“Oh god, she is.” Becky’s eyes widened. “Lay back down. We’ll get you some water.” The little girl crawled back into the single-person bed. Becky threw the blankets back over her, and Haley kicked them off.
“I’m hot!”
Gwen crawled out of her bed. Mark grabbed his pants. “I’ll go grab Dr. Miller.” He slipped his legs through and latched the belt.
“In the middle of the night?”
“It’ll be light soon. I’ll take one of the horses and Trent.” Mark insisted on using horses every chance they had and saving the fuel for the trucks and diesel-hungry Humvees. Over twenty Humvees sat outside. Half needed some kind of repair, but the Red Stripes were working on getting them all functional.
She kept her voice quiet. “Thank you.”
He kissed her lips. “No need.” Softly, he closed the door and his footsteps croaked on the stairs.
Gwen went back over to Haley and knelt on the floor. She stroked the girl’s face. “It’ll be okay, sweetie.”
Haley gave her a weak smile. “Love you, Gwenna.”
The little girl’s precious words brought tears to her eyes. “Love you too.”
***
Dr. Miller finished checking Haley and wrapped his stethoscope around his neck. His lips flattened as he walked over to Becky and Gwen.
He sighed, his eyes pained beneath his wire-rimmed glasses. “I’m sorry, ladies. I’m afraid she has a case of strep throat.”
“Not the flu?” Gwen asked.
“No, the symptoms are similar to the flu, but with those white spots on her tonsils, I would bet it’s a bacterial infection over viral.
“You don’t have anything?”
“I don’t. I wish I did. I really do.” Dr. Miller’s brow furrowed as he picked up his black bag and set it on the end of the bed. With a practiced hand, he stuffed his stethoscope inside. “Anything I had we’ve used.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “I’ve asked repeatedly for more. Do you think I like to stand by while people suffer?”
Becky turned away.
“I’m sorry. We’re just worried.” Turning to Becky, Gwen said softer. “We’ll find something.”
Dr. Miller’s face eased. “All we can do is try and keep fluids in her and hope she fights. I’m not going to lie to you; this could be deadly.”
Becky’s face twisted between wanting to cry and spit at the same time. “This is too much. Why her?”
Dr. Miller shook his head. “I’m sorry. I really am. These next forty-eight hours are going to be critical.” Sighing, he continued. “I’ll come back tomorrow and check in on her and the others.”
Gwen squeezed Becky’s arm then shook Dr. Miller’s hand. “Thank you, doctor. Has anyone come down with anything in town?”
“No. Thankfully, everyone’s okay so far.”
“Good. I appreciate you tending our people.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way. Maybe another doctor or two, but I’m here to serve the community.”
Dr. Miller nodded to the two women and left the room. His steps faded out of the house. Becky stood watching Haley, her arms folded over her chest.
“I need a cigarette then I’m gonna find something that will help that girl.”
“You heard the doctor. There’s no medicine.”
“Somebody’s got to have something that will help.”
Gwen watched her sister, unable to console her. Becky walked over to Haley, wiped the hair from the little girl’s head, and walked out. They moved to the front porch.
Becky lit a cigarette and Gwen moved upwind from her. A thin coating of snowfall covered the ground outside. Earth and dead grass struggled to stay above the collecting whiteness.
Gwen wrapped her arms around her torso. “Where do you keep getting those?”
Her sister took a quick drag. “Trade with the bikers.”
“You should quit. Eventually they’re gonna run out anyway.”
“My daughter is lying in there sick, and you want to lecture me on smoking?” Becky shook her head in disgust.
Gwen snapped her mouth closed. She was used to looking out for her sister and always trying to correct her course in life. Sibling parenting was a by-product of divorced parents. They looked out for one another because there were no other options. It was a survival mechanism learned at a young age.
She stood for a minute taking in the Reynolds farm that had formed into a refugee campsite and militia base.
Becky spoke while inhaling. “I’ll head up towards Bonaparte and hit the villages until I find some antibiotics.” She blew smoke out her nose.
“No, it’s dangerous.”
Becky’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not sitting idly by while my daughter dies before my eyes.”
“I understand.”
Becky blew smoke out her nose. “Do you?”
“I love Haley too, and soon, I’ll have a baby.” She reached for her, and Becky turned away. “I’ll go.” She couldn’t sit by while her niece fell victim to the disease.
“Don’t be silly. You’re pregnant.”
“I’m pregnant, but not far enough along to be bedridden. You’re her mom. She needs you the most.”
Becky’s cig glowed a vibrant orange as she took a long and hard drag, tears welling in her eyes. “Fine.”
The two women embraced for a moment.
“Let me talk to Mark.”
***
He sat at her grandfather’s writing table in the parlor. “I don’t want you going.”
She raised her chin. Stop me. “This is my niece. I am the mayor of Hacklebarney and responsible for the community, which includes this camp. I will be negotiating with other towns and villages. I’m the only person who should be doing this.”
He regarded the papers on his desk and rearranged them. “I’m not going to lie. We need more winter clothes. I think that would mitigate some of the illnesses.”
“Exactly. Who better to send than the mayor of a nearby town?”
He folded his arms over his broad chest, closing off from her. His blue eyes were darker today, a stormy sea.
“You’re pregnant. Let’s send Sheriff Donnellson or somebody else.”
She let her eyebrows lift on her face. “You want me to send that moron to negotiate and acquire vital supplies? Prolly come back with a supply of chewing tobacco and cigars instead of meds.”
Mark licked his lips, shoving his tongue into his lip at the mention of tobacco. His beard had grown even longer now. If he didn’t have a mustache, she might have thought him a derelict Amish man.
He stood and made his way over to her. With a gentle hand, he took hers. His eyes searched hers for understanding. “I can’t let anything happen to you. You know that.”
She turned away from him before meeting his eyes. “And I won’t let anything happen to that little girl upstairs.”
He released her and reached for his beard and massaged it, running his hand down his mustache into his beard. He considered her as he thought.
A sparkle of amusement filled his eyes. “I’d be a fool to step in the way of your capacity for good.” He waved a hand as if he didn’t want a fight. “You don’t need my permission, but Jackson and the dead are still out there, so you can’t go alone.”
She smiled. “I’m sure I’ll have plenty of takers.”
He laughed. “You always do.”
ALVARADO
La Crescent, MN
Her Marines were a cluster of bodies huddled together in the night. The only difference between them and the dead was they breathed and would eventually tire out and succumb to the elements. If they did, the dead would fall upon them and add more unwilling recruits to their ranks.
In the freezing mass, Marines coughed and hacked as they struggled to keep going, weighed down by whatever they could carry with them, tripped up by uneven ice and snow.
She couldn’t feel her feet as she half-jogged with the rest. Her hands had long since gone numb, and her chest burnt with fire from
the icy air. When the wind moaned through the trees along the unplowed interstate, she would glance in anticipation at the Marines behind her.
They’d been forced to leave Marines behind. It was a tough pill to swallow. In modern war, they would not rest until the missing were recovered. But this wasn’t a regular modern war with air support. Shit, they had almost no support. Only a thin line of living breathing people standing between the nation and the dead. This was a war of extinction.
She was confident that any pockets of surviving Marines would evade and fight their way back to the rally point. She’d always known that falling back was a very real possibility and planned accordingly. But she never thought they would be forced out of the outpost after such a soft fight.
The glow of flashlights reflected off the snow ahead of her. Shadows of naked trees with brittle crystalized branches loomed over the fleeing Marines. She heard a man fall behind her and she stopped. Spinning, she raised her weapon a fraction in case she needed to shoot down any dead that followed. None were close enough for concern, but they moaned in pursuit.
She grabbed the Marine by his arm and yanked him back to his feet.
“Thank you,” Wess breathed.
She peered around him, taking in all their surroundings as best she could. “Keep moving.”
Up ahead, she saw flashlights wavering around a short blackened building as the Marines entered their first rally point. The building lit up as they men filed into La Crescent Elementary School.
Marines spread out inside. Major Alvarado pushed Wess along ahead of her, and she was the last Marine inside the building. Bundled fresh Marines closed the doors with a bang.
Men collapsed on the tiled ground; their exhausted panting fogged the air. As quickly as they barged in, they started to spread out, manning barricaded windows.
“Major?” said a short lance corporal. He wasn’t exhausted and his eyes were unsure of what was happening. Lance Corporal Murphy? Her mind was clogged and slow as if her brain had succumbed to the arctic elements in their retreat.
She rubbed her temple for a moment. “Yes, Lance Corporal?”
“Lance Corporal Murphy, ma’am.”
The lack of blistering wind and cold air allowed her to catch her breath. It wasn’t that much warmer than the outside, but the lack of wind was a divine intervention.
“The outpost’s been overrun. This is our forward operating base now. Where are your backup comms?”
“Backup comms?” he said. His eyes darted around the room covered with finger paintings and posters featuring talking books.
“This facility was supposed to be outfitted with a backup radio in case we had to retreat from Barron Island. Captain?”
Butler shook his head shortly. “None were delivered, ma’am.”
“Goddammit. If I had an ounce of assistance from our command, we could actually put up a coordinated effort.” She sighed. “Get these doors barricaded. No one goes in or out. Everyone stays quiet.”
“What about La Crescent?” Butler asked.
“They’ve known the drill this entire time. Elevation and silence. In the morning, we will send a unit to the homestead, and let them know that we’ve been overrun. Butler and Wess with me. Sergeant Riddle.” Marines scrambled around the bottom floor.
A thickset sergeant made himself front and center.
“Get these Marines up to the top floor, then I need a headcount. No one fires until I give the command.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. He tapped a Marine on the shoulder and pointed him down the hall, moving the entire time.
She jogged the stairs to the top floor. A long corridor was lined with maroon lockers. Rubbing her hands together, she warmed them with her breath. Marine boots clobbered the steps as they raced behind her. Broken down into rifle squads, they quietly entered classrooms, taking firing positions at windows.
Tailing a squad, she followed them inside a classroom. Ten Marines squatted along a long dormant heating vent waist-high spanning the length of the room. The wind or the dead moaned outside; it didn’t matter which. Both were deadly, one took you in an icy cradle and the other screaming piece by piece.
The dead trudged through the snowdrifts. It gave Alvarado the tiniest bit of satisfaction that the by-product of unending winter storms hindered their progress even more than her Marines. They were slower moving than in the warmer months, now marching like infectious molten lava.
She supposed it was the cold that made them slower, but they still came, populated with their new recruits of infected. Dead Marines wearing the faces of her men, the fresh dead quicker than the old.
In the night, they were hard to see as they moved like ice sculptures. The men watched over the windowsills quietly waiting for another battle to begin.
The first Zulu reached the doors and rattled the chained entrance. It was joined by another. The only glass on the thick metal door was reinforced and had been well-secured. It would hold against a small horde, but not forever. As more dead came on, they started to work their way around the building. The men sat in silence, their breaths turning to cold smoke in the dark building air.
Wess crawled across the classroom floor, his thin youthful face looking for her. “Ma’am, Captain Butler has collected your officers.”
Shame boiled inside her as she followed the Marine crawling across the floor and into the hall. Once out of view of the outside, they stood and Wess led her into a windowless classroom in the interior of the school.
The square room had white concrete walls, and the front of the room had a green chalkboard. A final math assignment was scrawled across the board for homework.
Captain Butler was already inside. He pulled a lantern from a pack and placed it on the teacher’s wooden desk, adjusting a small American flag to the side.
“Wait.”
His hand stayed and he stared at her for confirmation. A lieutenant and three sergeants awaited her. She motioned for the last man inside the room to close the door. Gently, he shut the door, the latch clicking shut.
Butler flicked on his flashlight, letting it emit a dim red glow. Each man was enveloped by the light casting dark shadows over eye sockets. She would have killed to have any sort of night-vision equipment at their disposal.
“Sergeant Riddle.”
The sergeant turned on a headlamp that let out a red beam. “We have ninety-six Marines accounted for. Corporal Dixson thinks he heard gunfire south of the outpost, but we can neither confirm or deny.”
It was callous to say she didn’t care if there were others alive and still fighting, but she needed to know what pieces of a command she had to work with. She did the math fast in her head. There were almost forty Marines missing in action. If the dead didn’t get them, the elements would.
Forty missing Marines was the command’s single largest loss since the beginning. There would be more before this war was over, but this night would haunt her. One night under her command, she’d failed to see that the river could freeze, giving the mass of dead a jagged highway to traverse unimpeded. On the other hand, she could have had her entire command overrun if she’d made them stand their ground.
“Thank you, Sergeant.” She collected herself for a moment. A shiver ran down her spine as the dead wailed outside searching for a way in. It’s just the cold, she told herself. “We won’t last here. The facility is secure, but with hundreds if not thousands of the Zulus coming across unimpeded, we will fail our primary mission, and it will only be a matter of time before they find a chink in our armor.”
She inspected her red-shadowed Marines. “We can’t wait for spring to thaw us out. It’s not an option.”
Captain Butler nodded agreeably. “We could rally forces from the south and take back Barron.”
He’s still thinking he has the might of the American military at his back. “We would need to get word to Colonel Kinnick, and logistically, we are not prepared for a massive personnel shift. I don’t think that’s realistic. We must figure out
a way to win this on our own.” We only have our backs.
Butler gulped. “We don’t even have a full company.”
“No, we do not. What do we have?”
“We abandoned most of our supplies and ammunition at the outpost.”
“How long can our Marines sustain a firefight?”
“I’d say about two days, ma’am.”
“Then we must solve this problem before then.”
“How?” Wess piped up. The young lieutenant’s face glowered as if unnerved by the dark. His eyes shifted away from her gaze.
“How would any Marine solve a problem?” Her eyes bounced from Marine to Marine. “Improvise, adapt, and overcome with enough explosives and brawn to destroy the enemy.”
Her men nodded their heads in agreement. Marines don’t sulk; they would find a way.
She masked her joy of finding a way even if it promised to be a tooth-and-nail fight. “We’re going to blow the ice down the river, find any misplaced Marines, and retake Barron. Then we’re going to continue south, ensuring that the river is broken up. No gaps in our line.”
“Ma’am, I would love to blow up the entirety of the enemy and the river, but there must be over a thousand of them between here and there. More are coming by the second. That’s 10:1 on a good day.”
“Then we must move fast.”
Butler nodded. “If we planted enough, I don’t see why we couldn’t widen the river back out.”
“Who’ll do it?” Riddle asked, his eyes black orbs. He knew who the hard work would fall on: the Marines in the field.
Alvarado met his eyes. “I’ll go. I won’t ask Marines to do something I wouldn’t do myself. Only volunteers.”
“I’ll go with you, ma’am.” It really wasn’t a request but more of a declaration of duty from the sergeant.
“Collect a rifle squad of volunteers and all the explosives we have stockpiled in the school.”
She turned toward Butler. “You’re going to be in charge of this command while I’m in the field. If we do not succeed, there is no point in remaining here. You are to go south and link with Captain Heath and get word to Colonel Kinnick that we are overrun. Give us no more than two days and then you move. Take any civilians you can with you.”
The End Time Saga (Book 5): The Holding Page 4
