Still, we kept going until I called a stop.
“That didn’t go as good as I’d thought,” I told Courtney, taking a drink from my canteen and handing it to her.
“I think that first missile was meant for us,” Courtney said.
“It was. It passed us by a hairsbreadth.”
“Luck.”
“Not for Crowder and Frankie,” I told her darkly.
“We all knew the risks going in. We’re not out of it yet, Dick. Don’t give up on me now.”
Motor sounds coming up behind us somewhere on the road had us both ducking down.
“Stay? Go? Try to radio the farm?”
“It’ll take them forty-five minutes to get to the farm. I figure, of the vehicles that left, most are probably headed there, but a few are behind, looking for us.”
“Good, then I have more people I can—”
“Make the call, and let’s see what the morning sun shows us, if we make it that long.”
Her teeth flashed bright white in the darkness.
42
Throughout the night, we would sometimes hear what sounded like motor sounds rising and falling, gunfire, and sometimes either a large explosion going off or a large round firing from a turret. The wind had to be carrying just right, because we were far off. It wasn’t long to wait on sunlight, though. It was close to six am, by the time we could see enough to make out smoke in the distance.
“Do you think they knew it was us, and that’s why they went after the farm?”
“No,” I said after a moment.
We’d been walking almost parallel with the road, sometimes venturing out of the corn to make sure we were still heading the right direction. Never before had I seen so much corn. I’d read about the endless waves of grain and corn in Stephen King’s book ‘The Stand’, but I hadn’t ever expected to be walking through a Nebraska cornfield, after an all too eerily familiar apocalypse. One caused by human fuckery, much like the super flu that had killed much of the earth’s population in King’s story.
“I think that if they were mobilizing to hit the farm, they were probably going to roll at first light anyway. They made it to the gate too fast. It was like they’d locked and loaded, and then got some shut-eye. I think they underestimated us as badly as we underestimated them.”
“Do you think anyone’s left alive? At the farm, I mean.”
My feet tangled, and when I tripped, I didn’t even try to stop my fall. My breath left me in a whooshing sound and I rolled to my side, dry heaving.
“Dick?” Courtney said, turning around in the narrow row and rushing to me.
It had been bothering me in the walk through the corn; was there anyone left alive? How would I deal with Jamie or heaven forbid, Mel dead? I pulled myself into a sitting position as my breath returned, and I wrapped my arms around my knees and put my face into them, to squeeze the memories and the tears away. Fighting off the flashbacks that I knew would be coming.
“Dick?” I heard cornstalks snapping and breaking, and then strong arms wrapped around me from behind.
I needed the comfort, I recognized that I needed it, and I hated myself as I sat back and let her hold me.
“I need them to be alive,” I said, trying to keep it together. “I don’t know if I could stand to bury Jamie and Mel.”
I felt Courtney press her face into the crook of my neck, and she let out a sob herself. I took deep shuddering breaths and realized that she’d had to do just that herself, with her love, Luis. I was again a source of her pain. Feeling horrible, I was about to tell her so, when she spoke.
“I know what you mean. I don’t want to see it either. We’ve all be through so much. All of us. If it happens, I’ll be there with you. You won’t go through it alone.”
“Thanks,” I said shakily and felt her remove her arms.
I put both hands on the ground and pushed myself to my feet. I made sure my carbine was clear of dirt and mud from my fall and stood straight.
“How far away are we still?” Courtney said after a moment.
“More than five miles. Probably closer to ten.”
“How can you tell?”
“We would have run into the spot where we set up the ambush for the vehicles, starting at the five-mile mark. They weren’t perfect, but I talked to Steve. After we left, he was going to have people manning them, in case there was a counter-strike.”
“So, you two planned for everything?” she asked as we started walking.
“I think so, everything but what—”
The rising sound of a motor made us both tense up.
“I have to—” Courtney started saying.
“I do, too. I have to know it’s not them.”
She nodded, and we started moving laterally until we were only one row in, then both of us got low and waited. Anybody driving through would be less likely to notice us close to the ground, than if our heads and shoulders were readily visible. Besides, it made for a smaller harder target to hit if we were seen. So we hunkered down and waited, neither of us speaking.
“I hear a radio,” Courtney said, “like, country music.”
I listened hard, and despite the grim situation, I smiled. I heard it, too. Hell, I even recognized the song.
“Cuz the girls are so pretty,” Courtney sang to herself suddenly, breaking the silence and making a crow startle into flight from within the corn somewhere.
“Big and Rich?” I asked her.
“Yup,” Courtney said, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
The truck came into view, the rising heat from the asphalt making it a shimmering image I could barely make out, but what was unmistakable was the color of the truck.
“Is it?” I asked Courtney.
“I think so,” she said, sounding hopeful.
We stood and waited as Steve’s big truck rolled into view, half a dozen deputies standing in the bed of the truck, rifles bristling from every corner. Country music blasted from the old tape deck that Steve had stored in the EMP-proof bunker.
“Hey,” Courtney called, stepping into the open and waving her arms.
I walked out behind her, trying not to smile too broadly. My face already hurt. Laugh, cry, it was amazing how quickly our emotions could take over our whole demeanor. We both waved our arms as the truck slowed and pulled up next to us. I squinted and frowned, seeing Mel sitting in the passenger seat, but was even more pissed to see who was driving.
“Steve,” I said, walking up to the passenger door.
“Hey, Dick, you two, ok?” he asked, reaching his right arm out of the window.
“Yeah, barely. Hey Jamie, Mel,” I said, seeing Jamie looking us over from the driver’s seat.
“Is… where are the others?” Steve asked after a moment’s hesitation.
“They had anti-tank missiles,” Courtney answered for me.
Jamie and Mel winced, and the men in the back of the truck lowered their heads at hearing of the loss of people they had worked with, lived with. Steve choked up and silent tears fell from his eyes. I knew why, but I might have been the only one. Jamie looked at her husband, and in an instant, I realized that he hadn’t told her. Hadn’t had that talk yet. Like Courtney had tried to save me before, I was going to help this man.
“We’ve lost so many since the EMP,” I said, clasping his shoulder with my hand, “and it never gets easier losing men. Trust me, I know.”
Hopefully, that would be enough. As he wiped at his face, he took a deep breath and looked at me, nodding. Message received, was what that look conveyed to me.
“What happened at the farm? Why are all of you out here?” I asked.
“They came for us, just like you said. We blew the first charge as a troop carrier went over. Dick, I think we used too much,” Jamie answered. “Then, about a mile away, the secondary charge went up, flipping two of the trucks that had decided to keep going. Nobody… It was really hot. We thought if the wind changed directions the fire would spread to the farm, but
…”
“Nobody was left,” I finished for her.
They all nodded.
“The wind shifted and we’ve been firefighting for an hour now. That wasn’t a fight, Dick, that was a massacre.”
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “Any of ours hurt?”
He shook his head no.
“Why were there so few vehicles?” Courtney asked me. “It sounded like over a dozen passed us as we left the area.”
“I don’t know. Maybe they turned off and headed south? But we didn’t really get a good count of how many passed us. We were trying to hide out, more than anything else.”
“We heard word of them bugging out, and you’re right, Dick, they headed south. I was on the radio, monitoring everything, and folks I know on the horn reported a convoy heading that way, sixty miles away.”
“So, what’s that mean for the camp?” I asked, “We probably disabled everything we could there. How many guards do you figure are left?”
I asked Steve this, because he was looking off into the distance, and unless he wanted to tell his wife about his affair, he needed to keep things in focus. With Frankie dead, he may not ever need to burden her with knowing that her husband had thought her dead, and had replaced her spot in bed with a younger woman.
“Not that many, not according to the uniforms we saw in the carrier. It was probably half the contingent of the… and the other half…” he stumbled over his words.
“Ok. So, you guys are heading there to recon or are you…?” Courtney asked, letting the words trail off into a question that I had been wondering myself.
Why were they out here, and why were the men in the back silent and uncomfortable, and the ladies out of the safety of the farm?
“When you guys didn’t come back, we found Mel trying to hotwire Dad’s car,” Jamie answered.
Mel shot her a withering glare. “Mom, they weren’t home yet and it would take a NUKE to kill Dick. I knew they were stuck, and you two were busy.”
“So, you decided to do your own rescue mission?” I asked her. “Do you even know how to drive, kiddo?”
“This one’s an automatic,” she said proudly, and I had to smile at that.
A lot of post apocalypse cars and trucks were predominantly stick shifts for some reason.
“So, why did you let the women come?” I asked Steve sharply.
One of the deputies coughed while muttering something that suspiciously sounded like “asshole” and I looked at him sharply. He turned his head, his ears turning pink. The urge to beat his ass came and went quickly.
“With a bum leg, it was either ride bitch or let them go alone. Jamie pushed the kid out of the driver’s side when she convinced her she’d drive, and the guys wouldn’t let me leave without them.”
“Rescue party. Search and Rescue,” Mel said. “You wouldn’t have left it to fate, not if it was us out there.”
“No,” I said after a long moment. “I wouldn’t have left you two out there.”
“Get in,” Steve said, nodding to the back of the bed of the truck, “and we can go over it some more back at the farm. I’m just worried that later on they’ll be coming back with more troops from somewhere.”
That sounded credible, and I nodded.
“Thanks, guys,” I said into the cab of the truck, and smacked the door panel as I headed back to the tailgate.
The back was pretty full, so I dropped the tailgate and hopped on it, letting my feet dangle. Courtney joined me and together we put our rifles across our laps as Jamie executed a pretty good U’ie in the middle of the road and headed back.
“Do you think they’ll be back later on?” Courtney asked me as the wind whipped around us.
“I don’t think so. Not unless the vehicles that went south hook back around. I shot the shit out of everything at the front gate. The trucks that came must have been the farthest ones out, where I couldn’t get the armor piercing rounds at an angle to shoot them.”
We slowed where an enormous crater had taken out the middle of the road. The truck could only pass by going to the far corner and then riding on the median. To go any further, would have meant going through the corn, not something we ended up having to do, thanks to Jamie’s fancy driving. It amazed me that the barrel of ANFO had created all that destruction, but what I didn’t see was the troop carrier or APC or whatever it was they had had to use the demolitions on.
“Where is it?” Courtney asked me as I was trying to figure it out.
I stood, stepping back into the bed, and looked. In the corn, about twenty rows in was a smoking vehicle, most of the fire around it having burned itself out.
“Over there,” I said pointing.
Courtney joined me and whistled softly.
“Do you think you had them use enough?”
I let out a little chuckle and turned to her.
“No,” I said smiling.
We hit a bump and somebody behind me grabbed onto the back of my shirt before I could stumble, and I thanked him and sat back down.
“Let’s rest up and we’ll talk about what comes next, after we get to the farmhouse.”
“I just wish we would have come back with Frankie and Crowder,” she said, flopping down next to me.
“Me too, kid. Me, too.”
The men who were dispatched to do mop up duties on the DHS and NATO attackers were back early. There had been only one survivor and not much in the way of salvageable materials. More than once, people complained about using too much ANFO, but in a joking manner. They knew that if every vehicle had rolled that had been planning to, the farm would have been overrun, without the tricks and traps that had been set in advance.
After a day’s rest, three quarters of the men left at the farm went to the FEMA camp to scout how many guards were there. There was a lot of radio chatter and the name Offutt Air Force Base came up a lot, especially on the scrambled channels that the DHS and the NATO troops had been using. Steve wanted to recover the bodies of Frankie and Crowder, and I’d told him where to find Frankie in relation to the wreckage.
But we never got a chance to go in person. Radio intercepts suggested a ton of movement, and we were only mentioned once in relation to the troop movements. That had me stumped, so I decided to go check things out and listen in, live, instead of through the hourly briefings that Steve had shared earlier. There was only one problem: the long range radio equipment was in the bunker, with the antenna running from the barn’s roof to a telephone pole, so cleverly hidden that the only way it would have been found out, was if a lineman had come out to service the now non-working electrical service.
“Why do you look so green, Dick?” Courtney asked me, “You’d think you’d be ok with going underground.”
I nodded and got up from where I had been resting. Getting older, it seemed like I did more resting than not, but then again, how many guys my age were still running, gunning and getting shot up, dinged and beaten on a regular basis? Sure, I was a little apprehensive about going down into the bunker, but for a lot of different reasons, and none of them had to do with my own fears.
“Let’s go, just watch our backs down there. We’ve still got a lot of people that are pissed with us, and Scott’s wife and kids are down there.”
“Is he the dude that Doc shot?”
I nodded. Scott had been a hothead, an oxygen thief of the worst sort, but I doubted he’d been evil. He was a father, and probably in his little warped mind, had thought that shooting me had been the right thing to do, but he’d paid for his belief with his life. Now, I was walking into the lion’s den, where I may or may not run into an angry mob. Still, getting the intel about the DHS and NATO forces secondhand wasn’t cutting it. Besides, I could get on the horn and maybe do a little poking of my own. It was getting later on in the day, and I knew I should hurry, or Beth would have our hides for missing supper.
“Just keep an eye on things. I’m going to play with the radio.”
“I didn’t think you knew how to
use them?”
“I know the basics. I mean, I’m not going to kick Steve’s radio guys out. I’m sure he’s got two operators down there monitoring things most of the time. It’s what we would have done.”
“He was pretty smart for getting into HAM radio stuff, then? I always thought those people…” she let the words trail off and turned sort of red in the face.
“Were dorky?” I asked her, chuckling as she nodded. “Come on. Let’s go see this bunker.”
We left the house, and for the first time, walked to the barn together. I’d never been inside, and although Courtney had, in the time since we’d been back, she hadn’t been inside the bunker. She knew where it was though, so I followed her. Turned out the barn looked a lot like any old barn on the inside. Wooden rails separated what looked like horse stalls, and a couple had horses in them, something I’d missed seeing around the property while I had been recovering. The smell of manure was a little overpowering in the closed up barn, but as we approached, one of the horses whinnied and pushed its nose over the partition I was walking past.
I felt its warm breath on my shoulder and neck and turned, taking half a step back. I almost stumbled, but Courtney grabbed me by the shoulders and steadied me.
“He’s just getting a whiff of you. You never been around horses?”
“Not this close,” I admitted, “Camels, yes, horses…”
“You’re a good one, aren’t you?” Courtney said, reaching down into a galvanized metal trashcan that had been set just outside of the stall and pulled up a handful of dark, sweet smelling grain.
I almost pulled her hand back when she offered it up to the horse, but it gently took the grain off her hand, licking it. I was a little dumbfounded, and wondered what sort of history this woman had where she had such an affinity for large animals.
The Devil Dog Trilogy: Out Of The Dark Page 47
