“Yeah,” Andrews muttered.
“Are we the biggest concentration of living folks you’ve seen?” Buchek asked.
“By far,” Andrews told him.
Buchek was silent for a moment. “I’d had no idea,” he said, and his voice was choked with emotion. “I mean, I’d always supposed millions of people had died, but I was sure that a whole lot more had survived ...”
“We’ve only reconnoitered a small part of the country,” Andrews said. “We haven’t been everywhere. We’ve been active for less than two years. Our mission was to remain isolated for ten years, then come out and survey what was left.” He glanced at the UAV feed for a moment, then went eyes out. “But yeah ... this is the biggest pocket of population we’ve ever seen.”
“It’s been hard for us, Captain. We’ve ... we’ve, uh, had to make some difficult choices. We had to turn our backs on a lot of people who came to us for help,” Buchek said. “You need to know, not one of those people are a saint. Especially me.”
“Judging isn’t in my orders,” Andrews said. “I’m here to assess and assist. That’s it.”
The rig continued on through the checkpoint. The men and women manning it stepped back as the huge machine pushed its way through. Glancing through the side port, Andrews could see they were taken aback by the rig’s mass. He manipulated the sidearm controller and maneuvered the rig through the opening they’d made, doubtless tearing away parts of the barricade in the process, but that was unavoidable. Once clear, he accelerated the vehicle up the road. At the fork Buchek had warned him about, he deviated to the right. Through the pine trees, he clearly saw the small one-lane bridge that crossed the river, and he mentally concurred that the structure couldn’t possibly have withstood the rig’s multiton weight.
As the rig progressed, more and more people began to appear. They emerged from the tree lines, from weathered, dilapidated houses, or even from tents faded from the elements. They stood and stared at the massive vehicle as it rolled up the road, turboshaft engines wailing, big tires rolling.
Finally, they came to the center of the community. Over a hundred people were gathered. They watched the rig slowly drift toward them and roll to a stop. Their expressions ranged from wonder to distrust. Almost all of them carried weapons. Among their numbers were children, clad in either distressed hand-me-down clothing or garments that had been locally sourced. Andrews and Leona looked out at them through the view ports as they parked the SCEV and set the brakes.
“I can’t believe this,” Leona said. Her voice was soft.
“Me either,” Andrews replied. “Uh ... Sarmajor?”
“I see it from back here on the screens, sir,” Mulligan answered.
“I’d like you to remain with the rig,” Andrews told him. “Eklund and I will accompany Mr. Buchek outside.”
“Both of you? What the hell for?” Mulligan asked.
“This is what we’ve been waiting for, Sarmajor. We can dispense with the procedures for the time being. We gotta give this one our best shot, and frankly, you might scare the hell out of these people.”
“See, there’s a reason I call you Big Ugly,” Buchek said.
Mulligan’s response was a dour, “Please call me Sam.”
Andrews and Leona both laughed at that. “Mulligan, we’re in a tight spot. You know how to fight with an SCEV better than anyone. No offense to you, Mr. Buchek, but if something’s going to blow up in our faces, it’ll be now. We’re all friendly, but I have to make contingency plans just in case.”
“You really think we’re going to attack you?” Buchek asked, astonishment plain in his voice.
“I don’t at all,” Andrews said, “but I need to stack the deck in my favor, since I’m pretty severely outnumbered.” He pointed at the gathering mass of people outside.
“I see your point, but you’re going about this the wrong way, Andrews,” Buchek said. “I brought you here because you said you can help us. We’re not so crazy and desperate that we’re willing to cut off our collective nose to spite our face.”
Andrews nodded. “I’m sure that’s true, and we’re about to find out. Lee, let’s go through the shutdown checklist.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
As the outer airlock door cycled open, Andrews admitted to himself he was not only excited, but also scared.
Both he and Leona were dressed in full battle rattle, not because he felt they needed it but because he wanted to deliver a precise message. That disciplined civilization still existed, even after the fires of thermonuclear war had savaged the entire globe. That remnants of the United States of America had held on, and at the end of day had found their way to the people he was about to meet. He’d made certain the US flag insignia on his shoulders were perfectly aligned on their Velcro-backed shoulder patches. It was Andrews’s hope the patch would send a subtle message: America had been fought to the brink of extinction, but it was back.
Just the same, he felt a curious fear at facing the people outside the rig. He did not expect a hero’s welcome, nor did he feel he would be stoned to death on sight. But that no one was going to buy what he was supposed to sell was a distinct possibility, and that worried him. He wouldn’t have much of a chance to promote Harmony’s mission if the audience didn’t believe he was exactly what he claimed to be. He would have to embody the very essence of a professional soldier in a new, potentially hostile environment full of death and distrust.
Buchek picked up the two bags of clothes and nodded to Andrews. He smiled slightly. “Hey, lighten up, Andrews. They’re gonna love you.”
“From your lips to God’s ear,” Andrews said, but by then the outer door had cycled open and Buchek was already descending down the ramp, carrying the plastic bags of clothing he and his daughter had shed. Andrews exchanged a glance with Leona, sighed, and followed him.
“Hey, Stan, nice threads,” a man said. “Going for the full-on military junta look?”
“You know it, Derek. And this uniform feels great,” Buchek said. “Maybe we’ll all get one!” A slight titter ran through the crowd, but it faded the second Andrews emerged, followed by Leona. Both held their rifles across their chests, and Andrews carried his cautiously. He stepped off the ramp and onto the soggy ground alongside the SCEV. He nodded and regarded the people facing him.
There were at least a hundred of them. More were coming, streaming toward the parked rig. They traveled in groups, he noticed—no one approached alone. They were mostly dressed in sturdy garments. Jeans, coveralls, utility clothing. Lots of denim and flannel shirts, and even more bearing camouflage patterns. Everyone wore a head covering of some sort, from battered baseball caps to oversized beanies. Work boots appeared to be the standard footwear, though some individuals did sport well-worn athletic shoes. Most of the men had beards, and he wouldn’t have been surprised if some of the women did, too. And weapons, lots of weapons. Not everyone was packing heat, but many were. Enough to make Andrews wonder if that was normal for the people of this community, or if they were showing up ready for a fight.
Buchek motioned to him. “Folks, I want you to meet some people. They say they can help us out, and their pitch was pretty convincing. By the way, so was this.” With that last, Buchek dropped one of the plastic bags and slapped his hand against the SCEV’s armored side.
“Yeah, no shit,” said a broad-shouldered man with a tremendous beard that was shot through with gray. An ugly scar wound its way around the right side of his face, emerging from beneath his beard and disappearing beneath the greasy-looking baseball cap he wore. He regarded Andrews with hard eyes. There was something about him which made Andrews think that in times of plenty, he was probably enormously fat.
“Trumbull, try hard not to stare down a man holding a fully automatic rifle,” Buchek said. “We need to keep this friendly.”
“I’m friendly,” the man said. “I’m always friendly.” He looked at Andrews and raised his left hand and fingered the scar on his face. “This is what friendly g
ot me.”
“What happened to the person who did that to you?” Andrews asked.
“Fertilizer,” the man Buchek had called Trumbull said.
Andrews nodded. “At least he made a meaningful contribution, right?”
“Only after raping my wife,” Trumbull said. “Military man, too. Just like you.” He nodded toward Andrews’s uniform.
Okay, that’s not the best icebreaker I’ve ever heard, Andrews thought.
“Trumbull, these people had nothing to do with that. They’re regular Army, not National Guard,” Buchek said.
“All the same to me, Stan,” Trumbull said, and now there was open hostility in his eyes.
An equally broad-shouldered black man stepped forward. He wore his hair extremely short, packed tight against his skull. Dressed in camouflage utility trousers and a green flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, he stopped next to Trumbull and looked over at him.
“Relax, man. Let’s at least hear what they got to say,” he said.
“Thought we already knew what they had to say,” Trumbull muttered.
“Let me clear that up for you,” Andrews said, cutting off Buchek as he was about to speak. “Excuse me, sir. We should get the introductions out of the way, unless you have something you need to interject ...?”
Buchek shook his head. “No. Go ahead, Captain.”
Andrews turned to the assemblage before him. “Good morning. I’m Captain Mike Andrews of Harmony Base, and beside me is First Lieutenant Leona Eklund. Together, we command the vehicle behind us. We’re posted at an underground installation located in western Kansas. Our mission is to use these vehicles to find pockets of civilization and conduct sustainment operations in an effort to rebuild the nation. We’re not in contact with any other military unit in the area, or anywhere else in the country, so any incidents you might have suffered through in the past are not related to us. That being said, we’re here to help you folks out.”
“People don’t help each other anymore,” said a woman holding the hand of a small boy. The boy’s face was dirty, and his hair was a mess. Both were almost painfully thin. “There’s not enough to go around, and if you have anything at all, other people just want to take it from you.”
“We don’t need anything you have,” Andrews said, “and we’ve got plenty to give.”
“So you’re from the government, is that it?” asked the black man next to Trumbull.
“From what’s left of it,” Leona said. “The centralized government in DC was wiped out, and any continuity sites went dark a long time ago.”
“So how did you guys survive?”
“Like I said, our installation’s underground, and it wasn’t directly targeted by the Russians,” Andrews said.
“So they did this? The Russians?” asked someone else. “What the hell for?”
Andrews shrugged. “We may never know. Something triggered it, but whether it was the US or someone else, we don’t have any idea.”
“Why did it take you so long to get to us?” the black man asked.
“Protocol was for the base to remain isolated for ten years. To let the worst effects of the war weaken, so that when we started our operations there was a better chance of us being able to accomplish the mission,” Andrew told him.
“So you just let millions of people die instead,” said the man Trumbull. “Sweet. Seen people die from radiation poisoning, Captain? The cancers, the bloody diarrhea, the teeth falling out?”
“I’ve not seen the direct effects personally, no,” Andrews admitted, “but it’s not really important that I have or haven’t. What is important is that we’re here now, and we can support you folks regularly going forward.”
“How many of you are there?” The question was asked by an older woman with gray hair that was pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a dark jacket with a mandarin collar and was one of the few people who wasn’t outwardly armed.
“With me now, or in Kansas?”
“Both,” the woman said.
“There are four crew with this vehicle now, and another will be joining us in around a month. They’ll also carry four crew. At Harmony Base, we have over six hundred people, a mixture of civilians and military.”
“Six hundred people isn’t enough to restart society,” the woman said. “If we’d been wiped out entirely, your base wouldn’t be able to accomplish a damned thing.”
“Not exactly true. We have fifteen thousand human embryos in cryogenic suspension, and tens of thousands more animal embryos, from all across the spectrum. Also thousands and thousands of seeds and pollinated plants,” Andrews said. “Eventually, we could reconstitute the biosphere. It might take a long, long time, but it could be done.”
“Tough to believe the government had that much foresight,” said the black man.
Andrews shrugged. “I guess the elected representatives of Kansas owed some folks favors.”
“What kind of support can you give us?” the gray-haired woman asked.
“Medical, material, and defensive support right off the bat,” Andrews said. “We have some items in our vehicle that we can present you with right away, and after that, we can start pulling supplies from several caches around the country in addition to stores provided from the base itself. We’re already supporting a small community of survivors near San Jose, but yours is substantially larger.”
“Have you found anyone else? Aside from that one you just mentioned?”
Andrews shook his head. “No. No one.”
People in the crowd looked around at each other. Some seemed satisfied by the answer. Others appeared saddened.
“So we really were wiped out,” said the black man softly.
“We haven’t mapped the entire country yet,” Leona said. “We’ve only been operational for a little less than two years. We started survey runs local to the base in Kansas, and we’ve been expanding outward ever since. This is the farthest we’ve gone so far, but there are other missions to the deep south and back east. But so far, it really does appear that the northwestern part of the country suffered substantially less damage.”
“Have you been to Chicago?” someone asked.
“What about Philly?” another shouted.
Andrews motioned to the SCEV. “We have records of every survey run that’s been filed, not just by my team, but all the others as well. We can issue a formal report to your leadership, and they can disseminate it further. I can tell you that Lieutenant Eklund and myself have been as far east as Des Moines, which was destroyed. There are missions to Chicago and Philadelphia—as a matter of fact, the Chicago mission should have already launched. But I won’t know anything about those runs until we return to Harmony.”
“What about San Francisco?” asked a thin-faced woman. Her eyes were bright, and her expression was pinched. That told Andrews she didn’t really want to know the answer, but had to ask it anyway.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. San Francisco was wiped out. There are some buildings still standing, but the city took at least two direct hits. As far as we can determine from the brief surveys we’ve conducted, there’s zero chance of anyone surviving the attack. I realize that’s not what you were hoping to hear, but ...” Andrews shrugged and let the sentence hang there.
“Perhaps you can tell us if there are any other communities like this in the area?” Leona asked. She looked at Buchek first, then turned to the crowd, opening it up further.
“There are a few, but we’re not in contact with them regularly,” Buchek said. “I think the largest we’ve ever heard of is in Idaho. There’s another one well east of Olympia up in Washington, and there are two other settlements east of us—Ironside was one, which had maybe fifty people, and then Beulah. A bit bigger, a couple of hundred people around the reservoir there. We’re on friendlier terms with them. But there are lots of people moving in and around the mountains, people we don’t have much contact with.”
“You allow settlers to come into Sherwood?” Andrews asked.
>
“On occasion, but it’s pretty rare. We have had people try to raid us, but that’s pretty intermittent,” Buchek said. “Last time was two, two and a half years ago. Things have been pretty peaceful lately.”
“Captain, we have to recover the drone soon.” Mulligan’s voice came over Andrews’s earphones. “You want us to do it here, or do you want us a relocate elsewhere? Over.”
Andrews looked over at Leona, and she nodded to him.
“Might as well do it here,” she said.
Andrews turned back to the SCEV and shot a thumbs-up toward the view ports. He could see Mulligan, sitting in the pilot’s seat. “Good to recover here, Sarmajor.” He turned back to the crowd. “Folks, we’re going to pull in that unmanned aerial vehicle you may have noticed buzzing around. Please don’t be alarmed.”
“You’ve been using that to spy on us, right?” Trumbull asked.
Andrews faced him directly. “We’ve been conducting reconnaissance of the area, Mr. Trumbull. Not surveillance.”
Trumbull looked at Buchek. “I’ll bet you told them it was okay, right? Like you told them it was fine to just drive on in?”
“Yeah, Trumbull. I did. Issues with that?”
Trumbull grumbled something and looked away, tugging on the bill of his cap.
The hatch covering the drone’s bay clanked open, and its landing pad rose into the air on a hydraulic ram. The drone buzzed in a moment later, and the crowd watched with rapt attention as it settled onto the pad, shut down, and folded up its rotor booms. The pad then descended into the bay, and the hatch closed over it.
“Wow, that was neat!” This came from a young girl standing next to a barrel-chested man who had a shotgun slung over one shoulder. He smiled down at her and put his hand on her head. The girl was all smiles, and Andrews grinned back at her.
“Excuse me.” The black man stepped forward a bit, and Andrews turned toward him. But he wasn’t looking at Andrews, his attention was focused on Leona. “Don’t mean to be rude, but ... are you a sister?”
Leona smiled under her helmet. “My father was a black man, yes. My mother was white.”
Earthfall (Book 2): Earthfall 2 [The Mission Continues] Page 21
