Wasteland Marshals

by Gail Z. Martin

  Lucas and Shane left their horses and followed their escort toward the unassuming building that served as the palace. It looked more like a bunker, made of cement block, painted white, with square towers on either end that served as watch posts. Flags and banners were the only adornments, besides a mural on the entry walls that showed what the gathering at Cooper’s Lake had looked like Before.

  A glorious mismatch of furnishings of all styles and colors filled the public rooms of the large, one-story building. The palace housed a courtroom, a council chamber, a few offices, the king’s small apartment, and a large gathering room.

  Kevin Henderson had been a tenured history professor in medieval studies Before. He’d been a long-time member of the Organization of Historic Interpretation, and one of the local group’s leaders. Between his even temperament and his somewhat encyclopedic knowledge of how rulers had governed—for better and worse—Kevin had been elected king, by unanimous vote.

  Now, the King of Butler Highlands looked more like a harried disaster relief organizer than a monarch. He wore a loose tunic over a pair of khaki pants and work boots. Collar-length, graying dark hair was mussed, as if he’d run his hands through it in frustration. He pushed his gold wire-rimmed glasses up his nose as he spoke to the people gathered around him, who were ready to head out into the storm.

  “Make sure the people in more fragile housing come to the palace or go into the tunnels,” Kevin ordered. “And the others need to shelter in place. Clear the open areas. Close the storm shutters. Consider it an emergency.”

  “How can we help, Your Majesty?” Lucas asked.

  Kevin looked relieved at their offer. “Shane and Lucas—I can’t say that I’m sorry the storm brought you to us. We’ll need all the help we can get. Go with the guards. Get people to safety. We’ve always got folks who don’t want to believe the warnings.”

  The wind drove the rain sideways. Bells clanged and sirens screamed in warning, loud enough to be heard over the storm. Lucas and Shane darted through the rain, soaked to the skin, to escort stragglers to shelter.

  Lucas had to lean against the wind to keep moving, at enough of an angle that if the storm stopped suddenly, he would have fallen flat on his face. It reminded him of the time he and Shane had ridden out a hurricane in Miami when they were babysitting a key witness in a drug cartel case.

  Only then, they’d been on the coast, where storms like this were normal. But increasingly violent storms were part of the domino effect of the Events, one disaster creating another. And the first, initial Cataclysm had wiped out FEMA and the communication and power grid, so surviving relief efforts were quickly overwhelmed. Since then, every area had been on its own to face increasingly volatile weather.

  The wind snapped a tall wooden tent support with a crack like gunfire, and Lucas flinched. He and Shane trod through rapidly rising water toward a mother and two children who were soaked to the skin and struggling against the wind. Lucas took the children—one on his back and one in his arms—while Shane wrapped an arm around the woman’s waist to keep her on her feet as they guided them to shelter. As soon as they handed off the family, they headed back outside.

  Rain fell in gray sheets, and hail clattered on rooftops as the temperature fell. Across the compound, Lucas saw men struggling to get horses, donkeys, and cows into barns, while others attempted to herd the sheep and goats.

  Before the Events, when Cooper’s Lake was a summer campground, and the Organization held a two-week re-enactment, most of the participants lived in big canvas tents, making the grounds look like a scene from a medieval movie drama. When the kingdom became a permanent enclave, the re-enactors worked together to gradually replace the tents and portable shelters with more solid buildings.

  The storm was testing the strength of the enclave’s construction. Lucas knew that anything built after the Events was strictly do-it-yourself, without inspectors or building codes, or professional crews. If the wind and hail didn’t do damage, the rush of flood water as the storm gullies swelled past capacity was likely to strain even well-built dwellings.

  “Shit!” Lucas cried out, flinching as a wooden house groaned and then collapsed.

  “You think anyone’s in there?” Shane yelled over the howling wind.

  “We’d better check.” Lucas struggled against the wind, with Shane right behind him. He had to walk at an angle to stay on his feet, and the rain lashed his skin, as bits of hail stung where they hit.

  He and Shane fought their way toward the wreckage, and Lucas heard a thin wail, barely audible above the wind.

  “I heard something!” he yelled to Shane. They waded into the wreckage, shouting to let survivors know they were nearby. A woman’s scream cut through the storm, guiding Lucas and Shane toward a front room. They began to dig, throwing broken boards and splintered supports out of the way, until they could make out a shape beneath the wreckage. Part of a wall had fallen, with debris on top, but Lucas figured that they might be able to lift a section of a wooden door to get to the people trapped underneath.

  “We can’t clear all of this away—the pieces are too big,” Shane warned.

  Lucas nodded. “Okay. You hold up this end of the door, and I’ll go under to get them out.” He sized up the opening, hoping he could fit through and make an escape passage. Shane put his back and shoulders into lifting up a section of debris, and Lucas crouched down to fit underneath. He spotted a woman and a small child huddled next to a desk that had kept the wall from crushing them but had also blocked their escape.

  “Come with me.” Lucas held out his hand.

  A boy who looked to be about seven years old scrambled past him, and Lucas grabbed the woman’s arm. “Are you hurt?” he asked. She shook her head. “Then come on. We don’t have much time.”

  At first, he feared that she might have been pinned by other debris, but then she got on her hands and knees and crawled toward him.

  “Hurry up!” Shane shouted. “I can’t hold this much longer!”

  Lucas grabbed the woman’s wrist and pulled her to him, wrapping himself around her as he hustled her out. Just after they cleared the wreckage, Shane let go, and the door slammed down with a crash.

  “Come on,” Lucas said, holding on to the woman and child tightly. “We need to get you to shelter.”

  By the time they reached the palace, the public areas and gathering room were filled with frightened, rain-soaked people huddling together by the fireplace. Kevin was in the midst of the chaos, directing kitchen workers to dole out portions of soup and other volunteers to distribute blankets.

  “Is this everyone?” Lucas asked dubiously. The room was full, but not crowded enough to account for all the residents of the kingdom.

  King Kevin shook his head. “No. Just the ones whose houses might not stand up to the storm. The others stayed where they were, and some went down below, into the bunker that connects to the old mine tunnels.” He sighed. “There’ve been two casualties, both hit with flying debris. I really miss the old days, when storms weren’t usually life or death situations.”

  “What can we do?” Shane asked.

  Kevin chuckled. “Nothing much left to do except try to make them comfortable and ride out the storm,” he said. “I apologize, but I had to give away the guest room. Mine, too. So we’ll all just have to find a nice spot on the floor for the night.”

  Lucas and Shane pitched in, helping to reunite families that had been separated by the storm, or giving a hand as volunteers passed out blankets and cold provisions, while the storm raged outside. Children cried, and adults talked in hushed tones.

  Finally, when there was nothing else to be done, Lucas and Shane found an empty spot in the back hallway and sank to the floor with their backs to the wall.

  “You know, I don’t think I could do it,” Lucas said. “Live like the Amish at Green Farm or the folks here. It’s one thing to go without the conveniences because we have to, because the system broke. But if I could have them back again—”<
br />
  “I’d take it in a New York minute,” Shane agreed. “But then again, you didn’t exactly enjoy roughing it, even when we were deployed.”

  “You have a job, you do it. But man, some of those guys—like Wisnewski, remember him? I swear he wanted to get in touch with his inner caveman. He was actually disappointed when we went back to base.”

  “He’s probably doing just fine now,” Shane replied. “Or, he got what he thought he could handle but couldn’t, and he’s holed up crying in the corner somewhere, losing his shit.”

  They were silent for a few moments. “What do you think about this Raven Rock ‘Site R’ stuff?” Lucas asked.

  Shane shrugged. “Sounds suspicious for them to just go dark. I think we should look into it. But it might not end up being anything unusual. They could have gotten sick and died out. Or something might have gone wrong with the bunker, and they had to leave. All those things have happened to other groups.”

  “It just seems strange, in a location like that,” Lucas mused. “I mean, if it was intended as a safe haven for the D.C. brass, you’d think it would have medical facilities and all the best supplies.”

  “There’s enough weird stuff going on, I don’t think anyone could have anticipated everything that could happen,” Shane replied. “The weather’s never acted like this since people started keeping records. Places that didn’t use to get earthquakes get them now. And some of the diseases that mutated…”

  “I get the point.” Lucas didn’t like to think about the changes more than the job required, which was far beyond what he sometimes thought his sanity could handle.

  Were we the lucky ones to survive this long? Maybe the truly lucky got a fast death, instead of a slow one. Lucas tried to shift his thoughts away from the shadows that haunted his dreams. They had a job to do, a purpose that mattered. And considering how many people had lost everyone they cared about to the apocalypse, Lucas counted himself damn fortunate to still have Shane fighting beside him.

  “You know, this isn’t the worst place we’ve ridden out a storm,” Lucas said, his voice thick with exhaustion.

  “Definitely not,” Shane replied. Lucas knew his partner remembered all too well taking refuge in caves, basements, and abandoned buildings that even the rats had deserted, back in the early days right after the Events.

  Lucas’s stitches ached, he felt their ride in every muscle, and he’d twisted his back getting the woman and her child to safety. His clothing was still damp enough to chafe. Thank fuck for wool—still holds warmth. Lucas let his head fall back, making himself as comfortable as he could and fell asleep before he could complain about Shane’s snoring.

  In his dreams, Lucas saw the hotel room of the Holiday Inn Express near Youngstown where he and Shane were holed up for the night with the witness they were escorting. They’d pulled over in a snowstorm bad enough that Lucas didn’t want to push his luck, even with the four-wheel drive on their Chevy Suburban SUV.

  The room was comfortable, in a practical, no-frills sort of way. They’d gone to a drive-through before the storm got too bad and raided the snacks at the hotel’s small convenience store before they hunkered down for the night. Two beds, one for the witness, and one that Lucas and Shane would take turns sleeping in while the other stood watch.

  He’d turned on the TV while they ate, too tired from driving to flip channels away from the news station that came on automatically. Lucas remembered that he was eating a bag of barbecued potato chips when everything changed.

  Their government-issued, secure cell phones both went off with an emergency signal at the same time. Shane and Lucas exchanged a worried look, reaching for their phones in unison.

  “Washington is under attack. Do not come in. Repeat, do not come in. Find a secure location outside of a city center and await further instructions.”

  “Oh my God!” Vinnie Scarpelli, their witness, pointed at the TV screen, pale as a dead fish. Lucas and Shane turned to watch footage of buildings crumbling in the nation’s capital, as the bombs went off…

  Lucas jerked awake, sweating and heaving for breath, disoriented for a moment until he remembered where he was. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to block out the ache that the dream always brought, the longing for a normality they had taken for granted and would never have again. No matter how often the dreams came, snippets of his life Before, the feeling of loss never dimmed.

  The big room was dark, filled with the sound of steady breathing and the smell of wet clothing. Outside, the storm still roared, battering the cement-block building with hail that sounded like gunfire as it pelted the roof.

  Shane’s troubled murmurs roused Lucas, and he looked toward where his friend sat beside him, twitching in a restless sleep. Shane’s deep frown and his worried tone told Lucas his partner’s dreams were uneasy.

  “Hey,” he said quietly, bumping Shane’s shoulder. “Wake up.”

  Shane didn’t wake, and he kept on mumbling, growing more agitated. Lucas moved to crouch in front of him and took Shane by the shoulders, shaking him gently. “Come on. Wake up.”

  Shane woke with a gasp, like a swimmer rising out of the water and nearly out of air. “What?” he asked, not quite awake.

  “You had a bad dream. So did I. But you were mumbling, and it didn’t look like fun.”

  Shane shook his head as if he were trying to clear water from his ears. “I just…it wasn’t a dream.”

  “Another vision,” Lucas said, worried. “Is the song back?”

  “Yeah, but it’s different,” Shane said. “Louder here than before, and it blends with the sound of the storm.”

  “You’re getting the visions more often.”

  Shane looked away, then nodded. “Yeah. I didn’t say anything because it didn’t seem important. And it still might not be. I mean, we’ve seen some weird shit since everything changed. Maybe my brain is just trying to process it.”

  “But your ‘intuition’ has been getting stronger, and I’ve seen more ghosts,” Lucas countered. “I don’t think we can just brush it off.”

  He shifted to see Shane better. “Try to remember the dream. What happened?”

  Shane took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “We were on a trail, going into the woods. I didn’t recognize where we were, but it looked like a park. And I felt like there was a voice, speaking to me, just beyond the range I could hear what it was saying. That’s it. I didn’t feel threatened, just that it called to me.”

  “I was going to suggest going to see the witches in Bedford, to find out if they picked up anything about Raven Rock. I think they’d be the perfect ones to ask about the ‘songs’ you’re hearing,” Lucas said.

  Shane shrugged uncomfortably. “Maybe. I guess. We’ll see. Seems kinda unimportant, with everything else that’s going on.”

  “It’s on the way to Gettysburg, and we’ll need a place to re-provision,” Lucas argued.

  “The witches still give me the creeps,” Shane admitted.

  Lucas raised an eyebrow. “You get visions. I see ghosts. I think we passed creepy a long time ago.”

  5

  By morning, the storm had passed. Worried residents climbed stiffly from their sleeping spots on the floor and ventured out to see what the winds and water had made of their enclave. Kevin was busy from daybreak, directing efforts to clear away the damage and determine how much would require rebuilding.

  “We can stay for a while if you need extra hands,” Lucas offered.

  Kevin shook his head. “Thank you, but you’ve got more important things to do, and we have plenty of folks to do the work.” He sighed, looking out over the wet and windswept “kingdom.” “So far, it’s just some roofs gone, a couple of older wooden buildings down. Two casualties. It could have been much worse.”

  “Have you had any other visitors?” Shane asked. “News?”

  Kevin nodded. “Had a couple of peddlers through here a week or two ago. What they’d heard from New England isn’t good. Early
winter blizzards and rising storm surge. Anyone who hadn’t pulled inland before doesn’t have much choice now.”

  “We’ve heard similar about much of the coast,” Lucas said.

  “So I’ve been told.” Kevin sighed. “I’m also hearing reports of some enclaves going dark. No one’s been out to confirm. But we haven’t been able to raise them on the shortwave radio, or the emergency telegraph.”

  “If you know the locations of the enclaves you’ve lost touch with, we can check in on them if our route takes us that way,” Lucas offered.

  Kevin rattled off some names, and Lucas jotted them down. “It’ll take us a bit with the circuit we ride, but we’ll see what we can find out,” he promised. “And we’ll give these locations to the IT Priests. If there’s a college nearby, they can pass the word along and get someone to check.”

  “Thank you. I’m glad you paid us a visit, even if the storm drove you here,” Kevin said. “We do all right; I shouldn’t complain, and I’m not, really. But we’re cut off these days, like everyone. It’s nice to hear that there’s a world outside the stockade.”

  “Not as much of one as there used to be, but plenty of people doing their fucking best to survive,” Shane replied.

  Kevin nodded gravely. “So say we all.”

  “It’s louder here. Are you sure you can’t hear anything?” Shane asked after they’d ridden a short distance from Cooper’s Lake.

  Lucas shook his head. “I don’t hear anything except birds. But does it matter that you keep saying you hear something when we’re in a forest or near parkland? Because we’re coming up on Moraine.”

  “Maybe. I don’t have any idea,” Shane admitted.

  Lucas shrugged. “I figured we should stop in to see how Mitchell was doing, anyhow, since we’re riding past. Maybe he’ll know something about it.”

  Shane looked uncomfortable but nodded. “I guess it couldn’t hurt.”