“Who are you going to leave with us?” Michelle had turned on him and almost barked the question. He knew she was overworked, put-upon, and exhausted; that said, it was all he could do to keep from firing back.
“I’m taking Reed’s security team, Pro and his scout team, Rachel, and a couple of the folks she’s been training up on the long guns.” He stopped Michelle’s comeback with an upraised hand. “That will leave you with both Daniel’s and Gabe’s security teams, and everyone Reed and Mitch have been training up. We’ll be keeping Charlottesville busy in their own backyard, so you should be all right from that direction. You’ll have the river at your back, and the only direction a real threat can come from is the Maryland-DC direction or out west. Either way, they’ll have to use Route 7 to get to you, and we’re only two hours away.”
Michelle was nodding to herself. “And if they beat you, or whatever you call it, down there? What the hell are we supposed to do then?”
“Michelle, you wanted to fight. Remember? Would you rather fight here, or on their turf?”
The heavy growl of vehicles and the sound of a tractor trailer downshifting stopped whatever she was about to say in response. He was getting pissed off himself; the last thing Skirjanek needed was to get ambushed by “bad” Michelle, and it was starting to look like that kind of day. A big, four-wheeled JLTV, the light tactical vehicle that was replacing the Humvee in the Army, turned onto International and rolled to a stop. It had what looked like an M-60 machine gun mounted on its top. An eighteen-wheeler pulling a flatbed trailer, carrying an M2 Bradley, pulled up behind it.
“Oh shit.” Daniel let out a breath. “A tank.”
“Not a tank,” he said, letting out a breath of relief of his own as a familiar black Ford Raptor pulled around the stopped vehicles and came towards them. “And I think it’s a present for us.”
“How do you know?” Michelle asked.
“They dragged it up here, and it wouldn’t be tied down with chains if they were looking to use it.”
“You’re sure?” Daniel sounded worried.
“If I’m wrong, it won’t matter for long.”
The Raptor turned onto the parking deck and drove slowly towards them. He again credited Skirjanek’s common sense. The guy had to know what was going through the minds of the people watching. Jason turned to look behind him. Most of the mall’s roof was lined with people watching, probably terrified by what they could see stacked up behind the eighteen-wheeler out on Dolly Madison.
“I thought he’d be taller” was the first thing Michelle said when Skirjanek hopped out of the passenger side of the pickup. The driver seemed to fill the driver’s side of the truck and looked Samoan; had to be one of the Marines, he guessed.
“Jason.” Skirjanek waved in greeting and walked right up to Michelle. He’d warned the man.
“Ma’am, I’m Andrew Skirjanek. I guess you’re my civilian authority at the moment. Where do you want us? We’ve brought a lot of stuff that Jason mentioned you could use.”
Skirjanek might as well have hit Michelle in the forehead with a hammer. She was stunned. “Uhh, I’m sorry?”
“You are Michelle? The leader of this group?”
“Don’t look at me.” He shook his head at her when she turned to question him. “You wanted the job.”
“Well, I suppose you could just park the stuff right here for now. We’ve cleared it out for you.”
Skirjanek looked around at the expanse of the parking lot, and Jason thought he saw the guy wink at him. “Yes, ma’am. Might I suggest we keep the Bradleys out on the roadway? I’m not certain this parking structure would hold them.”
Michelle again turned to him. “Those would be your tanks.” He smiled. “Sounds good, Colonel.”
Skirjanek nodded once at Michelle and backed off a step. “Let’s do introductions after. I’ll get these people moving.”
Skirjanek was on the radio on his way back to the jeep. “Bradleys and tanker, up along the road fronting the mall. The rest of you, park on the deck here.”
Michelle turned back to him and almost smiled. “Is he serious?”
“About?”
“Civilian authority?”
Skirjanek had enough firepower to level Charlottesville without a fight. The guy preferred to risk a fight in order to try and save lives; and if he’d wanted to, he could have rolled over them here with one of the Bradleys. “Yes, I think he is.”
Nothing he’d seen in a long time gave him as much pleasure as the look of surprise and panic on Michelle’s face. He shared a look with Daniel, who wore a shit-eating grin on his face.
It had been a very long day; the supplies were unloaded, and his civilians were mixing with and making new friends among the fellow survivors of what had been labeled the Potomac settlement. They were barbecuing dinner in the welcome shade, just behind the Landsdowne conference center. Drew felt a pull he couldn’t have imagined. Part of him wanted to stay.
“This is much more defensible than where you were,” he pointed out to Michelle. “The Potomac behind you, Goose Creek on your north. You just need to build up a line of defense covering your west and south.”
“It’s going to be a lot of work,” Michelle said, “but I’m starting to see it.”
He pointed at Hoyt. “Mr. Sweet here is a former master chief in the Navy. That’s a long way to say that he can get things done. You don’t need to do everything; delegate. Let him help you manage the work.”
“Gee, thank you, sir.”
He traded smiles with Hoyt. “Face it, you were getting bored.” He turned to look at Michelle again and smiled at Daniel and Jason. “Never let Navy people get bored.”
“I’ll have a week of work just getting all the solar panels tied in with the extra capacity we brought up. Then we can start supplementing with some windmills. I can’t promise AC this summer, but you’ll have ice for our drinks.”
Andrew rattled the ice cubes around in his glass of whiskey and smiled. He was used to living out of a tent, but even he wasn’t immune to the allure of some creature comforts.
“AC? Seriously?” Michelle almost gasped. Jason’s description of the woman had been spot-on, and he could already tell he’d scored some points with her. He’d dealt with far worse during his Pentagon tour, where he’d had to schmooze with politicians for budget dollars. He had no interest in running a society; he needed Michelle to feel secure enough to leave him alone to do what needed to be done. He knew it was the same arrangement she’d managed with Jason, but if everything went as he hoped, this community was only going to grow, and with it, whatever authority and legitimacy she had. Whatever “arrangement” they came up with would likely have some staying power. He was thanking his stars that, her temperament aside, Michelle seemed more than up to the task.
“If Dr. Mandel says he can build a power plant, he can do it, yes, ma’am.” Hoyt was pointing toward the barbecue, at a large group of people who were in line for food.
Michelle held out her drink. “First off, people need to stop calling me ma’am. I’m not the damn school principal.”
“The hell you aren’t.” Jason spoke up and put an arm up ward off the incoming backhand.
“Dr. Mandel?” Michelle looked back at him. “He’s the older Russian gentleman?”
“That’s right, he’s the one with three doctoral degrees. Anything technical, he’s your brain. Let Hoyt be your clipboard.”
“Again, sir, thank you.” Hoyt was shaking his head, but he looked happy.
Michelle stood slowly and raised her glass. “When Jason ran this plan by me, I have to admit I thought it sounded too good to be true . . .” Michelle paused and looked around at the gathered people, new and old. “A part of me can’t stop thinking how fragile this all is, but sometimes I can almost see a future again. Thank you—all of you.”
He shared the toast and then stood up himself. “That’s a future we can all believe in, but I don’t think anybody here thinks it’s going to be hand
ed to us.” He looked at the young man seated next to Jason and Rachel. “A week ago, Jason told me that a kid told him that the world as it is was the only world he had. Wise words that we all need to keep in mind. Charlottesville is the current challenge; they aren’t going to be last. As we deal with that threat, it is we, the Gypsies, who should be thanking you.
“Any future we build isn’t going to be built through armed conflict. It’s going to be built here with crops; it’s going to be the protection and passing down of the knowledge the old world left us. Maybe that includes AC, maybe not, but it will have people sleeping securely. We are going to have to fight, but the war for the future will be won or lost here, and in places just like this.”
He paused, and looked around at the group of people that he had seen work so hard during the day. They were survivors. “For that, we thank you.”
If he ever got to thinking Skirjanek was some sort of superhuman, he’d think back on this moment. Skirjanek was in the front passenger seat of the Ford Raptor, slumped over and snoring up a storm. Jason was in the back seat along with Rachel, who was curled up against him and sound asleep. One of the Marines, Corporal Park, who was called Poy by everyone except Skirjanek, was driving. There was no doubt as to where the handle had come from. The guy had to be close to three hundred pounds and had mentioned at the barbecue that he was on a diet when he was told to go back for more.
“What was The Hole like, Mr. Park?”
“It’s Cameron, sir—or just Cam.” The Marine waved a hand, not taking his eyes off the road. They were driving south on James Madison Highway, Route 15, and just passed through what had been Orange, Virginia. He didn’t know if the destruction he saw around him was recent or had occurred during the riots, but the small city center appeared to have burned to the ground. He and Sam had taken a day trip down this way a couple of years back and toured James Madison’s home. He hadn’t been able to stop thinking about that trip; a different world and a lifetime ago. They and the vehicles that followed were driving without headlights, and the ghostly glow through the NVDs seemed to accentuate how empty the land was.
“You can call me Poy. Everyone else does, except the colonel.”
Skirjanek stopped snoring at the mention of his name. He could see Park shaking his head in admonishment. The corporal didn’t speak until Skirjanek started cutting logs again.
“The Hole’s a lot better than you are probably thinking,” Park whispered. “It’s really, really big. It was just the idea that we were trapped, and that everybody we knew was dead—it messed with us pretty bad. Guys started ‘suck starting’ their sidearms, sir. It got bad. Corporal Kearney almost did for all of us; he went nuts and rigged one of the ammo bunkers with C-4. Lieutenant Benoit handled the issue.”
“Lieutenant Benoit? I haven’t met him yet.”
“You won’t, sir. He went crazy two months later, though if you ask me, it was taking care of Kearney that did it for him. He was a good man, solid. A lot like Gunny Bruce.”
“Now Lieutenant Bruce?”
“That’s him; he could have gone to OCS years ago. But he’s a Marine’s Marine, sir.”
“I’m not a sir, Cam.” He felt himself smile. “Haven’t been one for a long while. It’s just Jason.”
“Not true.” Skirjanek shifted in his seat and then gave his head a shake. He wondered if the colonel ever truly slept. It was common knowledge in the military that the ability to function on the bare minimum of sleep was almost a mandatory superpower for officers. “You’ll have command of the people who are coming down with you, which will be our largest contingent. I’d say captain, at least.”
“Congratulations, sir!” Poy slapped the steering wheel in excitement. From where he was sitting, it seemed as if the corporal was laughing at him.
Charlottesville
“Miss Cooper . . . respectfully, you can’t be serious.” Dr. Naomi Vance was having a hard time processing what she’d just heard. For the briefest of moments, she’d considered just agreeing with Lisa Cooper and trying to figure a way out of it later. The former chief of obstetrics at Roanoke Memorial Hospital had been a guest of Charlottesville since early December, and she’d had to treat a lot of people who had disagreed with this woman in one way or another. Most recovered and were returned to the community; a few had been pulled from the university hospital that she ran, and had never been seen again.
At the end of the day, she was a physician. Her oath was all she had to hold onto in the fallen world; that, and moments like she’d had yesterday, when she’d helped bring a baby girl into the world. She had been very careful to keep her misgivings regarding Cooper private. Whatever the woman’s issues, Charlottesville worked. It was safe. That baby girl would grow up in a world different from what any of them had known in their childhoods, but she would grow up. The greater good . . .
“Dr. Vance . . .” Cooper got up from her chair, slowly walked around to the side of her desk, and pointed out the window. “These men are coming to destroy what we’ve built. If what they’ve said about being in Antarctica is true, correct me if I’m wrong, but they shouldn’t have our immunity to the virus.” The world’s coldest blue eyes stared back her, above a smile that looked nothing but inquisitive. “Would it somehow be more ethical or moral to shoot them?” Cooper sounded incredulous.
Yes, by a long shot. “Even if I could do it, and I’m not saying I could, I’m not a virologist. I do know it would risk a mutation that we might not be immune from.”
“We live with that risk every day, don’t we?”
She shook her head and looked directly back at the woman who controlled her life, controlled everyone within the radius of her bullyboys. One of whom had arrived with Cooper and had stood at the door of her office without saying a word.
“Yes, we live with some small chance of that happening. It would be increased by orders of magnitude if we were somehow able to find live cultures and rerelease it into the environment.”
“Find? What do you mean?” Cooper’s tone was back to conversational. “The world is carpeted in the bodies of people who died from it.”
“If the virus were active after all this time, within or upon the remains of the dead—the people you’re worried about would have already succumbed. Viruses are living organisms; this particular one needs a living host to propagate. The world simply ran out of those . . .” She could tell her tone wasn’t doing her any favors. She’d almost gone the psychiatry route after med school. She didn’t need any of that formal education to know Lisa Cooper scared her. It did give her insight enough to know the woman looking down at her was a high-functioning sociopath.
In the old world, it had served her well; if Lisa Cooper had chosen business rather than academia, given her intelligence and charisma, she would have risen just as fast and just as far in any corporate boardroom. Throw in seven billion dead and the end of civilization, and the constraints of normal society were gone. Those societal norms were normally what acted in place of a conscience in people like Cooper. All that was gone; what was left was a highly intelligent, hyper-motivated individual, wrapped in the kind of body and face that usually had the opposite sex eating out of her hand. In sum, she knew Lisa Cooper saw only the ends—the means to get there were nothing more than events to mark the passage of time.
“Where could we find some live virus?”
She wondered if Cooper had even heard her. “Research facilities that were working the problem,” she answered. “They would have super chilled the live virus down for preservation, to maintain a stock for study. But they’ve all lost power. With the temperature rise, the clock starts ticking.” Thankfully.
“This was a research hospital, and it was crawling with CDC folks during the last days. The power here only went down for a short time during our fight, and then we got the generators back up.”
The woman was too smart to lie to, too dangerous. “It’s possible,” she admitted. “I can certainly check. Although, if they knew they were dyin
g, I’m certain they would have destroyed any samples they’d collected.” If there was any live virus down there in the virology vault, she knew what she had to do. “First, do no harm . . .”
Cooper regarded her with a cool smile for a moment and then nodded to the man standing at the door. “I think we’ll make sure you don’t have to do that alone.”
*
Chapter 19
A feeling of relief washed over him as a sand-colored JLTV came into view around the gentle curve of I-64. They’d had a heads-up they were inbound. Poy’s drone had spotted the convoy thirty minutes ago. Within moments, a line of flatbeds loaded with gear, M2 and M3 Bradleys, and if his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him, one Abrams tank, followed. Rachel and Pro were somewhere in that convoy, and the relief he felt wasn’t due solely to their return.
The Gypsies were stretched thin. There was no getting around it. More so over the last week, as Lieutenant Bruce and three of his Marines had been absent with the fifty people from Reed’s security team that he’d brought south with him. They’d all been sent east, back to The Hole for equipment and a week of intensive training. Reed’s team was the most capable group of “soldiers” he had, followed by Daniel’s team that had remained up north. Within Reed’s group, there were exactly three individuals who had ever served in the military, including Reed. After almost a year of fighting for their survival, they weren’t exactly civilians, but he wished that some of Skirjanek’s people would quit referring to them as soldiers.
While they’d been gone, learning to operate the small M72 rocket launchers, heavier Javelin missiles, and the assorted weapons sported by the Bradleys, he’d been inserted into the rotation of patrols and observation posts that Skirjanek had emplaced around Charlottesville. He’d understood what Skirjanek was doing; plugging him in with as many different team members as he could, giving both him and them a chance to get to know each other. What it now meant was that he’d been “on” for ten days straight, and life was about to get more interesting.
Seasons of Man | Book 2 | Reap What You Sow Page 18
