“I started in Cincinnati,” he yelled back. “I’m from Georgia.”
“You don’t sound like you’re from Georgia.”
He shook his head in confusion; what in the hell was this guy’s issue?
He peeked around the bumper of the SUV. “Well, I am! I’m just trying to get home.”
“You’re not from Charlottesville?”
He did a double take. “You trying to tell me you’re not?” This guy didn’t sound like the sharpest tool in the shed.
“We are not.” The deep voice came from directly behind him and was punctuated with a rifle barrel against the back of his head. “Place your weapon on the deck, now, sir.”
He looked up and saw the dark-skinned Marine, in full battle rattle. He’d worked on building and repairing pipelines in Iraq during the reconstruction effort. It was all familiar to him; the gear, the polite phrasing, the smile, and the absolute willingness to do violence were all evident.
His hands went up off his weapon. “I swear, I’m not with those folks. I’m just trying to get—”
“I don’t care.” The Marine above him shook his head and nudged him with his rifle. “Toss your weapon, now.”
He sat against the pump house, his wrists and ankles zip-tied together. The Marine who snuck up on him had the name “Uwasi” on his BDU top. They had been polite enough with him, even when they’d told him in no uncertain terms that they’d kill him if he tried to escape.
The other Marine, Elliot, had been the one who zip-tied him, and he hadn’t stopped talking since. He’d almost had trouble overhearing Uwasi’s radio call telling someone that they had a prisoner.
“You really from Georgia?” Elliot looked young to him, as only a redhead could. The kid could have been twenty or thirty.
“Yeah . . . you guys really Marines?”
“Bet your ass we’re Marines—the last Marines.”
“Elliot!” Uwasi had yelled. “Leave the detainee alone and get back on your scope.”
He watched the Marine wander off into the darkness, mumbling to himself as he went.
Detainee? He could just barely see the outline of Uwasi in the cupola of the Humvee above him. “You guys really not with the group in Charlottesville?”
“Save your breath, sir.”
“Who’s coming to get me?”
There wasn’t a response, and there was nothing but silence for nearly a quarter of an hour until he heard another vehicle roll up, coming from the south. He was fully expecting a replay of Lexington; a mishmash of survivors carrying military surplus and looking like they’d just raided Bass Pro’s hunting gear department. Instead, it was three more Marines.
One of the new arrivals, close to his own age, maybe a few years younger, knelt at his feet, drew his knife, and cut the ties around his ankles. “I’m Lieutenant Bruce. If you’ll come with us, we have a few questions.”
“Aren’t you a little old for a lieutenant?”
“It’s a long story, sir. If you’ll come with us, maybe some of your questions will be answered.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not at all, sir. I’m just trying to be polite.”
The man he’d been speaking to, Drew Skirjanek, the one they called the “colonel,” grabbed three glasses off the shelf behind him. They’d been sitting at a table in the back-office lounge of a large landscaping company for the past two hours. He’d been watching as they drove in; they were in a building just off Highway 15, a quarter mile south of I-64. He’d told them his story, twice. The false dawn was starting to glow out the window behind the third man at the table, who had yet to say a word.
The colonel filled the three glasses and pushed one across the table to him. “That is quite a story, Mr. Hoover.”
He handled the glass and looked at the amber liquid. He could smell the peaty scotch. If it was going to be his last drink, he couldn’t fault the choice. He lifted the glass. “Is this supposed to make me feel better?”
“Relax,” the colonel said after taking a sip of his own drink. “I believe you, and I apologize for being the one to interrupt your trip home, yet again.”
“So . . . not a last drink?”
Skirjanek was rubbing his face; clearly, his thoughts had taken him elsewhere. He glanced up. “Not at all, we’ll see you on your way. But first, I wonder if you’d do us a favor, possibly help out your friends in Northern Virginia as well.”
“I’m not telling you where they are, or anything more about them.” He’d been very careful to hide any details about Jason and his group.
“You’d have to be either a world-class asshole or insane to tell me anything like that. Your reticence speaks volumes to your character.” The colonel swirled the liquid in his own glass. “I’m asking that you contact your former group on our behalf, arrange a meeting. Whenever, wherever they’d feel comfortable. I’m willing to be the one at risk.”
“Colonel? I advise against this course of action.” The statue of the third man at the table finally spoke. Ray did his best and failed in hiding his surprise at the thick Russian accent.
Ray held up his glass in a mock toast. “Here’s to someone farther away from home than I am.” He drained his glass; it looked like it might be his last drink after all. He was shaking his head as he slammed the glass down. “I’m not going to do anything until I hear your story, and probably not even then. Near as I can tell, these people at UVA have lied to the people of every city they’ve attacked.”
The colonel nodded to himself. “I’ll tell you our story, but I’ve got something that may help you believe me when I do.”
He watched as the colonel got up and went to dig through a backpack next to a fold-up cot on the other side of the room. The man moved slowly, like he was tired from more than being up all night. He came back with a ruggedized laptop.
“I was stationed at McMurdo Station in the Antarctic.” The man waved a hand around the room as he waited for the laptop to start up. “We all were, everyone except for the Marines you’ve met. Our Russian contingent was at their primary base there . . .”
“Vostok Station,” the Russian said simply as he appeared to be reading the back label on the bottle of scotch.
“Riiiight, I’ve heard this story. The one where you paddled an ice floe before it melted.”
The colonel’s face twitched a little at his statement before he turned the laptop around so he could see the screen. It was a recording of a split-scene video conference. He recognized the colonel on one side of the screen straight away. It took his brain a moment to process the man visible in the other half of the screen.
“Is . . . is that? Son of a bitch, is that the president?”
“President Eugene Huffman.” The colonel reached forward and hit play. “The last president, giving me my last orders.”
He watched the conversation, noting the date/time stamp on the bottom of the screen. As far as he could tell, he’d already been at the training seminar in Cincinnati for a day when the video call had been recorded. The same day, he’d started out of town as people had begun dropping dead all around him.
“. . . if they’re free of infection. Make every effort to get them a ride home as well.” The president was talking about the Russians in Antarctica. When he looked up at the Russian next to him, the Russian was staring back at him. He pointed at the screen and then at the man. “You?”
“And others you have not been allowed to see.”
Ray listened until the president asked the colonel about his family. He reached out and pulled the lid of the laptop shut. Nobody needed to relive one of those conversations. He shook his head, coming to grips with what he’d just heard. Holy shit! These people had survived the virus in Antarctica.
The colonel was holding out a hand for him to shake. “I’m Andrew Skirjanek, formerly a colonel in the US Army. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ray.”
He gripped the man’s hand; he’d already decided he was going to trust these people. Nobody would have
made up or could have faked what he’d just seen. “So . . . the Navy came for you?”
“A single Los Angeles attack submarine, down to a skeleton crew, came for us and brought us home. A week ago, the captain of the USS Boise, a man we all owe our lives to, a man who had become a friend, was killed by the people running Charlottesville. We didn’t know who they were; we approached them under a white flag.” Skirjanek held out his glass to the Russian, who still held the bottle of single malt. “My fault.”
“Is not your fault.” The Russian poured two fingers into the colonel’s glass and then waved the bottle at him.
He was exhausted, he needed sleep, but the drink sounded very good at the moment.
“I am Captain Pavel Volkov.” The man nodded at him. “Will you help us?”
He glanced at Skirjanek, who was appraising him over the rim of his glass. He nodded to himself and slammed the drink back. “I can’t promise anything, but I’ll try on one condition.”
“Which is?”
“When this is over, if you can, you get my ass to Georgia—stick me in one of those tank things I saw in the garage and escort my ass home. I don’t seem to be able to make it on my own.”
“Not tank.” Pavel was shaking his head. “Is Bradley infantry fighting vehicle.”
Skirjanek gave a short laugh to himself. “It’s a deal, Mr. Hoover.”
“It’s just Ray, Colonel.” He looked back to the Russian. “And Bradley infantry . . . whatever will do nicely.”
*
Chapter 16
University of Virginia
Josh Keynes was suddenly a popular guy. He figured it had everything to do with the shredded and burned-out hunk of metal that had been the Bradley anchoring Charlottesville’s eastern roadblock. General Marks and Miss Cooper had finally run into a group that had real teeth. Josh had almost succeeded in convincing himself that they had, in Miss Cooper’s words, “grown the fastest and farthest,” so no one would be in a position to challenge them. He’d heard those words a lot early on, and they’d been an important part of the effort to grow their community as fast as they could.
He’d been part of the twenty-five-person-strong group of locals that had figured the UVA campus offered a lot of advantages after the virus, especially after the FEMA center it hosted was overrun and then abandoned by looters. That had happened before the dying was truly over and the looters had the run of everything.
They hadn’t quite made it to the campus and by the time he and his group had emerged from the church basement where they’d been hiding for two weeks, they were scared and hungry. It was technically his group at that point; not out of any wonderful leadership on his part, but more of a process of elimination. People had continued to die during those two weeks, and when they emerged, it had been him they’d all looked to for guidance. He could still remember the sheer terror he had felt when it hit him that these people were depending on him to keep them alive.
Before the virus, he’d been a townie, from a long line of townies. He’d grown up and worked in a small city dominated by a university where many of the region’s best and brightest got their start. He had been serving them beer for a decade, behind the bar of a place he owned. He might have been a pillar of the local chamber of commerce, a deacon in his church, a scout master to his nephew’s Boy Scout troop, but every night, he’d been surrounded by young people who never even saw him, not really. The respect he saw in those faces looking to him for answers had been something new, and something he’d worked hard to maintain in the year since.
When his group had reached the campus, Lisa Cooper was already there and in charge. She’d recognized his worth right away; a leader who had the trust of his people. He’d been her right hand for a short while. Eventually, he was replaced. People were found who could keep the power on. Doctors were found who could keep people alive. General Marks had shown up and was put in charge of the militia. Lisa Cooper could have forgotten him. He wouldn’t have even faulted her for it. He figured the list of things more important than his ego was a long one.
But she hadn’t forgotten. She always took the time to speak to him, ask how he was doing. She’d gotten him assigned to Lewis Hall; he and a couple of others from his group had the run of one of the prettiest buildings on campus. With the arrival of General Marks, she’d made sure he was given command of one of the militia companies. It was a job he’d carried out with enthusiasm. To his own surprise, he’d been good at it, even if he had some issues with the way they did things. General Marks had come to rely on him more and more. Which, he supposed, was why he was here with the man now.
They were surveying the eastern barricade across I-64, the old one that had been abandoned after the attack. There was a new one being built fifty yards further east. It would be three cars deep, and would have what the general was calling a tank trap dug across the interstate. He could see the bucket arm of the backhoe already working just beyond the thick wall of abandoned cars.
Marks had been studying the remains of the Bradley that had anchored the former roadblock. When he turned around to face him, the look of worry on the general’s face seemed to have grown. “Show me the device your guys found.”
“We’ve left it where they fired their missile from, hoping they’d come back for it. It’s right across the freeway and up into that hill,” he explained, pointing at where he knew the site was, about five hundred yards away.
“Your people are set up on the site?”
He nodded. “At a distance, yes, sir. But they have eyes on it. Do you feel like a stroll?”
“Hell, yes.” Marks started walking and waved over his shoulder for him to join. “Anything that gets me off that damn campus is welcome.”
As they crossed the median between the freeway lanes and proceeded towards the new barricade, Josh pointed at the backhoe. “Will that really stop a tank?”
“Stop?” Marks shook his head ruefully. “Maybe, if someone is dumb enough to drive into it, but it will direct a tank or any other vehicle around the barricade, where we’ll set up a choke point and some nasty surprises.” He was about to ask what the odds were that these military folks had a tank or other heavy gear, when the general turned to face him.
“We’ve scoured every military base in the region, and tried to disable whatever we couldn’t grab. I think the odds of them attacking with gear we can’t handle is remote. Besides . . .” Marks pointed at the two hundred militia soldiers manning the new barricade. “I don’t think there can be very many of them, and most are likely to be former sailors—that little shit of an art history professor did manage to convey that they’d arrived on the USS Boise; that’s a submarine. How many people from Antarctica could it have brought with it?”
Josh had no idea how many people a submarine held, but he liked Marks’s reasoning. He’d served two years in the Virginia National Guard right out of high school, and his military experience had been limited to responding to hurricane relief efforts. For his part, he’d never liked Russel either. He didn’t know the guy had been an art professor, but that kind of made sense with all the solidarity bullshit the guy had always spouted. He’d just assumed the dead militia leader who had been in command here had been just another trust fund baby who had taught at the university before the suck had killed all of his students.
“How many?”
“Christ, I don’t know. If you had to, I suppose you’ could put three or four dozen folks in one of the things on top of its crew, but it would be standing room only. They certainly couldn’t have anything remotely approaching what we have in numbers.”
He reminded himself that Marks wasn’t a real general. Josh was part of a very small number of people who knew that. The man had retired from the Army as a major and spent the previous three years running the ROTC program at Virginia Tech in a reserve billet. He was by far the most experienced military person they had, and the rank Cooper had bestowed on him had made sense. But for Josh, there was still the fact that Marks might just
be as far out of his depth as the rest of them.
“Could they have more than one ship?”
“It’s possible.” Marks grunted. “I was privy to a lot of the command traffic during the die-off. All of us reservists had been called back up—everything I heard or saw regarding naval assets was pretty pessimistic.”
They walked in silence past the new barricade for about a hundred yards until the general turned to him. “Josh, I’ll be honest with you. Lisa . . . I mean Miss Cooper wants me to take you under my wing. You’ve done well, and with your guard experience, you at least understand what I’m trying to do in terms of training up the militia.”
“I hear a ‘but’ in there, sir.”
Marks grinned at him. “Not a ‘but,’ more of a concern that you’ll answer to me and not her.” Marks held out a hand as if to stop an expected argument. “Strictly in terms of the militia, you understand. What she’s managed to do here is nothing short of miraculous. She’s held us together and built a solid foundation from which to grow. But she’ll be the first to admit that she doesn’t know a damned thing about leading people in battle.” Marks jerked a thumb over his shoulder as he walked. “Yesterday’s shit show back there highlights that.
“Josh, I need you to understand that we have no idea who we just started a fight with and how very fucked up that is. I’ve tried to make her understand that we won’t be the only ones who managed to hold people together and raid the local armories. Do you understand what I’m saying? She needs us, but we need her to understand that we have to be able to direct our military affairs. I know you’ve been with her longer than almost anyone—it’s why I’m being straight with you.”
“I understand, General. I see what you’re saying, and for what it’s worth, I think you’re right.”
Marks looked at him as if he was expecting something more by way of a response. The general wasn’t going to get anything more. Marks had already said enough to him to sign his own execution if Miss Cooper felt it was warranted. It would be up to her, and she’d asked him to make a full report of this meeting. Josh could still feel where she had kissed him on the cheek when she’d asked him to become her eyes and ears with the general. He knew he was infatuated with the woman, had been since he’d first met her. If he could gain the trust of the militia, he might be able to replace the general in more ways than one.
Seasons of Man | Book 2 | Reap What You Sow Page 15
