the earth had washed across the entire road that ran through the middle of the settlement.

  And in that dirt, which was still moi
st from rains which the team had yet to experience, were more tire tracks left by a heavy truck with dual rear wheels.

  “Yeah, we’re cookin’ with gas now,” Mulligan said.

  “What does that even mean?” Leona asked absently.

  “It means we’re onto something, LT,” Mulligan replied. He pushed away from the bulkhead and stepped closer to the flat-screen display, towering over Andrews as he crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t think there’s going to be anything left in that town to scavenge. They must’ve hit all the houses already, too. Looks like there was a bit of fight, though. See here?” Mulligan pointed to a section of buildings on the town’s eastern side. They were surrounded by all matter of debris—tires, fencing, mattresses, shipping crates, even an old, dilapidated fire engine. “That looks like the remains of a barricade. And those buildings definitely have bullet holes in them. And fragmentation damage, too. See the scoring on that one there?”

  “I see it,” Andrews said. “Doesn’t look military grade to me, though.”

  “Nah. Probably something like dynamite, or a home-brew explosive. Plenty lethal if you happened to be right next to one, though.”

  “What do you think happened, Sarmajor?” KC asked.

  Mulligan shrugged. “Dunno. Maybe the folks down in Bend got hungry and started looking for some relief. The small towns around here would have been the first places I hit, let me tell you.”

  “You think they murdered each other?”

  “I think that if I have sick and starving kids at home, I’d kill anyone who might have something that could help them,” Mulligan replied. “And I’d do it all day long.”

  Andrews paged through his tablet. “According to the last census, there were about twenty-five hundred people living here. Figure they lost ten to twenty percent in the first year, maybe more if the winter was especially tough.”

  “Which it was,” Mulligan said. He motioned to the display again. “This happened like maybe a few months after the bombs fell. That would be about when the food starting running out, and the weather began turning shitty for real. It happened a long time ago, folks. Our friends aren’t from here, they just pass through on their way to Bend.”

  “We’re approaching a decision point here,” Leona said. “Drone is almost at fifty percent. We’ll need to recover it soon.”

  “Keep paralleling the highway to the west,” Andrews said. “Let’s look a few miles up the road, and see what we can see. If there’s nothing there, we’ll recover the drone and relocate the rig to Sisters and resume operations from there. Everyone comfortable with that?”

  “Not a problem from an engineering perspective,” KC said.

  “Solidly,” Mulligan said.

  “Good to go on that,” Leona said. She was already reconfiguring the drone for the next phase of its flight, sending it on a course up the highway. The clouds were becoming even more sullen, and the wind was buffeting the small craft as it made its way to the northwest at a more leisurely forty-five miles per hour. Every now and then, it would enter the cloud layer which would cut off the video feed, but the radar continued to function unimpeded. Andrews looked at the air data readings. The drone was now taking on some mist, and the temperature was flatlined at fifty degrees. It was definitely getting cooler as the little octocopter climbed higher into the Ochocos.

  “How many miles out am I sending it?” Leona asked after a few minutes.

  “Can we get five?” Andrews asked.

  “Sure, but we’ll have to fly direct back to the rig. That means overflying Bend.”

  “That’s fine.”

  The little drone continued cruising along, dipping in and out of the cloud ceiling. Every now and then, a droplet of moisture would form on the video camera’s lens before it rolled off an instant later, swept away by the wind stream from the rotorwash. At five miles, Leona brought the drone into a hover.

  “Want a look around?” she asked.

  “Yeah, give us a turn.”

  The drone pirouetted in midair, turning to the left. As it did, a small paved road came into view, snaking past a hill. Something about it caught Andrews’s eye.

  “Hold it there, Lee,” he said. “I think I see something.” There was a line of cable and wire extending across the road, held in place by wooden posts. Flat pieces of plywood lay all before the wire. He wasn’t sure what those were for, but they had obviously been placed there intentionally. Their formation was too neat for it to be a random event, like wreckage from a house or building tumbling down from the mountains.

  “You sure as hell do,” Mulligan said. “That, folks, is a barricade. I think we’ve found our pals in the truck.”

  “Lee, got the coordinates for that road?” Andrews asked. He was already looking through the map on his tablet. It was another rural highway, this one leading up past an area called Black Butte.

  “Got ’em,” Leona said, and there was excitement in her voice. “I’m going to recall the drone now.”

  “Do that. In the meantime, let’s plot our axis of advance—I kind of want to get up into the high country, all of a sudden.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The route was fairly straightforward to plan, since they already had a good idea of the lay of the land between their points of departure and arrival. By the time they had recovered the drone, the cloud ceiling had dropped even further and the wind was picking up. If they hadn’t recalled the unit when they had, it would have automatically landed somewhere along its flight path and the crew would have had to drive over to retrieve it manually. As it happened, the drone had just lowered itself into its cradle and shut down before the first gust of powerful wind came rolling out of the mountains.

  “Losing that could have sucked,” Leona said as the drone automatically folded its rotor booms against its body after landing in the cradle. It began recharging as soon as it shut down via the charging pad that lined the landing bay’s floor. The door to the small bay closed with a distant clunk that was audible inside the rig.

  “Yeah, I’m thinking we’re definitely going to be needing it later, once the wind dies down.” Andrews looked around at Mulligan, Leona, and KC. “Okay, guys, here’s the mission brief. We leave here, drive there, and look around. That’s about it, aside from the possibility we might not be able to get through that barricade. If we can’t, or find a reasonable way around it, we’ll shut down nearby and wait for the weather to improve enough the launch the drone again. Questions?”

  “We’ll need to post lookouts if we’re going to be hanging out near potential hostiles,” Mulligan said. “Sure, we have enough warning systems to wake the dead if someone approaches the rig, but we’d be well served having someone up and ready at all times. Also, I’d like the minis put in autodefense mode. Safeties off and ready to fire.”

  “Good God, why?” Leona asked.

  “Again, potential hostiles,” Mulligan said. “We don’t get too many chances out here, and for all we know, they might have anti-armor weapons. An SCEV is plenty tough, but anything that can destroy a tank or an APC can destroy the rig as well.”

  “I’m not sure we need to worry about shooting people in the face, Mulligan,” Leona said.

  Mulligan frowned. “Jordello, is that you? What have you done with Lieutenant Eklund, the nice sensible girl who understands how things work?”

  Leona smiled and shook her head. “Ha-ha.”

  “I get where you’re going, Sarmajor,” Andrews said. “I agree a hundred percent. If we shut down before we know who we’re dealing with, we continue as if we’re in bandit country and do what we have to do in order to protect ourselves. Lee, KC, issues?”

  “Not really, no,” Leona said.

  “It makes sense to me, sir,” KC said. “I mean, the sarmajor’s been drilling that stuff into our heads for months now, right?”

  Mulligan turned to her. “Did you just try to give the teacher an apple?”

  KC looked at him oddly. “I ... I don’t know what that means ..
.?”

  Mulligan sighed and waved it away. “Before your time, kid. Never mind.” To Andrews: “What else, sir?”

  “Brief complete. I’ve got left seat. Mulligan, you’re co,” Andrews said as he pushed past the hulking sergeant major and headed for the cockpit. “Let’s roll, boys and girls.”

  ***

  The SCEV drove through the gray day for almost two hours, climbing higher and higher into the hills surrounding the decayed city of Bend, Oregon. Its big tires rolled without a care across weathered, cracked pavement and loose soil alike. Twice they had to backtrack to avoid obstacles—in one case, it was a fallen building, in the other a gigantic deadfall of rotting trees—but aside from those incidents the vehicle made good time. As they traveled, Leona reviewed the drone footage captured during its overflight of the town of Sisters. She determined the town would likely be safe enough to travel through, which meant they could stick to the more-or-less flat roadways and spare the crew a lot of bouncing around. That was a bit of a boon, since even the unmaintained roads were absolutely superior to picking their way through unfamiliar rising terrain.

  Not to mention a whole lot faster, Andrews thought.

  The trip through Sisters was uneventful, if not a touch eerie. Andrews maneuvered the rig carefully, choosing to hand-drive the vehicle instead of allowing the autopilot to see it through the course. He divided his attention between looking out the viewports and glancing at the radar returns on the MFD before him as he used the millimeter wave radar system as a backup nav aid while threading the hulking SCEV through the detritus that filled the town’s main street. From the corner of his eye, though, he observed Mulligan in quick snatches. The big man was quiet as he sat in the copilot’s seat, ostensibly doing his job. Andrews wondered if it was an act. The town of Sisters was quite similar in many respects to Scott City, that dusty Kansas town where Mulligan’s family had met their end.