Jason felt a moment of shame; that was more than he knew about Naks, who had come south with him and Reed. He’d only known he was one of the guys who helped Daniel take the mall back. Somebody who had worked hard, never complained, never said much at all.
“I lost both my Javelin teams as well; Mr. Baker’s and Sam Hirai’s. Four more people who had no business doing what I asked them to do.”
No one was a civilian anymore. Skirjanek was smart enough to come to that understanding himself. He didn’t need to be told.
“Over here, sir!”
Pavel wondered if he would ever grow accustomed to being called “sir,” by Americans no less. Flags and countries were a thing of the past. “Clan” he understood. When the colonel went on about the “them” and “us” that he was so certain the world would revolve around for the next century, Pavel heard only “tribe.” The Volkovs, his father’s family, was Cossack from as far back as things were remembered. These people were his tribe, his “host,” and he had a place of importance here. There was nothing he would not do for their survival. Looking for survivors in the ruins of the enemy’s headquarters made little sense to him. But he’d been given an order.
There were enough flashlights lighting the way that he had no issue in seeing past the pile of rubble that had almost blocked the basement hallway, and into the room beyond and its sole occupant. Not a room, he realized—a cell. The man had been handcuffed to a pipe above his blood-covered head. The injured man held another hand in front of his face as if to block the beams of light seeking him out.
“Leave me . . .” the man rasped when Pavel reached him.
As much as he wanted to say, “As you wish,” and move on, he was almost certain this was General Marks. They’d circulated the pictures the scouts had come back with.
“Where is Lisa Cooper?”
“Wanted . . . my help.” Marks almost seemed to be trying to laugh, but a gout of blood bubbled out of the man’s nose, mixing with the mask of dust covering his face.
“Where is she?”
“Tunnels,” the general almost shouted. “Steam tunnels . . .” A smile cracked the pale mask that was the general’s face. “Lost.”
“How many people does she have with her?”
“How many, here?” The man’s eyes tried to flutter open but slammed shut against the cake of dirt covering him.
The man was delirious.
“Where did she go?”
The general was moving his head back and forth with great effort. “Lost . . .”
“Sir, we’ve got two bodies here,” one of his men shouted from behind him after joining him in the room, carting a first-aid kit. “A soldier and a woman. Dark hair; it’s not her.”
He almost ordered the man and his medical kit back over the hill of rubble, but he focused on the general’s handcuffs. Perhaps he’d tried to stop Cooper. What had the man said? “How many, here?”
He turned back and slapped the general. “There are two bodies here! A guard and a woman. How many went with her?”
The general’s head shook, causing another mini avalanche of debris to cascade down his face. It took what seemed like an eternity for the general to realize he was conscious again, and he repeated the question.
Marks coughed. “Two here, just one . . . one with her.”
Pavel backed away so that the medic could get to Marks. He bumped into Pro, who was already climbing back over the pile of rubble, out of the room. The young man was driven to find Cooper; he could understand that. They all could. They had searched the hallway approaching the general’s cell on their way down, and there hadn’t been any tunnels.
He grabbed the back of Pro’s tunic and yanked the young man to the left side of the blockage. “This way!”
The footprints made in the thick layer of dust were easy to follow in the flashlight’s beams. The two of them made it to the end of the hall, where they came to a heavy steel door. The door had been opened since the building had been hit, and there were no prints beyond.
“You will stay behind me; do you understand?”
“Alright, yeah.” Pavel didn’t believe him in the least. The teenager sounded almost excited.
Pavel gripped his flashlight in his left hand and held it against the bottom rail of his rifle. “Hold your torch like this.”
Pro clicked his flashlight off and activated the one attached to the underside of his weapon. “I didn’t break mine on a doorway last night.”
“Fine.” Pavel felt himself grin. “Save the other. We may be down here for some time.”
There was a set of metal stairs leading down into a cinder-block subbasement. Large, insulated steam pipes passed through the room below them; the tunnel that carried them stretched in two directions. Even from the landing above, he could see the two sets of prints in the cone of light. One from a pair of boots, the other from a pointed pair of toes separated from a small heel. Beyond the clearly defined perimeter of light was absolute darkness.
*
Jason had been directed by one of Charlottesville’s civilians, a woman named Sally, who had seemed far more concerned with the well-being and future of the other civilians than any of the surviving combatants. Reed and one of his men were in the back seat. Another Hummer, loaded down with water jugs, had followed behind them. It wasn’t much of a lake; more of a really big, four-hole water hazard sitting at the back edge of the former golf course cum farm. The crowd gathered there under the shade of trees lining the water, some sitting on picnic benches, were very much armed and didn’t look at all happy.
“I think you’re up.” Jason didn’t take his eyes off the crowd through the windshield as he spoke to the woman in the seat next to him. “Please tell them they can trust us. If they want, we will just go away and leave them the water. We don’t want any trouble.”
He watched Sally approach the crowd, aware of his hands on the steering wheel and how much he wanted to drop them in his lap and get his hands on his Glock 17.
“Why we doing this, again?” Reed asked from the back seat.
“I think the colonel wants to deliver a message to everybody who’s left. One message, one story; not have half a dozen different groups out there spinning what happened.”
“Yeah . . . I’m not sure that’s worth getting shot over.”
Reed made a really good point. He watched the crowd as they gathered around Sally. It was fear and exhaustion that played on most of the faces, not rage. He couldn’t blame them; they’d had to fight their own people to get off campus. They had little reason to trust anyone.
“See that big guy?” Reed slowly sat forward until he was almost hunched over between the two front seats. “Far left, next to the picnic table.”
“Yeah,” Jason intoned, looking with just his eyes.
“He was at Zion Crossroads with that Josh character, when they delivered Cooper’s note.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
Josh Keynes was another “somebody” they hadn’t found yet. They’d hoped to find somebody to talk to who held some semblance of authority. That was the problem when you took down a police state or removed a dictator. Depending on the situation, either everyone claimed to be in charge, or no one did. These people were scared, and right now no-one was stepping forward. Jason was still watching the man when Reed clapped him in the shoulder. “Speech time.”
Sally had turned back towards the vehicle and was waving at him to come forward.
“You too, Reed.”
He made a point of slinging his gun around to his back and made sure Reed had done the same before walking over to face the crowd. There were thirty or forty people gathered who had been listening to Sally. The majority of those who had sought refuge here must have been satisfied with waiting to be told what to do. Jason could see hundreds of people stuffed back into the woods, waiting.
He pointed back at the other Humvee. “We brought water,” he started. “Cooper and her minions shut off t
he water on campus sometime yesterday; people there have been pretty thirsty.” There was a stirring in the crowd that he would have had to be blind to miss. Reed saw it as well and had already turned to wave their second vehicle forward.
“That’s great,” an older man spoke up. “We do appreciate it, but what happens to us now?”
Other questions sailed out of the crowd before he could answer the guy. As much as he wanted to strangle Skirjanek for sending him up here to deal with this shit, he let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. These people weren’t going to shoot at them.
“One question at a time! Please. To answer the first question—you can do whatever you want. Charlottesville is yours. We have our own settlement up north. We don’t want yours. We would like to have a neighbor we can trust. One that doesn’t go out, attack, and kidnap other settlements.”
. . . and on it went for almost an hour.
“Where’d you say your settlement is? Tysons Corner?” The young woman with a toddler on her hip stepped through to the front edge of the crowd. He did a double take; he’d seen this girl somewhere before.
“We used to be in Tysons,” he replied, racking his memory. His brain was as tired as the rest of him. “We moved when Cooper sent her spies in, and we caught them. We figured out we were the next group on her list.”
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
“I’m sorry, miss, I don’t.” He almost answered otherwise, because he knew she looked familiar.
The girl turned her shoulders to address the crowd. “I don’t know anything about this other bullshit he’s spouting,” she shouted. His hopes of having this go well took a nosedive. He glanced at the men he’d brought with him, and they all took the hint and stopped what they were doing to focus on the crowd.
“This man saved my baby’s life, when he had every right to kill me and my Will. We attacked him, and tried to kill him. And he still helped us when he didn’t have to. I say we can trust him.”
Jason felt the tension go out of his shoulders as the crowd itself seemed to uncoil. He lifted a fist and pointed at the young mother, remembering. “The girl on the motorcycle? And your friend? Will?”
She smiled grimly and nodded once back at him. “They shot him yesterday, when we were trying to get here.”
“I’m sorry” was all he could think to say. A lot of graves would need to be dug.
Trucks had been sent up to collect the people at the lake; several had already departed for the campus with a full load. Many of those headed back had already said they weren’t going to stay, and planned to return to wherever they’d been when the forces of Charlottesville had found them. He knew the colonel had been counting on that. Skirjanek wanted a community of settlements, the more the better.
Jason could only think in terms of some sort of mutual defense agreement; he had his own community to worry about. Skirjanek was miles down the road and years ahead of that in his thinking. He was taking into account some form of mutual defense, sure, but he had ideas regarding a common military force in addition to localized militias, trade between the communities, and some sort of very loose legal framework. It seemed like a stretch to him at this point, but so far, these people at least seemed inclined to listen to what Skirjanek had to say—and they would likely listen to Michelle too. The relief column from Potomac was on campus. Skirjanek had radioed a few minutes ago and let him know they’d arrived safely.
“I thought for a second there, that young girl was going to nominate you as her baby daddy.” Reed punched him lightly in the shoulder. “I was picturing myself the best man in some sort of postapocalyptic shotgun wedding.”
Jason had to smile. “I knew I’d seen her before.”
Reed had started to say something when Jason’s radio squelched loudly. “Gypsy One—for Jason. Immediate. Gypsy One, Jason. Do you copy?”
“Shit . . .” Jason pulled the radio. “Jason, Gypsy One. I copy.”
“Pavel and Pro are in the steam tunnels beneath the campus, in pursuit of target one. Get back here. We are finding access points under all the old buildings and putting teams down. We need to find Josh Keynes—ask the people up there if they know his twenty.”
“On my way.” He looked up; Reed was gone and halfway to the truckful of refugees.
“Reed, let’s go!” He was about to leave without him when Reed jumped back down off the truck, leading the big guy he said he seen with Josh Keynes.
Reed didn’t wait for the big guy to catch up with him. “This is Eric—he’s a friend of this Josh character.”
“If you have any idea where he is, tell us.” Jason did his best to keep his emotions in check. “He’s not in trouble; a lot of our friends owe him and Dr. Vance their lives. But we need to find him. He may know where Cooper is trying to get to in the tunnels.”
“He isn’t helping her, trust me,” Eric replied. “He was going to hide out with the doc somewhere in the hospital. He knew Cooper would have both of them killed after she figured out they’d tricked her.”
“Do you know where in the hospital?” Reed beat him to the question. The medical complex was massive; it was something like three hospitals and a med school all mixed together. Combined, it was nearly as large as the campus itself.
The man just shook his head. “I’m sorry. If I knew, I’d tell you.”
“Shit!” Jason slammed his fist against the door of the Humvee.
“Did you mean she’s in the steam tunnels? I helped run the power plant; the campus electrical grid runs underground, in places alongside the old steam system. I know some of them.”
“Hop in.” Jason slapped the rear door and was already sliding into his seat.
*
Chapter 33
Ray’s small sector of the campus-wide search had him on the south edge of campus, not far from the stadium and a massive brick building labeled the Aquatic & Fitness Center. He turned into the parking loop that ran around the building and mashed on the brakes.
“What the hell?” Elliot was in the seat next to him. The colonel had paired him up with Elliot when assigning search areas. Skirjanek had been focused on finding Cooper, not to mention worried about Pavel and Pro; Ray figured he’d have to forgive the colonel for pairing him with the only other person in the Gypsies who had tried to kill him at one point.
Ray had been running from one thing or another since the virus had struck. He knew what a bug-out vehicle looked like; he’d daydreamed of such a thing not long ago. Parked adjacent to one of the twenty-foot-tall AC compressor units was a black SUV with a massive heavy-duty luggage rack covered in tied-down gear and equipment.
“What’s that look like to you?”
“Sweet ride.”
Elliot was a good Marine. He knew that because John, Farmer, and even Jason had told him so. Skirjanek was convinced Elliot was some kind of savant. Ray wasn’t convinced; Elliot had the imagination of the box that held the proverbial rocks.
“That’s a bug-out machine.” Ray was sure of it.
“I’d go with something lower profile.” Elliot waggled a hand back and forth. “Hey, wait a sec. You think this might be where she’s trying to get to?”
Ray wanted to backhand a fist into Elliot’s forehead.
He took a deep breath and counted to three. “I suppose it could be. Let’s see if we can’t find a nearby entrance to the tunnels.”
“This is a fairly new building.” Elliot pointed his muzzle at the fitness center. “But this close to the stadium, I’ll bet there was an old building here before; most of the old buildings have those subbasements.”
Ray almost did a double take at the Marine. He was starting to figure the kid out. You just had to get him focused on the right problem for his brain to work. Elliot was almost incapable of turning the page himself.
“Sounds right, let get inside.”
The subbasement was there, all right. As near as he could tell in the flashlight- broken darkness, they were directly under the Olympic-size
d swimming pool. They found the steam tunnel that came in from the north, made a 90-degree turn, and then ran off into a matching pitch-black tunnel to the east.
“Which way now?” Elliot whispered.
Ray had radioed in that they’d found a suspect bug-out vehicle. There would be someone else sitting on the SUV outside soon, if there wasn’t already. Ray shook his head. “Neither, we’ll wait. Kill your light.”
He did the same and pulled his NVDs down over his eyes. Every team Skirjanek had detailed to the tunnels had been given a set. There wasn’t any ambient light to work with, but the ghostly image was clear enough that he was hopeful he wouldn’t shoot Elliot. Elliot, in the meantime, didn’t have a set. He had a perfect excuse for accidentally shooting him.
*
“She took her shoes off,” Pro whispered. The footprints had changed; the smaller of the pair now looked like bare feet. There were large patches of damp mud covering the concrete floors in places. Following the prints through those areas was easy. The dry patches always started off easily, but the footprints would soon disappear. When they came to a junction amid a patch with a dry floor, they had to try each tunnel that branched off until they picked up the footprints again. They’d gotten lucky at the first four-way junction they’d come to. They’d guessed right on their first try. At the most recent four-way junction, they’d spent the better part of an hour exploring down two tunnels until they’d been able to determine which way the quarry had gone.
The whole time, Pavel had been like a mute robot dog following a scent that only he could detect. Only Pro could see the tracks, too, and had felt he needed to say something. Pavel had been so quiet, for so long that he was beginning to wonder if the guy remembered he was behind him.
The Russian stopped in place and held his position for a good ten seconds before turning around to him. “Yes, she did,” Pavel whispered as he stared at him, bringing a finger up to his lips.
Seasons of Man | Book 2 | Reap What You Sow Page 34
