Crowds were drifting nearer the car. Noah was just trying to get some information.
“Where are you backtrackin’ to?” asked a middle aged woman from the roadside.
“I ain’t tellin’ you shit. Git back. Back.” She was now waving the pistol. Noah motioned Natalie off the opposite side of the road. His wife relayed his command back down the highway. Noah saw Margus, fifty yards behind, disappear from sight. Natalie settled to the ground with nothing but the top of her blond head and the muzzle of her rifle showing over the road’s shoulder. People beside stranded cars nearby began to react to the standoff at the stopped car by seeking cover—some casually; others with undisguised urgency.
“All I can say is,” the woman in the car snarled, “you people are all fucked.” A three car caravan raced past at speeds too fast and margins too narrow for Noah’s comfort. He began to shy away from the tense scene. “In a few hours,” the woman continued in a sadistic taunt meant, presumably, to intimidate the growing crowd, “there’s gonna be a whole horde of those motherfuckers. Runnin’ away from the killin’. Runnin’ right the fuck over every last one a you. Ya know what I’d do? Run. Anywhere but south. Hey! Hey git back! Get the fuck…. Hey! I’ll shoot! I’ll shoot, mother—!”
Noah took off just as the first shot rang out. Multiple gunshots erupted, he saw over his shoulder, both from and at the car, whose windows began shattering as the crowd around the car either fell, ran, or fired.
Noah slid painfully onto the shoulder with a grunt and dumped his pack. Natalie’s rifle rested atop her pack a few yards away, and her eye was behind her sight as the volume of gunfire from the highway rose. The new fire came from the trees above the road. The father and son had returned and were shooting anyone and everyone near their car. “Please! Stop shooting!” one woman shouted where she cowered before she was shot dead.
“I got one in my sights,” Natalie said, not in a whisper, but aloud and calmly.
“What?”
“The boy from the car. Should I shoot?”
“What?”
“Noah. They’re firing in this general direction. They’re murdering people trying to crawl to safety off that highway.”
“This isn’t our fight, Natalie,” Noah replied through gritted teeth. “Jesus.”
“What’s goin’ on?” Margus’s voice crackled over the radio.
“Two men on the hill with rifles shooting anything that moves,” Noah replied. “A woman and three kids in a car…” Jesus. Their car was riddled. The glass pocked or mostly gone. He could hear, between the sporadic gunshots, a crying child and a loud moan.
Finally, when the shooting subsided, the father raced down the embankment to the car as his son presumably covered him. His wail made Noah’s eyelids too heavy to keep open.
“Daaad?” his son called out.
“Oh, God!”
Noah got on the radio. “Head to that stream down the hill to our right. Where all those other people are headed.”
Amid the scratch of the radio’s sign on and sign off, Noah heard, “Got it.”
“Dad! Dad! What is it?” the boy shouted from the hillside.
“It’s…It’s…Your mother. And Becka. And…Oh, God!”
Natalie wouldn’t look at the car or the carnage around it. The senseless slaughter had ended as quickly and inexplicably as it had begun. Noah and Natalie hurried down the hill to escape the moans of the wounded, the inhuman howls of loved ones, and the cries for help—“Is there a doctor anywhere?”—from both sides of the pointless tragedy.
* * * *
Chloe squatted beside the little trash strewn stream tossing rocks into the water. But she was jittery, Noah noticed. Her hand quivered as she picked up small stones.
“It was like a fucking horror movie,” said the man talking to Margus, whom Noah joined, from the prescribed safe distance of ten steps. He and his grungy wife were both the color of the surrounding soil. Their backpacks were dusty, their boots mud caked, and their jeans stained. “Infecteds just kept coming and coming,” the couple reported. “The town, Bristol, is right on the border, and it’s split in two by the infection. Everybody on this side of town is infected, and everybody on the other side is trying to drive them out. The Tennessee Guard is shelling the hell outta the Infecteds. That’s sending them back up the highway this way in a fucking frenzy. We hitched a ride in the back of a pickup until it ran outta gas and everybody then went their own way.”
Chloe asked in bewilderment, “Why’d they shoot that woman and her kids?” She tossed a last rock from her perch atop a ledge and rose. Noah hadn’t even realized she was listening to their conversation. “That woman on the highway up there? What was that?”
No one had an explanation. “Dunno, honey,” the man said. “Everybody is killing everybody these days. But say, we’re headed back toward this detour someone mentioned off I-81, up through the mountains, and around Bristol. Why don’t you folks join up with us? Marco and Laura Moretti from Ocean City, New Jersey. We’re self-sufficient. We’re both armed, and we could share turns on guard. We’d get a lot better sleep with more people.”
But Noah shook his head and said, “No. Thanks. Let’s go.”
“Yes, sir!” Chloe replied under her breath. Noah pointedly ignored her.
There was a crackling rumble from the sky that seemed to dissolve not into distinct echoes, but into the crinkly whoosh of noise scattered by the trees and hills. Another rattling string of staccato bursts followed the first like distant firecrackers, but instead of pops they made booming sounds. “Artillery,” Margus said in a worried tone.
When Chloe, Natalie, and Jake all stared at Noah, he said, “Those are the good guys…fighting back. Let’s head their way.”
“You know,” persisted the man from New Jersey, “when they fire those big guns, they kill whoever happens to be on the receiving end ten miles away. Good guys, bad guys—everybody dies. There’s a whole lotta Infecteds, folks, between here and those troops in Tennessee, who, by the way, are turning everybody back. Let’s take this detour together.”
Noah spent a long time looking at Natalie, trying to guess at her opinion. But she gave him no clues. He took a deep breath. “No. We’re headed south.”
“Awright. Good fuckin’ luck to you.” The man turned to leave.
His wife hesitated. “If you’re stuck for a place to hole up before nightfall, we stayed at this old abandoned barn last night. You could see a long way across open fields.” She gave directions to Noah before her husband dragged her away.
The Miller family plus one set off toward the magical barn after Noah’s inspiring words—“Five meter spread.” When they angled back up the hill to the more open Interstate, the light was better. But the explosions on the horizon ahead sounded nearer and more prominent. That was where Noah was leading them.
They passed a steady parade of slouching refugees heading in the opposite direction. A girl a little younger than Chloe said casually, in a sing-song voice, but ominously, “You’ll be sooorry.”
Chloe stared at Noah, but said nothing. To Noah her look communicated only one thought—My life depends entirely on you.
* * * *
It was dark when they found “the barn,” which was a total pile of shit. “Really glad we hiked all the way up here,” Chloe said. The relic had no roof. The house accompanying it had long ago burned down, leaving an ancient bad smell. Chloe dropped her pack, righted a low, overturned stool, and sat. “Ahh. All the comforts of home.”
“Good walls,” her dad said, slapping the thick stones that rose a grand total of about three feet off the ground. “Top of the hill. This side has great sight lines across the pastures. The other side is too steep to climb. This’ll do.”
Margus took the empty doorway to cover the road up from the highway. Chloe’s dad spread the four members of his family at intervals along the s
tone wall looking out over the moonlit fields below. They had ceased paying attention to the artificial thunder. There was no gunfire, but there were clusters of explosions, then a respite, then another dozen booms, all close enough to illuminate briefly the dark horizon to the south. “What’s the watch schedule?” Jake asked.
“No watches tonight,” Chloe’s father replied.
“What?” Chloe said. “After what those people told us, we’re not posting a watch?”
“No.” It was her mom. “Tonight, everyone’s on watch. An all-nighter.”
Chapter 15
OUTSIDE BRISTOL, TENNESSEE
Infection Date 77, 0315 GMT (11:15 p.m. Local)
The jogging was difficult under the weight of Isabel’s huge and cumbersome backpack. “Shouldn’t we…drop these…packs?”
“No,” Rick replied tersely. The sound of gunfire toward which they ran was close. Steady. One crack from a rifle every second or two, sometimes randomly overlapping. “This is it,” Rick said at the broken sign, the remaining bottom half of which warned that something was, “Out!”
The dirt drive up the hill was more of a rutted track. The small bridge across a stream had mostly collapsed, but one beam was passable on foot. They could now see the flashes of individual rifle fire from the top of the hill.
Bam! Isabel jumped when Rick felled a single, previously unseen woman in the woods off to their right. His muzzle flash illuminated two more men. Bam-bam! They both fell. One tried but failed to rise. Neither made any sounds of pain or distress—Infecteds.
Isabel was swiveling her carbine, aiming at shadows, looking for targets at all points of the compass but finding none before they finally spotted the ruins of a barn ahead from which rifle fire blazed like camera flashes. One bright flame and loud crack accompanied a passing sssszzt sound that sent both Rick and Isabel to ground.
“U.S. Marine!” Rick shouted. “We’re comin’ in!”
“Make it quick!” a man or boy replied from behind the barn’s low walls.
They rose and ran in a stoop toward the roofless structure, which was silhouetted against the flashes of more rifle fire. The barn was just where the woman had said it would be. After Isabel and Rick had ignored the warnings of the New Jersey couple and refused their invitation to join them on their detour around the besieged Tennessee town, the woman had whispered, “And my husband didn’t tell you the truth. We did see your family. We told them about this barn we’d found where they might stand a chance to make it through the night.”
The man in the barn fired again and again to either side of them. “Get inside! Now!” Rick and Isabel practically dove through the opening and collapsed behind a wall. The shooter kept up his fire, which Rick joined.
Isabel dropped her heavy pack and rolled toward the opening to assume a prone firing position. The edge of the woods forty meters away was alive with dark, moving targets. Isabel fired at the shapes and hit one. Two. Missed the third. Rapid shots erupted from a newly arrived defender and spent cartridges rattled around the rubble. “Aunt Isabel?” she heard Chloe cry.
Chloe lay beside Isabel and they stole a brief hug before returning to their weapons. The teenage girl’s smooth skin was warm on Isabel’s cheek.
Both plinked away at the dwindling number of profiles in the woods. “We need help over here!” came a voice Isabel recognized as Noah’s. She saw her brother firing his rifle over the stone wall. While Rick and Margus kept shooting down the road, Isabel and Chloe scrambled to Noah’s side of the old barn and raised their rifles onto the cold stone. Isabel could make out figures approaching across the fields below. She jumped when Chloe’s rifle blazed. Isabel quickly engaged running targets too numerous to count. Even at the greater distance and in the poor light, her shots hit more than they missed.
“Isabel! What are you…?” Noah had made his way over to her, but took no time away from his rifle to embrace her.
“We’ve been looking for you,” Isabel explained in between shots.
“Lucky you,”—bam!—“You found us!”
Natalie arrived to say, “There’s too many of…! Isabel?”
The confused reunion was interrupted by their steady fire at the onrushing Infecteds. “And Rick’s with me!” Isabel added. She looked over at Rick, who appeared to be on the satellite phone as Margus redirected his fire from the road to the pasture filled with targets. Isabel aimed at dark, onrushing Infecteds in the field below and added her fire, hitting someone every couple of rounds.
“We can’t hold this place!” Natalie shouted at her husband between shots. “There are too many of them! Noah, we’ve gotta drop everything and run! Now!”
Rick arrived with a scraping slide. He held the glowing sat phone Isabel had been given by the president’s aides in upstate New York.
“We’re making a run for it!” Noah announced to Rick
“Negative!” Rick replied. “Take cover! Fire in the hole!” he shouted at Jake. “Fire in the hole!” went a shout Margus’s way.
“Jake, get down!” Natalie added before joining everyone on the ground at the base of the barn’s wall. All sounds of their gunfire fell quiet. The only noise was a distant but rising howl or growl from hundreds of voices drawing ever closer. It was the same sound Isabel had first heard on the bridge in upstate New York. It was the sound that presaged the end. As it grew louder, she reached for her pistol. Rick’s hand stopped hers. He shook his head.
An eerie noise like a blend of whistling and cutting descended from the night sky.
BOOOOM!
The stunning burst shocked Isabel. She felt the blast wash over her. It seemed to suck the breath right out of her chest. Her ears rang with tones. It was impossible at first, to make sense of anything.
“Fuuuck!” Chloe cursed. “What was that?”
Rick peered over the wall through goggle clad eyes with the sat phone to his ear. “Drop one hundred! Fire for effect! I say again, drop one hundred! Fire…for…effect!” He pressed himself to the ground beside the rest of them and said, loudly enough for Jake to hear in the distance, “Get as low as you can! Hug the ground! Plug your ears!”
“What?” Isabel asked.
She heard the same whistling and cutting sound as before, but times a dozen. Her fingertips found her ears just in time. B-B-B-B-B-B-B-BOOOOM!
Just as her brain was beginning to register the stupendous series of explosions that landed seemingly right on top of them, there came another. B-B-B-B-B-B-B-BOOOOM! And another. The sickening jolts—each its own sharp shock to her senses—were followed by still another, which rattled Isabel’s chest and frayed her nerves as debris rained down and an acrid smell fouled her nose. She coughed and thought she might vomit.
The barn alit in another string of blinding strobes as the ground beneath her shuddered. Thudding blast waves pounded their tiny refuge. Charred wood bracing snapped and splintered. Bits of stone sprayed from unseen impacts. The boy by the door lay in a fetal ball. Isabel jammed her eyes shut and clenched her teeth in a grimace.
The growing pall of smoke made Isabel nauseous. Or at least she thought it was the smoke. It could just as easily have been the shaking that her insides were taking, or the clench of all the muscles in her body as if that might fend off errant shrapnel. The condition grew worse the longer the barrage continued. She coughed and coughed until she did throw up. But no one noticed. Everyone was preoccupied by the same explosive tumult.
When the volleys finally ended, Rick was back on the satellite phone. He then raised his rifle and fired off a steady stream of shots before finally Noah, then Natalie, then Jake and Chloe and the guy by the doorway joined him.
When Isabel rose, grit cascaded off her. She found a spot atop the stone wall to steady her carbine, but smoke partially obscured the field. A hundred fires, however, lit the smoke and everyone passing through it, whom Isabel’s loved ones steadily cut to pieces
. Most of the Infecteds were staggering, drunk from shock or wounded in myriad ways. Their clothes were ripped into shreds and hanging from their torsos, as was the occasional limp limb. Their bodies looked blackened and sometimes visibly smoking in the flickering light. Isabel found only one target at which to aim before Rick shouted, “Cease-fire!” She never squeezed her trigger hard enough to release a round, and her would-be target stumbled and fell on her own.
It was the end of the unwholesome slaughter, but it wasn’t a merciful end. Two helicopters wheeled into sight amid the glow from the blazes beneath them. The smaller one orbited the smoking pasture firing its machine gun into the few pathetic Infecteds struggling to stand upright. The larger one thundered right over their wreck of a barn stirring dust and dirt and ash into the air in its hurricane force down blast before landing in a clearing between the barn and the remnants of a fire ravaged house.
Rick helped everyone toss their heavy packs through the open doorway of the ubiquitous Black Hawk, which took off the moment Rick clambered aboard last.
When the door closed, and the relative silence descended on the shell shocked survivors, Noah crawled over to her and said, simply, “Oh, God, Isabel.” He looked older, tired, his brown face chapped and riven with deep creases of worry. They hugged. Isabel cried, but no tears came out. She was surprised when she felt Noah’s chest bucking against hers.
Chapter 16
RADFORD UNIVERSITY, VIRGINIA
Infection Date 78, 0950 GMT (5:50 a.m. Local)
“Ten minutes,” Dwayne announced to Emma on the hill overlooking his operation.
Samantha, who had just discovered coffee, asked, “Should we attack exactly at six o’clock? Shouldn’t we pick some other time than on the hour? Isn’t that too obvious? Won’t they be expecting it then?”
Resistance: Pandora, Book 3 Page 10
