Lines in Shadow: Walking in the Rain

by William Allen

  Scott was implacable now, his pity pressed down deep by the image of Leslie laid out on the floor of the blockhouse. And then he imagined Isabella in that same condition and he gave the terrified woman an ugly smile.

  “Tell me what I want to know, and you get to live for now,” he hissed. “Lie to me, Katrina Warren, and you will die screaming, begging me to stop hurting you. But I won’t stop. Not ever. Do you believe me, Katrina? Really believe me?”

  “Yessss.” From her cry, he knew it was true. She now feared Scott more than she did the DHS goons. Scott wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing in the long run, and frankly, he didn’t care. Worse case, she died when they reached the farm. If Leslie didn’t make it, then Kat’s death became a given. Same thing if the farm had been attacked in his absence. The best outcome she could hope for now was exile, but the odds of that were remote.

  She answered all of Scott’s questions to the best of her ability, and he never laid a hand on her. Her information was far from complete, but he drew inferences from what her masters’ asked, and from the answers she gave. Thankfully, Katrina lacked certain key information about the communities, and the dispersal of forces, that might just make a difference. Her ignorance was due more to the speed of events evolving rather than any clever disinformation campaign.

  Afterwards, they began the long walk back to the farm in silence. She actually knew more than Scott expected, and he needed to pass along that information. They still had a window of time for now. But the already complex juggling act now needed new balls thrown into the mix and the farm, and the fledgling local government, couldn’t afford to have any of those balls dropped. Not if the residents could expect to survive the next twenty-four hours.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Despite maintaining a hard pace that left Katrina gasping, Scott didn’t catch sight of the first outpost until late afternoon. The absence of gunfire, not to mention the lack of explosions, kept Scott going as he drove his prisoner past exhaustion. This was his best speed, a ground-eating lope that wasn’t quite a run but would eat up the yards with his long strides. No stealth, no caution, slowed their approach, and he wasn’t stopping until he reached his family.

  Scott saw shapes that resolved into the outline of bodies, the guards on the gate, as he drew nearer. They, at least, were holding out to afford security to the community and not retreating to the bunkers. Scott figured if they had open guards, then at least half if not more of the twenty fighting positions arrayed around the gate were being manned as well.

  Practically dragging Kat by her arms the last few yards, Scott dumped the limping and gasping woman on the ground just inside the cleared field of the gate. Nearly dead weight at this point, Scott had no more need of the spy at the moment.

  “Guard her,” he ordered curtly, his stone face demonstrating the seriousness of his words. “If she tries to get away, shoot her in the leg. We may need more out of her later.”

  “Yes, sir,” the younger of the two men replied, and Scott thought he recognized the teenager as one of the Tigh’s grandsons. He had his grandpa’s nose, Scott thought as he walked briskly past. Then he stopped, realizing the blockhouse was likely evacuated. Unlike the underground bunkers, the heavily-built log structure was not designed to withstand a missile attack.

  “Where are the members of command team?” he asked over his shoulder, barely slowing down after releasing the exhausted woman.

  “Your brother has moved them into the second bunker, the one behind the big house,” came the shouted reply, and Scott altered his course, turning that way.

  After a quick trot, Scott reached the stairway leading into the ground and pounded down the steel rungs like he was being chased. At the bottom of the stairway, Scott turned right and strode through the open door, noting the blast doors were loosed from their hooks and only held open by what looked like steel door stoppers.

  Inside, Scott found his eyes struggling to adapt to the gloom as he stumbled through the airlock area and into the bunker proper. He saw several tightly-packed groups sheltered inside the underground room, the gloom alleviated by the LED lights strung along the ceiling. Before Darwin built the shelter, Scott knew his brother did some research indicating a high ceiling might help some deal with the tight quarters during long confinement. Fortunately, they’d yet to test that theory.

  “Scott.”

  The name was called as a greeting, and as a question, as Scott saw it was Nick who had spoken. Even in the sparse lighting, his nephew looked ghastly with the dried blood on his clothes and a fierce look in his eyes.

  “How’s Leslie?” he asked first, burning to know the fate of the woman he’d known since she was little more than a school girl.

  “Cass said she’ll live,” Nick replied, his voice catching in a hitch of emotion. “If we can stop any infection. She lost a lot of blood, but thank God that bitch missed any major blood vessels. You got her, didn’t you?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” Scott said simply, the message clear. He simply would not have returned without Katrina Warren.

  Nick tried to force a smile, and failed. Scott had seen that look too many times in the past and tried to conceal any reaction. Nick didn’t need or want his pity.

  “Did you find out why she did it? Why she betrayed the people who took her in, and likely saved her life?”

  Scott nodded, but wanted to save the explanation until he could tell the story to the whole command team.

  “Have there been any attacks here yet? I didn’t hear anything on the way back.”

  “No, nothing so far. Folks are starting to get antsy in the shelters, and we’ve still been rotating the guards in and out all day.”

  “If they haven’t attacked yet, then I think we have some time, but not much. I need to brief the command team immediately. Where’s your dad? And Bruce?”

  “Back in the radio shack, monitoring broadcasts. There’s a lot of activity out there all the sudden,” Nick explained, gesturing vaguely, “across the region and beyond. We’ve also been picking up transmissions closer to home, but encrypted.”

  “And the drones?”

  “We’ve gotten word of four strikes. Fortunately, three of them were centered on our traps. The fourth, well, we don’t know. Just heard the explosions, but that one was west of us, not east.”

  So, not helping their pawns by hitting our fighters at Lowell, Scott mused. The traps, or empty repeater sites, cost the group valuable electronic gear, but no human lives. Unless they hit the hunter teams trying to shoot down the drones. Even with a fifty caliber rifle and excellent optics, hitting a drone was iffy at best, but all those brave men were volunteers. Most were older men, seasoned hunters in their fifties or early sixties. They might not be able to hump it in the field like the young bucks, but Scott knew could certainly lay under their space blankets on a mountainside and wait for the shot.

  “Alright. Let’s get moving. I think we have twenty-four hours, well, less six, so eighteen hours until the bombs start falling here.”

  That revelation got Nick into gear, and he led his uncle around the clusters of worried folks and back into the small room set aside for communications. Darwin, Bruce and Sid Stevenson formed a tight ball around the speaker as their resident electronics guru adjusted the dials on the radio. Sid wasn’t a full-fledged Amateur Radio operator, but he could hum the tune just fine.

  Scott, for his part, ignored the scratchy voice over the speaker as he shut the door behind Nick. Darwin looked up, and Scott could see the relief written there in his brother’s open features.

  “Get her?” Bruce asked.

  Scott nodded and plowed ahead, ignoring the follow up questions.

  “Katrina Warren was sent to spy on us specifically. The Homeland boys are holding her parents hostage at the same facility where she’s been held prisoner for the last month. The camp grounds at War Eagle. She didn’t know the name but confirmed the layout. Today was her first opportunity to check in, and she repo
rted the bulk of the community’s fighters and the remnants of the National Guard unit here were focused on the compound at Lowell.”

  “Oh, shit,” Bruce muttered, his voice rising as he spoke. “they’re going to take out our boys there. We’ve got to warn them!”

  “And we will,” Scott replied, trying for calm. “But I think they are right where the bully boys want them for the time being. All that is important, but here is the crucial bit. After Katrina made her report, she received a response. She wasn’t expecting it, but her handler told her to find some way to get out of the camp within twenty-four hours.”

  “But she’s just some expendable pawn to these guys,” Nick barked angrily. “They might hit the farm in five minutes for all we would know.”

  Scott nodded. “That is certainly possible. However, Katrina had been sleeping with the guy for several weeks before she came here, and she thinks the guy, an Agent Montag with ICE, wants to keep her around. She said he’d even mentioned marriage just before she was sent here.”

  “If the man’s so hung up on her, why is she here? You could have just as easily shot her that first night. Not something you do to the love of your life.” Darwin scoffed, but Scott knew his brother was trying to draw out more information.

  “Not the agent’s call,” Scott replied. “Katrina claims the intelligence gathering operation is being run by Major Drummond, and he carries a lot more weight around that camp than a border patrol agent.”

  “So who’s Drummond?” Darwin continued, using his questions to brief the other men. Scott wished James was here, instead of at the siege in Lowell. Would be nice to have another military-trained brain churning on the problem.

  “Missouri National Guard. And someone who has access to dossiers on at least some of us. He had mine, and likely Nick and Mark’s, too. But the guy calling the shots is someone named Baird. Katrina didn’t know much about the man, except everybody called him Director Baird. Apparently, he’s the new regional director for Homeland Security.”

  “Wait, like that jackass who got all his men killed trying to bull his way into the Pine Bluff Arsenal?” Sid asked suddenly.

  “Just like that,” Scott confirmed.

  “But all this information comes from a spy, Scott. How can we trust what she has to say?” Darwin finally let down the façade of grilling his youngest brother, and clearly, Darwin wanted some reassurance that wasn’t coming.

  “I strongly advise we continue interrogating her,” Scott stated. “In fact, if we had time, I’d suggest a trip over to the Porter place to introduce her to Bennie.”

  “Who’s Bennie?” Sid asked, and Scott gave him a sharkish grin that was totally unlike anything the computer expert had ever seen outside a movie.

  “The last guy I interrogated. He lied to me, and if I’d hurt him on my first set of questions, I can guarantee he didn’t enjoy the experience when I got back.”

  Clearly, everyone got what Scott meant, and the uncomfortable silence that followed was only broken when Nick spoke up angrily.

  “Fuck that bitch! She nearly killed Leslie,” he raged. Then, drawing a breath, he slowly released the stream of air and tried to let the tension bleed from his body. “You just tell me what to do, and I’ll hold the pig steady.”

  Scott felt his face redden at the completely unexpected comment from his nephew. That boy has been dropped on his head too many times, Scott thought, but the silly reference to a book the two men loved made Scott grin again. This time, the grin looked more like something related to the human face instead of a cold-blooded predator.

  “And can’t do this without the help of the Guard, agreed?” Nick asked almost formally.

  “Do what?” Sid asked, still trying to catch up with the conversation.

  “Mount an attack on the enemy base at War Eagle and hope the pilots for those fucking drones are onsite,” Scott replied. “Against an enemy with superior numbers, weapons, and training. And we have no time to scout or prepare our own forces.”

  “Well, hell, Scott” Bruce piped up, “why even try? We could lose our whole force that way. All of us. Then who is left to defend the farm?”

  Darwin replied, beating Scott to the verbal punch.

  “Because if they blow up the barns or silos or set the fields on fire, we are all dead anyway. Even if what food we have in storage survives, that’s still not enough to get this community through the winter. Better to go out fighting than laying down to die.”

  Darwin’s words echoed in their minds as Sid retrieved the one-time code book and prepared a burst transmission to try to set up a meet with Colonel Hotchkins. The SINGGARS radio transmitter was tied to a repeater three miles away in a manner Scott couldn’t even begin to understand, but they could shoot a short, encrypted transmission to the colonel. Of course, the enemy had their own cool military radios, but without the key, Sid assured them, the bad guys would need more time than they had to decipher it.

  “Alright, boys,” Bruce announced, “Let’s get this shitwagon on the road. We’re burning daylight.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  “Scott, I don’t know what to tell you, but there’s no way we can attack that compound tonight,” the colonel said, and Scott could read the discomfort in the other man’s voice. “If you are this convinced your communities are going to be attacked, then I can help some with getting your people evacuated, but that’s it.”

  “Colonel, I just had this conversation with Darwin,” Scott said carefully, trying to hold his temper. “I know this timeline is impossible, but you are already planning the attack, aren’t you?”

  They stood together in the colonel’s new operations center, and Scott could tell just from looking at the maps on the table that Hotchkins had been engaged in just that exercise when the civilians showed up at his door.

  This time, Hotchins was using an abandoned dry cleaner store front as his base, and his troops were much more disbursed that when they’d met at the hotel. His radio operator and the guards all appeared tense when Scott showed up with Max, Aaron, and Nick in tow. Not necessary worried about the new men, but the upcoming action, or the threat of a drone strike, or hell, something else of which Scott was unaware.

  “Yes. Thanks to your warnings, we were able to locate the site, and begin scouting the area. But we are far from done, and frankly, assaulting that place is going to take more men than I have at my disposal.”

  “Then let us help,” Max said, stepping into the conversation.

  “I thought all of your men were tied up with reducing the camp in Lowell,” Hotchkins said, stepping back from the maps on the table as he shifted more focus to the men in front of him.

  “Hell, we are just waiting around for the poison to do its job or for them animals to keep killing each other,” Max continued. “Scott did a great job of dosing the water with none the wiser, as near as we can tell, and most of them are already dead and just don’t know it yet.”

  “We can leave a few dozen men there,” Aaron said, supporting Max’s assertion, “and still muster at least sixty shooters. But we need to start moving that way immediately.”

  “Colonel, you said you need men to handle the initial insertion, correct?” Scott continued in the same vein as the other men. “Well, I have some men, some scouts, who can get into the compound tonight and secure the hostages before your attack starts. Good men, and trained.”

  Well, half trained, Scott continued to himself. Ben and Keith had been just about to the point to start on their own, as had Mike, but Kevin, Sarah, and Yalonda, while soaking up instruction like sponges, still needed some time in the field.

  “I’ll go,” Max volunteered immediately, seeing the colonel was taking their offer seriously. “I’ve got family in there, and I guarantee if my brother or his wife see me, they can get the rest of the captive families to cooperate.”

  “I’ll go after the comfort women,” Scott said. “We’ve been up the chain this far in eradicating their slavery ring, and my men and women want
a piece of these asshats that started everything.”

  Sarah would want a piece for sure, but Scott left that unsaid. The colonel knew that, of course. He’d made sure Sarah was not only be on the stage for the hanging as the surviving rapists responsible for her own attack met their fate, but she’d actually pulled the lever.

  “But going in tonight? That’s just foolhardy, men, and you don’t have to be a military genius to know that.”

  “Colonel,” Scott said, bringing the point back, “I told you, I had this conversation with Darwin. You’ve seen your scouting reports. Are they gearing up for an attack?”

  “Yes, that appears to be the case,” the officer conceded. “And that’s all the more reason to evacuate from your communities, at least until this is over.”

  “Sir, if they get their attack off, we might as well all sit down in a circle and eat a bullet,” Max pointed out. “I’m no farmer, but Darwin Keller is, and he said maybe five or ten percent of us will survive the winter if our food stocks are wiped out.”

  “Colonel, wouldn’t you agree the best time to attack an enemy is when they are distracted? Like, say, getting their own attack ready?” Aaron’s logic, and the ceaseless battering from the other men, seem to finally have an impact on the colonel.

  Hotchkins sucked in a deep breath, and glanced at the maps with their clear acetate overlays once again.

  “Can you really get me sixty fighters here before dark? And Scott, Max, are the two of you willing to lead teams to penetrate the wire in advance of the barrage starting?” he asked, his voice steady but with an added overlay of worry.

  “Yes, colonel,” Max replied. “In fact, the first truckload is already on the way here.”

  With Colonel Hotchkins still doubtful but willing to try, he waved the other men over for a closer look at the heavily annotated maps. One was a standard if highly detailed 1:10,000 map that Scott was familiar with from his time as a Wildlife Officer, but the second looked like a hand-drawn map with at least as many details filled in for the colonel.