About a mile farther down the highway, a little boy, who was trying to play with a flat tire by rolling it with difficulty along the shoulder, waved at Chloe with a hand that was grimy and blackened by the tire’s road dirt. Chloe tucked in her chin and ignored him, entertaining herself instead by noting in silence the license plates of the cars she passed. Few were from Virginia. Most had Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Massachusetts, or New York plates. When she saw a tag from Vermont, where the P. had first broken out in America, she looked around to share the exciting find. But only Margus was close enough to hear her, and he was kind of a jerk.
Not actually a jerk, really, just standoffish. “Some boys are shy,” her mom had said the night before when the girls and boys had separated for their respective sponge baths. “You’ve only paid attention to the confident boys who hit on you. But there are lots of nice, decent, kind boys out there who just aren’t comfortable coming up to talk to a pretty girl.”
“Whyyy?” she had asked.
But her mother had given up with a shake of her head.
Chloe glanced back again, and again found Margus returning her gaze. That didn’t seem too freaking shy. He was carrying his rifle in both hands, at the ready like he was in the army. Which, technically, they all believed he still was, though no one dared ask him for fear that it was a huge secret. “AWOL,” her dad had told her mom in a whisper when they had thought Chloe was asleep. “Desertion?” she had replied. “They’re shooting people for that.”
So Margus was, like, a criminal. That kind of made him a little more interesting.
Chloe slowed, but Margus slowed too. Finally, she turned and walked right up to him. If he wouldn’t talk to her, she would talk to him. “So, Margus, you were in the army?”
Margus’s soldier on patrol playacting grew awkward, and he lowered his rifle. There wasn’t anyone around anyway. “Virginia National Guard.”
“And you’re…taking a break?” He said nothing as they walked side by side. “It doesn’t matter to me. I mean, it seems like the smart thing to do. Virginia basically doesn’t exist anymore. And I suppose you wanted to get back to help your parents.”
“Lotta good that did.” Again, he mumbled barely audibly.
“How’d they catch it?”
“They insisted on keepin’ the store open.” He shrugged, frowning. “All they had left on the shelves were some stupid games for car trips, over the counter meds, and a bike tire pump. They didn’t even raise their prices.”
“Somebody came in the store who was sick?”
He shrugged. “I’d taken the predawn watch and was catchin’ some shut-eye. When they didn’t call me for breakfast, I came lookin’ for ’em. My Ma had thrown up in the store, and my Pa was moppin’ it up. I shouted at him to get away, but…it was too late. They both turned a few hours later. I thought they’d both die ’cause I wasn’t able, you know, to get too close and help. But they helped themselves, and when they woke up, they was turned.”
“I’m sorry.” Margus paid her no attention. The scowl returned to his face.
“I ain’t done too much good anywhere I been, it turns out.”
When the silence wore on, Chloe said, “Well, you’re sure helping us out.” Margus snorted. “My dad says you went to Iraq.”
“Naw. I joined too late. It was my unit that went. They were gonna send me over after trainin’ me up, but my unit was in the last month of its deployment and it wasn’t worth it. I appreciate your mom and dad takin’ me in. Sharin’ your supplies. And this rifle. All I had before was my ole .22 I got when I was a boy.”
The conversation died when she couldn’t think of any follow-up questions. “What were your plans from before?” the question finally came to her. “I mean, I know you had the National Guard gig, but…?” She had been worldly enough not to ask what colleges he’d applied to, which was a standard and safe question back at McLean High School.
“Git a job. My parents paid me for workin’ the register, but they couldn’t really afford it long run. I thought I’d gotten a job down at the renderin’ plant. They were s’posed to let me know. But then the news about the virus hit, and…”
She considered asking what renderin’ was, but instead said, “Was it hard? Leaving, I mean…your unit?”
He surveyed the stinking bus they passed, which had rolled onto its side off the Interstate and burned down to a barely recognizable frame, scorching the grass all around. “They gave us orders to redeploy to Texas.” Again, he laughed sourly. “Instead of gettin’ a free ride with my buddies courtesy of Uncle Sam, here I am…headin’ to Texas on foot.”
The conversation again died. But this time, it was mostly because Margus’s attention was drawn to their surroundings. He craned his neck to peer all around, even behind them, and finally pulled out the small, handheld radio that her dad was constantly recharging whenever they found power. “Mr. Miller, you read me?”
A crackling, “Yes, Margus. Copy.”
Margus’s nervousness suddenly infected Chloe. She grabbed her rifle’s pistol grip and front guard. There were cars lining the highway, but no people. The car nearest them was filled with holes in the windshield and open driver’s door.
“Mr. Miller, there’s no people around these cars. Somethin’ don’t feel—”
Boom. Boom. Boom. Three gunshots—loud—rang out from the hill on the left side of the road. Chloe was already stooping and running, but Margus grabbed her arm painfully and dragged her in the opposite direction—toward the gunshots—before taking cover behind the hulk of a car.
“Leave your gear behind!” someone shouted down from the hillside above them after those first three shots. He was clearly giving orders to her father, who was at the head of the column maybe sixty yards beyond Chloe and Margus. Her mom and Jake were safely behind the cover of bullet riddled cars of earlier refugees who, presumably, had strayed into the same trap. But her dad was exposed as he lay behind a pile of trash. Chloe and Margus, by lagging behind to talk, appeared to be just outside their killing zone. “Leave your weapons and packs and other gear,” came the ambusher’s shout, “walk on past, and we’ll let you live!”
“Come on!” Margus said. He took off running up the hillside from which the voice had called down. After hesitating, Chloe followed. No shots rang out. They hadn’t been noticed amid the wreckage from past atrocities or during their run up through the thick trees.
Margus dumped his pack and Chloe did the same. “What’re we doing?”
“I’m gonna go fuck them up. You stay here and guard our shit.”
“No. I’m gonna go too. I’ll help…fuck them up.”
He directed Chloe to a spot downhill and behind him, and both slowly climbed uphill toward the ambushers’ elevation. Both held their rifles to their shoulders ready, as taught, to fire at a moment’s notice. Chloe peered just over the rifle sights, but repeatedly lowered her right eye to the optical sight to be ready to acquire a target in the crosshairs in an instant.
Her father, ever the lawyer, was arguing. “We don’t want trouble! You obviously don’t mean to kill us or you would’ve hit one of us! We’ll pull back, but with our gear!”
When the attacker replied, he sounded shockingly close to Chloe. Margus lowered himself to the ground with his palm patting down. Chloe got down, her eyes darting now back and forth between Margus’s hand signals and the ambusher’s voice. “You don’t seem to understand your situation here! But you are correct! If we’d wanted, we coulda hit any one of ya, or maybe all three! That tends, however, to piss any survivors off and make ’em wanta fight it out! We’re willin’ to go there if you insist, but we thought we’d be polite and ask first!”
Margus pointed at Chloe and made a sweeping motion around behind him to a place uphill. Chloe nodded, crawling backwards, and edged her way in a crouch up the slope past Margus. Her heart was pounding, but not from exertion. Her sh
allow breaths dried her mouth, and when she tried to swallow she couldn’t. Gone were her aches and pains and boredom. She paid little attention to the back-and-forth parlay in which her father engaged. Chloe’s focus was on not making any noise.
She climbed until she reached a wall of sheer rock and crumbling dirt and worked her way forward on her belly, careful not to shake foliage on passing or trigger little avalanches of rock or dirt. When she saw Margus, he pointed at the ambushers and raised three fingers. Chloe saw nothing on the wooded hillside and shook her head. Margus raised his AR’s scope to his eye in demonstration.
Chloe peered through the magnified sights, searching the hillside for—
A head. A woman with flecks of gray in her messy hair. The muzzle of the woman’s hunting rifle, aimed at the road, poked out through brush. She hadn’t dug a hole or prepared her position in any way other than to pile up branches in front of a log. About four yards beyond her—so close Chloe could almost hit both with one shot—was a boy about Jake’s age. He, too, had a rifle and lay behind the far end of the same log. She couldn’t see the man who shouted, “Last chance!” at her dad.
When Chloe caught Margus’s eye, she shook her head and raised only two fingers. Not knowing how else to say it, she held her right forearm up like it was the log, and lay her finger across it like the two ambushers’ rifles, one at each end.
Amazingly, Margus understood her pantomime and nodded. He pointed at her, raised one finger and then two, and pointed at the log. He then pointed at himself, raised a third finger, and pointed at the third target she couldn’t see. She nodded, failed again to swallow, and lowered her eye to her scope. In her peripheral vision, she saw Margus raise five fingers, then four, then three, then drop his hand to his rifle.
She aimed right at the curly haired woman’s head. At thirty yards, it was—
Crack!
The woman turned, wide-eyed, to look straight at Chloe’s crosshairs. Chloe’s finger twitched. Bam! Her rifle kicked. A giant mass blew out the back of the woman’s head. Both the log and her son’s face were coated with gore.
The boy behind her, aghast and in horror, cried, “Dad!”, got no reply, and took off.
“Cease-fire,” Margus said, but too late. Bam! Chloe hit the boy in full stride squarely between his shoulder blades. He dropped his rifle, arching his back as if to stretch out a kink, looking skyward through the canopy of trees toward the sunlight, and collapsed without any attempt to break his fall.
She glanced at Margus, who was staring at her until he turned back toward the three fallen ambushers. “Anybody else out there?” he shouted. “Now’s your last chance to give yourselves up!” His radio crackled. Margus said something too quietly for Chloe to make out, looking up at her midway through his little confab.
“Stay here!” Margus told her. “But cover me!” She lowered her eye again to her sight. Margus went forward, keeping his distance from the dead. They could be infected. “All clear!” he finally shouted.
Chloe safed her rifle, brushed herself clean, took a deep and steadying breath, and joined Margus at the same time as the rest of her family. Her dad was sweating profusely and looked freaked.
They stood the requisite ten meters from the dead, though that was probably excessive since they no longer appeared to be breathing. Or so she thought.
“Hey!” Jake said. “That one’s still alive.” It was the boy Chloe had shot—in the back—as he ran away. After Margus had called cease-fire. The others joined Jake, but Chloe stood off by herself, searching the ground beside her boots. “Whatta we do?” Jake asked.
Chloe allowed her eyes to stray toward the wounded boy. He lay on his stomach, and his back rose and fell rhythmically. His jeans had sagged, revealing underwear with cartoon images from SpongeBob SquarePants.
“I shot him,” Margus announced, glancing at Chloe. “I’ll finish it.”
He raised his mask and put on a pair of blue Latex gloves. No one said a word, but Chloe’s parents and Jake exchanged looks. The wounded boy wore a knife in a scabbard on his belt. Margus squatted beside him, put a gloved hand on the boy’s head, said a silent prayer with his eyes closed, drew the boy’s knife, and plunged it straight through his back between his shoulder blades a few inches from the gunshot wound.
Chloe heard a gasp. It was probably her mother, but she imagined it was the boy.
Margus rose. “Are…are you gonna leave him like that?” Jake asked in a voice that quaked, but not from puberty. The knife handle protruded from the boy’s back at a right angle. Margus extracted it and tossed it down the hill along with his gloves.
As they headed back down to the Interstate, Chloe fell in alongside Margus. “I…I guess I owe you one,” she said without catching his eye. He didn’t ask what she meant.
In the ditch just off the shoulder they came across the bodies of a middle aged man with a bald spot on the top of his head and a woman with long gray hair. Both had been killed by single shots to the backs of their heads. The man’s front pants pockets and jacket pockets were all turned inside out. An ancient double barrel shotgun lay beside them, cracked open and empty of its shells, which the ambushers must have deemed the only thing worth taking. Margus again donned his mask and a new pair of gloves to pick up the man’s wallet, which had also been rifled through but left behind. “Andrew Potter, New York, New York,” he said after checking the man’s driver’s license. He then took the plastic card and grotesquely inserted it into the dead man’s mouth, eliciting looks of alarm and disgust from Chloe’s mother.
When Margus turned to Chloe, she averted her eyes. After their brief thaw on the highway before, they resumed a chilly distance. Chloe’s family thanked Margus, but had trouble describing his good deed, mumbling only, “you know, for what you did.”
“Counter ambush,” Margus supplied. “Always depart your line of advance on the ambushers’ side.” They retrieved their packs and resumed their column with ten meter spreads and paid much more serious attention to the terrain they approached. Chloe let the tears flow, but avoided any other outward manifestation of the crushing guilt she harbored. No bucking chest, hiccupping gasps, or contorted face, just tears that went unnoticed by her newly threat aware family. And she especially avoided any eye contact with the one person who knew the reason for her guilt, who walked ten meters behind her and couldn’t see her face.
Chapter 12
OUTSIDE RURAL RETREAT, VIRGINIA
Infection Date 73, 1045 GMT (6:45 a.m. Local)
As the sky grew brighter, the spooky mist along the Interstate began to lift. There were people sleeping in the stalled cars Isabel and Rick passed, but no one stirred. Isabel was exhausted from their mind-numbing march and looked forward to finding a campsite for their one midday rest.
“Hey!”
Rick and Isabel both slewed their carbines toward the startling call, which came from a mop headed teenage boy. They relaxed.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. Are you headed south?”
“Yeah,” Rick replied.
The boy approached them. Too close; not for Isabel and Rick, who were now immune, but for his own safety had they been contagious. “My mom and dad went down that way yesterday morning. They said they’d be back by sundown, but they weren’t. Sophie and Andrew Potter. My dad has, like, a bald spot.” His hand patted the curly top of his head. “My mom looks like, you know, an old hippie. Long gray hair, baggy corduroys, a green army shirt—like yours, only not camouflaged. Like from Vietnam. I’d show you a picture if my phone had some juice.” He still clung to the useless, dark device.
“What do you want us to do?” Rick asked. It sounded somewhat cold to Isabel, but it was probably just fatigue: physical, and emotional.
“If you see ’em…I dunno. Tell ’em Barry is waiting. Right where they told me to!”
“Your name is Barry Potter?” Rick said.
“I know. They fucked me. My real name is Berrigan—named after some antiwar dude that nobody remembers but was their, like, hero—and Barry is what stuck.”
“Sorry ’bout that. If we see ’em, we’ll give ’em the message.” Rick headed off.
He seemed annoyed when Isabel showed the boy her cell phone and asked, for the thirtieth or fortieth time, “You haven’t by any chance seen these people, have you?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, thanks for….Wait. You have seen them?”
“Well, her. The hot blond chick. And this dude. Her dad or whatever. I’m pretty sure the others were up ahead. Plus there was another guy with short hair, like yours,” he said to Rick.
“You saw them?” Isabel repeated, unable to believe the boy’s answer.
“Yeah. Like I said. They came through yesterday before dark. Headed south, too.”
“All of them? Five people? All alive?”
“Yeah.” He looked up while seeming to count. “Yeah, five. Sounds right.”
“Thank you. Thank you!” Isabel repeated. She grinned broadly as she rejoined Rick, feeling energized.
From behind, the boy said, “You can’t spare any food, can you? I’m, like, starving.”
“Sorry, buddy,” Rick replied over his shoulder without even looking.
They got a few steps before Isabel whispered, “Not even one MRE?”
Rick huffed and stared skyward in obvious irritation. “Isabel, you’ve probably asked me that two dozen times. If you’d given food away every time we passed pitiful people, we’d be out by now.”
“Yeah, but that boy helped us. And he’s alone, waiting for his parents.”
“Okay, listen. I’m not gonna do this. You wanta give somebody some rations, go right ahead. You don’t need my permission.”
“Okay.” She returned to the boy’s SUV. “Here ya go.”
Resistance: Pandora, Book 3 Page 8
