“Chloe,” Noah said. “Why don’t you head downstairs and take a break?” He expected an argument. Instead, their teenage daughter crawled along the antique runner to the top of the basement stairs.
In the silence following, Noah said, “In answer to your question…no. I don’t think this is gonna work.” He shrugged. The sound of buzzing outside from the drone’s little electric motor confirmed that Jake was keeping an eye on things. “All this…” Noah said, feeling utterly defeated. “I don’t know what I was thinking. How I thought this might work.”
“Don’t you dare!” Noah looked at his wife with a start. “You don’t have the right to give up.” She was angry…with him. “You don’t get to quit. You have to fight…for us!”
As if on cue, Jake shouted down from the tower. “More on the way! I count four!”
From the basement, Chloe cried, “Ahhhh!” The footfalls of her boots were heavy on the wooden treads until she got down on all fours, struggling to keep her rifle slung over her shoulder.
Natalie was first off the floor with her rifle. She glared once more at Noah before he followed and both ascended the spiral staircase to join Jake in the tower.
* * * *
Things grew worse as the evening wore on. The number of near misses mounted. Sometimes, the smack of a bullet a foot away was noted by a “Jeez!” or a “Shit!”; other times, they were too busy returning fire. But each close brush with death left its mark on its would-be victim, and doubly on their parents. After darkness fell, the cumulative toll of the fear, adrenaline, and stress was written on all four faces of the Miller family.
In between assaults, Noah began to prepare. Down in the basement, he distributed among the four huge backpacks of all the food, water, ammunition, and camping and survival supplies that would fit. Several times, he completed the process only to find that the packs were far too heavy. Out came water and some food. In went ammunition. The net savings in weight, therefore, was modest. He tucked a few small bars of gold into his pack, but left in the safe $9 million worth at the last quote he’d heard before the exchanges closed.
Another attack began with several shots fired by Jake from the tower. Noah grabbed his rifle and, on the spur of the moment, a nylon sack filled with hand grenades, courtesy of his sister Isabel’s Marine boyfriend. He hit the stairs just as all hell broke loose. “Noah! Noah!” Natalie was shouting from the tower. “There are a lot of them!”
He had left Chloe crouching beside the open front door peering into the darkness.
“Lock that door and keep low!” Noah shouted, panting as much from the anxiety as from exertion as he climbed the spiral staircase. In the tower, he found Natalie and Jacob blazing away, and ducked as grit from the stone wall above their heads rained down with each shot fired in return.
“They made it to the fence behind the barn!” Jake took the time away from his rifle to shout. “They’ve got big bolt cutters. We don’t have a shot from up here!”
Natalie never stopped firing. She barely winced as her face lit with each blast from her AR-15. If only she were a good shot.
Noah knelt above his prone wife and took aim. The security lamps in the trees around the property began to explode and fall dark as the attackers shot them out but revealed their positions with muzzle flashes.
“Noah!” Natalie took the time to say while inserting a new magazine into her rifle with quivering hands. “They’re coming inside! There are too many of them!”
There was motion inside the barn. The second time Noah saw it, he squeezed off a round. The barn flickered with a half dozen shots that forced him down behind the crenelated tower wall. Stones behind them spat debris from new pockmarks.
“Chloe!” Noah called down the stairs. “Get away from the front wall! They’re inside the fence! If you see movement, shoot through the door or windows!”
“Okay!”
Too many rounds hit the tower to raise a head to return fire. Natalie, Jake, and Noah all lay flat under a rain of fragments shot loose from the walls and roof above them. Noah dragged the nylon sack over and extracted a smooth, round grenade. Jake and Natalie stared back at him in amazement. Natalie nodded her encouragement. He grabbed the first grenade and its handle—its spoon—firmly in his right hand, and had to pull with effort the metal pin, bent ninety degrees, out through its hole. The unrelenting fire his way made exposing himself even for a quick throw dangerous, but the barn was a long way away.
Noah readied himself. “Chloe, get down!” he called out. In what he perceived was a slight lull, he rose to one knee and put everything he had into a throw, grunting as he flung the grenade as far as he could toward the barn. He dropped back to his belly and reached for another grenade.
The brief but shocking blast was of a higher order of magnitude than the firearms, even the shotguns, and it must’ve been triply stunning to the people in the barn, whom it silenced for a moment.
Noah threw another. From his high vantage, he saw it bounce once and skitter into the dark structure, which exploded in light and flame and boiled with smoke. Noah even heard a distinct scream. He grabbed another and, with less fear of being shot, hurled a third grenade, which again bounced inside. It burst with a chest thumping thud, and the barn became consumed in fire. “They’re running!” Jake said.
Natalie, Jake, and then Noah resumed firing. But they weren’t all running away. A few crossed from the barn toward the house. Most didn’t make it. One or two did. “They’re downstairs!” Natalie said, terrified, as the guns all fell silent. “Be careful.” Noah nodded and crawled toward the spiral staircase.
At the bottom, in the darkness, Noah got a wave from Chloe, who had taken cover behind a plush armchair in the living room opposite the double storm shutter clad windows. The twin sheets of metal were filled with holes, and bright light from the remaining security illumination and the fire in the barn shone through them like flickering stars. Noah heard Natalie ask Jake in a whisper if he saw anything, and Jake’s reply of, “Nuh-uh.”
Noah aimed his rifle at the front door. Propped up beside it, however, was the shotgun and, in a crouch, he went to get it.
“Dad. Dad!” came Chloe’s breathless whisper.
He returned to the living room in a crawl and she pointed at the windows. The light from holes was extinguished one by one as a human form pressed against the shutters and tried to peer into the room.
Quickly, before the form could disappear, Noah raised the shotgun, flicked the safety off, took aim at the target’s chest, and pulled the stiff trigger.
The roar and brilliant flash of the gun overwhelmed his senses to such an extent that he missed the recoil and only felt the pain in his shoulder when he coughed from the smoke. A tightly packed pattern of holes admitted even more light through the shutters where the attacker’s chest had been.
There was another, single shot from the tower. “Got him!” Natalie called out, presumably felling the last of the fleeing attackers. The blaze from the flaming barn danced across the living room walls. The apocalyptic light show in their darkened refuge’s living room made it official. Time to go, Noah now knew for sure.
Chapter 2
THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY
Infection Date 63, 2145 GMT (5:45 p.m. Local)
Emma Miller approached the ranch style home warily. At her side was Fred Walcott, the cowboy hat wearing local sheriff. Hiding in the thick woods were Emma’s former roommates at the NIH hospital in Bethesda—Dwayne Bullock, a Marine Lance Corporal and former Beijing embassy guard, and Samantha Brown, the slender twelve-year-old with every strand of her long blond hair in place. Her father had been the U.S. ambassador to China when she and then Dwayne had caught SED—Severe Encephalopathic Disease—from infection by Pandoravirus horribilis. Emma made sure Sam was behind cover. She was too high functioning an aide to lose. Not so Dwayne’s small militia of ragtag Infecteds—dullards all—who awaited
orders to attack.
“That’s far enough!” shouted the potbellied man in the front doorway maybe twenty yards away. He was obscured by the screen door and framed in the darkness of the home behind him, but it was clear that he held a long gun.
Walcott obviously knew the man. “Randy, we’re goin’ around, spreadin’ the word that there have been some changes in town.”
“What kinda changes, Sheriff?” There was a smaller figure beside him—Randy’s wife, Emma surmised.
“Well, the virus came through,” Walcott replied. “There was some trouble, but it’s mostly passed. This young woman here, Dr. Emma Miller, is in charge now.”
There was a brief, whispered exchange behind the screen door. “Who put her in charge?”
“I have a proposal to make,” Emma called out. “If you agree to abide by the Rules, we can all work together and survive.”
“Who’s we?” Randy asked, now pressing against the screen.
“The survivors,” Emma answered. “In this area.”
There was more whispering. “Are you infected?” came their next question. Emma caught Walcott’s questioning glance before she simply nodded. Randy stepped back into the shadows. The only thing they could see clearly now was the muzzle of his weapon. “Git the hell off my prop’ty, Walcott! What the hell do you think yer doin’ here?”
Walcott shrugged, and turned to leave until Emma said, “This is your last chance!”
They waited on more debate in low but urgent tones. Finally, Randy said, “What does that mean?”
“If you don’t join us, you’ll run out of food and supplies and try to come and take them. We can’t wait for that to happen. You’ll be a danger to the community. So, we’ll have to kill you all,” she said simply and honestly. They might as well have all the relevant information before they made their decision.
There were full-on arguments now from inside the house. “There’s a bunch of ’em in there,” Walcott said softly. He was fidgeting and growing increasingly anxious.
“Breath in through the nose, and out through the mouth,” Emma advised.
The door opened. Walcott flinched. Emma caught his hand before he drew his pistol. With parting arguments cast over their shoulders, four people emerged—a couple and a young boy and girl—and rapidly approached the infected emissaries, but not too closely. “We’ll join up,” the woman said.
“You’ll agree to abide by the Rules?” Emma asked.
The woman’s husband began to whisper something, but the woman gathered her two children into her arms and said, to Emma and Walcott, “You’ll treat us fair, right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Emma said. “The Rules will be clear. If you follow them, there will be no punishment and your needs will be taken care of to the maximum extent possible. If you break the Rules, however, the punishment could include death.”
The woman’s husband shot her a look. But his wife hugged her son and daughter to her as if they were human shields. “We agree.”
Walcott directed them off toward the flatbed of a pickup truck, politely keeping his distance and leaving them in the open air with the two other Uninfecteds who’d agreed so far. They exchanged nods of greeting but said nothing and stared at their feet.
Emma and Walcott met Dwayne by the highway. “I can’t tell how many are in there,” Emma said.
“Should I ask those people who just left?” Dwayne replied.
“No. Let’s not put their loyalty under too much stress yet. As a matter of fact,” Emma said, turning to Walcott, “have your deputy drive them into town before we kill everyone in that house.”
Walcott gave the orders. The pickup departed with its wide-eyed Uninfecteds. “It still makes sense,” Walcott said, “to just infect ’em all. I don’t trust ’em otherwise.”
“And you trust Infecteds?” Dwayne asked.
“Infecteds will kill ya at the drop of a hat,” the sheriff replied, “but they’re not as devious. I never know what Uninfecteds are thinkin’. Plannin’. Infecteds are simple. They ain’t plannin’ nothin’.”
Emma was ready with what was becoming her stock reply to the suggestion that Uninfecteds all be forcibly infected. “Half would die, and we’re already short of manpower and skills. Plus, you’ll be surprised at how useful the Uninfecteds will be. They’re industrious and innovative.”
“And devious,” Walcott repeated.
“So don’t trust them. But also don’t trust Infecteds. Follow the Rules and be fair about them, and we’ll end up with the right population after a while. Now, kill them all.”
Dwayne organized the attack. Four men crept toward the house holding Molotov cocktails. Three lit rags protruding from beer bottles and hurled them onto the roof of the one story house. The fourth man had trouble with his lighter. By the time he rose from behind a wood pile to throw his bottle, he was shot from a window.
Randy sat in the gasoline flames spreading from the bottle he’d dropped. He emitted no shouts of pain. He didn’t flail his arms and legs in panic. His clothes and skin quickly blackened and drooped from his seated frame before he toppled over dead.
The roof was ablaze. Smoke poured like an upside down waterfall out the upper few inches of the front doorway, and began escaping open windows all around. Emma checked her watch. They should be able to get to a couple more houses before dark.
The screen door burst open as the coughing man from before rushed out. He swiveled his shotgun left and right, but he was squinting through watery eyes and couldn’t find a target. A rapid succession of single shots riddled him as his gun boomed and a tree branch dropped to the ground next to his body. A woman appeared, hands raised in surrender, with a young child clinging to her legs. They were easy shots. There was more shooting from the rear of the house as its other occupants fled straight into Dwayne’s people. It was over in minutes.
When Dwayne approached Emma, she said, “Maybe we shouldn’t do it this way. Burning down a perfectly good building, probably filled with supplies, just to get at the people inside seems wasteful. See if you can figure out another way to flush them out.”
Dwayne asked Walcott how much tear gas he had during their walk to the trucks for the short trip up the highway to the next house. Samantha had marked it on her map with a big capital “I” for Infecteds.
Chapter 3
THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY
Infection Date 64, 2215 GMT (6:15 p.m. Local)
Isabel Miller was totally exhausted; a fact she denied with an increasingly fake smile every time Rick Townsend asked if she needed a break. She wasn’t one of Captain Rick’s Marines, so he had no idea what her limits were. Nor did she, but Isabel understood that the harder they pushed themselves, the sooner they’d catch up with her brother Noah and his family, who had fled their compound just before Isabel and Rick arrived.
The tree-lined highway along which they trudged shrank over the hours from a ribbon of asphalt many miles long, to a stretch of pavement no further than the crest of the hill ahead. Beyond that, she could see neither the road nor the dangers that awaited them.
Her long brown hair was matted by sweat and slowly coming loose from its tight bun just beneath her Kevlar helmet. Her spine felt like shattered glass from the heavy pack she carried but seemed ominously to be falling numb. Her feet, knees, and shoulders ached, and her thighs burned. Her hands flirted every so often with a quiver. The evening air was growing chilly, but in body armor and boots she produced heat that even damp camouflage clothing couldn’t shed. Sweat poured down her face, her ribcage, and in the little valley in the small of her back. Still more worrisome, despite the sweat she felt the onset of chills like the first warning of a fever but more likely the first symptom of physical collapse. She had to will herself to take each step like in the unnatural gravity of some supermassive planet.
All conversation had finally halted. Gone were the little perso
nal trivia games of earlier in the day. “Okay, here’s something you don’t know about me,” she had said cheerfully. “I always sneeze twice. Not once. Not three times. Twice.” Now, Isabel set her sights in silence on objects ahead. A bare white trunk of a rotten tree. A yellow road sign warning drivers of a junction. An abandoned, rusting junker in the roadside ditch. She plodded along until reaching those bite-sized milestones, then found another.
When Rick stopped, dropped his pack beside the road, and knelt amid some litter, Isabel grew annoyed. She had told him she didn’t need a break. He was manufacturing one nonetheless. If Isabel took her pack off and sat, she knew she wouldn’t rise again.
“Come on!” she snapped. Rick raised the trash and sniffed. Isabel rolled her eyes. “Seriously? Are you from some lost tribe of green-eyed Wisconsin dairy farmers?”
“These are MREs. Five of ’em. Still fresh.”
“You think it’s theirs?”
“No soldier worth his salt would’ve eaten a meal right on the side of a highway.”
“They’re tired.” Isabel set her sights on the toppled trash cans ahead. “Let’s go.”
Rick hoisted his huge backpack into the air and, in one motion, slung its straps over both shoulders. After buckling it into place, he hopped once without leaving the ground, and off they went.
Isabel’s shoulders were so red as to practically be bloody where her own straps, though broad, cut a little more into her with each step. By the time they reached the overturned plastic trash cans, her vision had tunneled. All she could see was her next goal—a handmade sign, drooping from the mailbox where it hung.
What did the sign say? Only a few dozen more steps would tell. How long had it been since the apocalypse began? Two months? Uncollected trash swirled with every gust. Every car or truck seemed to be rusting. Half the trees were rotting. Maybe this impoverished part of rural Virginia had looked more or less the same before the outbreak, but it seemed inevitable that the rest of America would quickly join it.
Resistance: Pandora, Book 3 Page 2
