by J. W. Vohs
Lori finally decided the issue. “Look, we have to stop Barnes from crossing the river; I know that as well as the rest of you. Everything I’ve done since the outbreak has been to protect Blake and the girls. Hell, even those two rapists I put down on Middle Bass Island was done to protect other people’s daughters in the future. But as far as I know I don’t have innocent blood on my hands, and I don’t want any. I don’t want any of you to have to deal with that either—it’ll give you nightmares. I saw it happen in Iraq. I don’t know if these guys qualify as innocent; they’ve certainly flown missions for Barnes, but they’re defenseless right now. We can always use more pilots too. Let’s just follow our lawyer’s advice and put them in a boat out there. Jack will have someone here in a few hours, and my gut tells me these two will still be here when they arrive.”
Carter knew Lori was right in her assessment of the situation. Of course, he was right too. Sometimes there was no great option. But the odds were really good that Jack would find these airmen instead of Barnes, especially since they hadn’t seen any sign of the mad general except for the bridge guards. Finally he relented, “All right, we’ll go with David’s plan.”
Thirty minutes later the two teams were ready to move on from the Hawesville area, sharing final words before going their separate ways. Carter promised Lori, “We’ll look over the next bridge real good before we pass it by. If anybody’s up there we’ll wait for you and help take ‘em out. If not, we’re headin’ for the Mississippi as fast as we can.”
Lori gave the tired, gore-crusted Ranger a small smile. “Thanks for everything you did here. My team couldn’t have done it without you.
Carter shrugged, “All y’all that survived that trip over from Cleveland are some flat-out killers. Most of ya don’t care for guns, but when it gets up close and personal . . .”
She just nodded, “That’s why we need you old Army guys; you know how to shoot. But don’t try to act like you folks don’t know how to kill these critters with blades and axes and all the other toys Jack designed. Hell, the story all the newcomers want to hear a second time is the about the Battle of The Castle; eighty-six soldiers against ten thousand infected.”
Carter chuckled through the grime on his face, “Yeah, we laid a whoopin’ on ‘em that day, well, two days. They weren’t like the hunters we face now, though. Purty soon a bullet’s gonna be hard to find and we’ll have to do all our fightin’ with medieval weapons. We’ll lose more people in the battles to come.”
Lori lost her smile as she thought about the terrible odds facing the people she cared for so deeply. “Well, when the choice is an impossible fight or slavery . . . ”
“Yep,” Carter replied. “We fight.”
Back at the Brandenburg bridge, Jack and his fighters were blissfully unaware of the brutal fight taking place to the west, using the hours of darkness to continue strengthening their fortifications as well as sending out a team of scouts to find Barnes. With most of his best soldiers engaged in reconnoitering the Ohio River and blowing bridges, Jack’s options in choosing someone to lead the dangerous scouting mission into Kentucky were definitely limited. He hated to admit it, as he felt extremely protective of Luke at all times, but the teen was by far the best soldier available for this type of work. The kid was eerily quiet and stealthy in the field, and, quite obviously, when he had to fight he was the deadliest of the humans gathered at the bridge. Jack still believed he could do a better job of leading the mission than Luke, but as commander of the entire operation he didn’t have that option.
As for the rest of the team, Jack allowed Luke to choose the people he was most comfortable with. Chad Greenburg had plenty of former soldiers and Marines in his outfit, but Luke hadn’t had the time to get to know any of them very well in the days following their arrival during the Battle of Fort Wayne. Zach Kinstler and Maddy Johnson, two eighteen-year-old hunter-killers who’d been with Jack since the early days of the outbreak, had hitched a ride down to the river with the caravan of vehicles without permission. They’d been keeping a low profile since they’d arrived, hoping to avoid a confrontation with Jack that they knew would be unpleasant at best, and at worst could end up with them being sent home at the earliest possible opportunity. Their hopes had been in vain, however, as Jack sought them out late in the afternoon and told them that if he couldn’t count on them to follow orders as soldiers they would be permanently assigned to sanitation work back at the settlement.
In reality Jack wasn’t actually upset with the pair since they weren’t part of any of the established squads remaining in Fort Wayne to guard the civilians. In fact, the two young warriors often found themselves working as Jack’s unofficial aides, and in battle usually ended up at his side. They could both fight like devils, and they were definitely on the bright side in the brains department. Even more importantly, Zach and Luke had spent many hours training together. They were not only becoming friends, they were also learning to anticipate each other’s battle moves and trust that the other would always have his back in a fight. Zach and Maddy had faced more than a few skirmishes together, so Jack wasn’t surprised when Luke said he wanted the two young Hoosiers for his scouting mission. In spite of the dread he felt at the thought of sending the three teens on such a dangerous task, Jack knew that all were capable, natural-born warriors. He chose to respect Luke’s wishes and summoned Zach and Maddy to share the news and carefully detail their mission to locate Barnes and his troops.
The three young fighters were packed and ready to go an hour after being told to prepare, excited over the prospect of being on the move after being stuck in Fort Wayne for weeks. None of them had been looking forward to sitting around the bridge-site for up to a week as they waited for Barnes to arrive; plus, they sensed that this mission gave them a chance to really help Jack and the others achieve their overall goals down here.
The small team was heading out on foot, so they were limited in equipment as to what they could carry. Small, pump-style filters would provide safe drinking water, so they only needed to pack their Nalgene bottles and fill them as necessary. Food was a simple choice, with thousands of MREs looted from the National Guard armory on the site, they just cherry-picked their favorites and moved on to weapons. They all greatly preferred their medieval weaponry to guns, but they also realized the impracticality of most of their favorite killing-implements on this type of mission. Luke carried his bow and several dozen arrows, and they each carried short swords and daggers. Zach was determined to carry a small war-hammer with which he had crushed the skulls of dozens of infected since the outbreak began; he said that he didn’t care about the extra weight. After that it was silenced .22s, with plenty of extra clips and ammunition.
Small tarps and space blankets for sleeping rounded out their kits, with extra socks and underwear being the only clothes they would carry. Small radios would allow for communications between one another, but after a day or two they expected to lose contact with the bridge. The distance travelled, combined with the hilly terrain, would effectively block the relatively weak signals. Luke managed to round up several sticks of dynamite before leaving, just in case he found anything out there that needed blowing up.
Jack insisted on a final briefing with the team before they headed out, trying to set some rules that he hoped would help insure their success and keep them safe at the same time. The trio pored over a map of Kentucky south of the Ohio, and they all agreed that Elizabethtown should be their primary destination. I-65 and a number of other important roads passed through the city, and, once again, geography seemed to dictate where large ground forces would be forced to travel.
Elizabethtown was thirty-plus miles southeast of the bridge, and Jack decided that the fact that Luke and his friends would be well out of communications range was unacceptable. Therefore, he decided to send two of Greenburg’s men out with the team, eventually to be placed on high ground somewhere near the midway point between the city and the bridge. These two men would be able to stay i
n contact with Luke’s team and relay information between the teens and Jack. When told of this development, the three young fighters looked at one another with shared embarrassment, silently wondering why they hadn’t thought of such a great idea.
Finally, Jack made his last point before sending the team on their way. “I’ve seen all of you fight. You three are as good as, or better than, any soldiers I’ve ever seen in action. In other words, you don’t have to try to impress me with a body count on this mission; I’m not sending you out to fight this time. I need to know where Barnes is, and I need intel. We need to know the size of his army, how many humans are with him, what resources he has, and where they all seem to be headed. Stay invisible, and once you’ve achieved your objective I want you to get back here and help us defend this bridge.”
He stared intensely at each of the young soldiers for what became an awkward minute of silence. He then bit his lip and cast his eyes to the floor before shaking his head and muttering, “Please be careful. Now, get the hell out of here.”
Luke and his friends didn’t need to be told twice, all of them more than ready to hit the road and determined to cover as many miles as possible before dawn. Figuring that they had four hours until sunrise, Luke set a pace of five miles an hour and allowed no breaks. By the time they reached a small hill just north of a group of subdivisions the map called Rineyville, situated about ten miles northwest of Elizabethtown, all three were fully winded and missing the relative comforts of the camp back at the river. The two radiomen had been left behind on a patch of wooded high ground five miles back, and the first thing Luke did after stopping his team for the day was conduct a communications check. He was pleased to learn that he was indeed able to reach Jack through what he called their “relay station,” and after briefing Greenburg’s men he told Zach and Maddy to find someplace they could shelter for the day. While there were plenty of houses and other buildings nearby, none of the teens wanted to expend even more energy on a stealthy approach and dangerous clearing of rooms in the growing light of dawn. They finally settled in the middle of a large copse of trees and bushes, and after setting up a guard rotation and scarfing down a quick meal, they crawled under tarps and slept fitfully in the cold shadows.
By late afternoon they were well-fed, reasonably rested, and anxious to move again, but as close as they already were to their objective, and considering the fact that they had so many advantages operating under the cover of darkness, they accepted the reality that they were better off waiting a few more hours. Maddy had brought along a high-powered spotting scope picked up in the ruins of a Sporting Goods store in Columbia City during a long range patrol a few months earlier. She hadn’t found much use for the powerful optics until now, having set up an observation post looking over the relatively flat land heading toward Elizabethtown. After hours of fruitless watching she finally called Luke and Zach over to look at something, the excitement in her voice told them that whatever she was viewing was important.
When Luke reached her position, Maddy stepped back and motioned toward the horizon. “Take a look out there; this is freaking amazing!”
After taking a few seconds to allow his eyes to adjust to the scope, Luke could see at least two helicopters, flying low. A black dot even further in the distance was probably a third. The choppers were at least five miles to the southwest, maybe further, and they were flying the broad, circular pattern that Zach called “the round-up.”
“Those birds are rounding up infected,” Maddy explained. “Me and Zach have seen it before, back in Dekalb County, before a big attack on The Castle.”
“Damn,” Zach grumbled, “I guess this as far as we go.”
Luke stepped away from the spotting scope and shook his head. “They’re pretty far to the west right now, and we haven’t seen a single hunter since we left the river last night. Those choppers could be gathering infected for any number of reasons, but they aren’t doing their round-up along our route to Elizabethtown.”
Maddy sounded skeptical when she asked, “You’re going to suggest that we continue south when we know there are thousands of hunters being gathered a few miles away?”
Luke shrugged and offered an alternative he knew would never fly. “No, you two stay here and keep watch; I’ll head south myself as soon as it’s dark.”
“The hell you will,” Zach argued. “Jack told us to stick together and that’s what we’re gonna do.”
Maddy angrily jabbed her index finger in the air, stopping a few inches from Luke’s face, “Listen up; he’s right. Jack would be insanely pissed if we let you run off on your own, probably right into the middle of thousands of hunters.”
Before Luke could respond, Zach added, “And those helicopters don’t belong to anyone who isn’t working for Barnes. We’ve found him.”
Luke shook his head. “We haven’t found him yet, Zach. I’ll call this in, but our mission isn’t over or compromised. We don’t know where Barnes’ main force is, and we haven’t even found his livestock herds. For all we know, those choppers are just out clearing the way for the humans driving the cattle. Heck, they could be doing anything over there. Might be organizing a feint to the west, or preparing to attack a settlement in that direction . . . we just don’t know.”
Zach glanced at Maddy, who nodded once. He looked back to Luke, “Fine, we’re all in agreement. We’ll go on.”
“We are not using a helicopter for taxi service,” Deb stated firmly. “Father O’Brien will let us know what he finds out, and we can organize a standard expedition if it becomes necessary.” She looked Christy squarely in the eye. “It is not necessary right now. We have other, more pressing matters to deal with—like what we should do about our neighbors across the river.”
Christy stared back defiantly, but she knew it was no use to argue. Deb was right; at this point, tagging along on a fact-finding trip through the Great Lakes wasn’t a necessity. Father O’Brien and his associates were quite capable of mapping out potential hideaways and establishing friendly relations with other pockets of survivors. Suggesting that they use one of the helicopters for non-emergency travel was foolish. She suddenly felt embarrassed.
“You’re right, of course. I think I’m just a little stir-crazy sitting here waiting while David and the others are out fighting to keep us safe.” Christy appealed to Sal, “My mom is back in Noble County, on the ranch with the horses. She knows more about Manitoulin Island than I do, and she knows more about my dad’s conversation with my cousin, Michael. Can they spare you around here to come out there with me to talk to my mom? I need to feel useful, but I guess I also need a clear head to keep me grounded.”
Hiram nodded to Sal. “Those other Smith brothers, Carey and Tom, have set up a terrific little shuttle for us. We boat up to a park not far from a damn—“
“Johnny Appleseed Park,” Deb interrupted. “They keep several vehicles there, so you tie up your boat and drive to the checkpoint near The Castle. Take 33 to 9; Vickie knows the route if she wants to tag along.”
“I think they want to get rid of me for a while, Sal,” Christy said lightheartedly. “Can’t say I blame them. So are you up for a little trip? I have a gut feeling that Manitoulin Island could be helpful to us in the future. Plus, just imagine if it were possible to find a place not destroyed by the infected . . .”
“I think you’re getting ahead of yourself,” Sal laughed, “but your enthusiasm is contagious. My head tells me that we’re chasing a pipe dream, but my heart always tells me to be hopeful. Besides, Vickie and I told Blake and Lori that we’d keep tabs on their girls, and, as you know, Blake took them to be with your mother at the ranch while they’re gone.”
“Seriously? I had no idea. That will be good for Mom.”
“They think they are there to help with the horses; they have no idea that Blake and Lori aren’t still here in Fort Wayne.” Sal cautioned, “Don’t let them find out otherwise.”
“Aye, Aye, Captain,” Christy saluted. “I guess this means
that your answer is yes. When can we leave?”
Sal thought for a minute before answering, “Let me check with Vickie, and maybe Sarah—she’s helping Redders with his research too. I’ll talk to Carey and let him know we’ll be making the trip. Right now, I think we should be able to leave first thing in the morning.”
CHAPTER 8
When darkness finally fell over the area, Luke, Zach, and Maddy continued southeast. Zach and Maddy were experienced enough to set aside their earlier opposition to the move and were now focused intently on the mission. After gaining their cooperation, Luke had grown silent, appearing to be lost in thought after completing the radio call to the relay men. He didn’t tell his two partners that he’d since turned off his radio so they couldn’t receive any potential message from Jack ordering them to abort the operation. He didn’t want to have to argue with Jack about the need to go on, which was mostly based on his intuition that the true purpose of this mission was still somewhere ahead of them.
The young soldiers moved slowly through the night, knowing that since they were only about ten miles from Elizabethtown, there was no need to rush their approach to the city. After an hour or so, they had covered a bit over a mile and were navigating their way through a small cluster of nice homes on the southern edge of Rineyville when Zach hissed for them to stop. He was tilting his head and raising his NVGs to look at the sky, one hand raised as a signal for the others to remain still.
