Threat Ascendant

by Brian M. Switzer

  He had a goal to spend thirty minutes visutating every day. Some days he made it, others he didn't. Entire weeks flew by out on the road where he couldn't practice at all. But now that things had settled into a comfortable routine, most people understood that if he disappeared for a time in the late afternoon, he was tucked away somewhere visualizing past and future successes. Everyone respected his need for privacy and left him alone when he visutated. Everyone but Danny.

  That's how he found his private time interrupted by the sound of a rock banging against the side of the truck and Danny peering at him over the bed rails with a gleeful smile.

  "Wake up, limp dick! We don't have time for your mamby-panby mind tricks. Meditation- what are you, a communist, or just a girl?"

  "Hello, Danny," Jiri said in a calm voice. "It's good to see you."

  "Damn straight." Danny threw his head back and took several big swallows from a liter-sized bottle of water. He wiped the rim with the tale of his T-shirt and offered the bottle to Jiri.

  Jiri waved him off. "What's so important couldn't wait?"

  "Wait for what?"

  "Wait for me to finish my visutation."

  "Visutation." Danny chortled. "Where I come from if you get caught staring at the sky, you'd better be daydreaming about Carrie Underwood, naked and covered in maple syrup."

  "Yes, but my understanding is that where you come from, men still fornicate with their sisters."

  "That's not nice. Besides, you've never seen my sister. She's a rocket."

  They both laughed, then lapsed into silence. Jiri sensed there was something on the younger man's mind. "What's up, Danny?"

  "Will's been talking about you like you invented apple butter again. I worked for the man for six years, save his life four times, and took his son out and got him laid for the first time. But you're the one he's in love with."

  "Didn't you take his son to a whorehouse in Slab Falls, Nebraska where his first sexual experience was with a four hundred and fifty-pound transvestite? You probably scarred him for life."

  "I didn't know it was a he-she!"

  "Her name was War Eagle."

  "I thought they called her that because of the way she made her tricks hoot and holler."

  Jiri laughed. He found a pebble on the bottom of the bed and tossed it at Danny, who slapped it away with an easy grace. Jiri pulled his legs up and sat Indian style, with his back against the cab. He grew somber. "What's on your mind?"

  "Will says you have some ideas that will guarantee we win this little war."

  "Danny, you know as well as I do there's no such thing as a guarantee. But history gives us a number of strategies and maneuvers that worked in the past. If we deploy them properly it evens the odds and makes it a fairer fight. And nobody beats us in a fair fight."

  Danny nodded and looked off into the distance. "I've had the Crandall’s backs since I went to work for them. If I'm watching out for their self-interest, and there's a fight coming that's two thousand against a hundred and fifty, then my job is clear- I get them the hell out of here. Even if it means hitting Will over the head with a brick and carrying his unconscious body out over my shoulder."

  "I wouldn’t do anything that drastic. If these plans work, it'll be a bloodbath. And it will be over fast. Let Will and Becky stay. If I'm wrong, and things start to go south, then hit him over the head with a brick. I'll help you get them out the back end of the tunnel, and we’ll grab a car and get a fresh start somewhere else. Because regardless of what Will thinks, this isn't the last safe place in the world. We found this- we can find something else."

  Danny's features took on a pensive look. "If that happens, if we run, I’m taking take Tara, too."

  "Okay. We can take Tara. Which means we take Tess. Tara isn't going anywhere without her sister."

  "And if we take Tess, we’ll half to take the Hendrickson sisters. Her and Ashley have become good friends."

  "That means we have to take Tempest, because her and Meghan are getting really close. And we can’t take Tempest without taken her mom."

  "And Sylvia's not coming without Kathy, taking Kathy means taking David."

  They both laughed again, and Jiri clapped his hands together. "So either we win, or our entire original group sneaks out the back door together."

  "I agree."

  "So let's win."

  Danny offered Jiri his hand; the professor clasped it with his own, and they shook.

  "I agree with that, too."

  14

  * * *

  For the next ten days, the quarry hummed with activity. 170 of the 179 adults made the choice to stay and fight to keep calling the tunnels home. Each of them had a job to do; many had several jobs.

  Cars and trucks came and left around the clock. Will lifted the edict against traveling into town; scavenge teams no longer ransacked country houses for whatever they might find. Instead, they went on runs for specific items, ones they could only find in the nearby towns.

  So they changed the plan of attack. Instead of one truck driving into Carthage or Joplin, three made the trip. One team’s task was to find a specific object- copper wire, crossbows and bolts, empty gasoline games, or fifty-gallon drums, for example. Two more vehicles followed close behind- to provide support, protection against the dead, and, if worst came to worst, a means of escape for the scavenge team.

  On the day after Will's speech, David and two passengers drove a car up the hill and out of the quarry at first light. He returned alone a short time after noon. His passengers followed him, each driving an empty grain truck. After that, the trucks traveled out every day, each carrying a team of five men with sickles. They roamed the countryside, searching for fields with knee-high crops or grasses. They chopped the plants until their shoulders ached, then loaded the trucks and delivered the plant matter to Cyrus.

  The fat man’s ethanol factory ran twenty-four hours a day. Will drafted two people with engineering backgrounds as his assistants. He ran roughshod over them until exhaustion forced him to collapse on a nearby cot. His browbeaten workers reveled in the silence and bitched without pause about their temporary boss while they fed tons of plant matter into the hopper on one side of his still and filled gas can after gas can with the fuel that dripped out on the other side.

  Mark set up a picket line a mile south of the quarry. The picket’s job was to climb high into a tree and observe the landscape to the south through a pair of binoculars. They were an early warning system who would signal if they saw a sign the enemy was attacking early.

  An argument broke out over where to place the line. Mark and those who agreed with him who wanted the quarry encircled and pickets in the trees every fifty yards. Will and the Council refused to hear of it. Jiri ended the disagreement in a succinct fashion. "We’re not getting attacked by General Eisenhower or Napoleon. They won’t circle around and come at us from the north, and they won’t march a thousand people through the woods. They’ll come straight up that road out front. And we don't have enough manpower to waste twenty people by posting them as lookouts where she won’t come from. Put five people along the road south of here and space them out one every hundred yards."

  Mark did as he was told. He instructed the lookouts to empty their clips into the air at the first sign of enemy forces, skedaddle down out of their trees, and get back to the tunnels.

  Clark Tullin headed up a team of five men who had jobs before the outbreak operating or working on heavy equipment. With two crews in tow to provide support and protection, they hunted the nearby towns for twelve bulldozers and a backhoe.

  "They need to run," Will explained to Clark the morning he gave him the assignment, "or be repairable with the equipment we have on hand if they don’t."

  Clark gave him a resigned look. "I can tell you the problem right now- the diesel fuel will have jellied."

  "Keep looking until you find twelve with decent fuel, Clark. They don’t
have to be in great shape- they aren’t going far. Drain the tanks, use additives, replace the filters and injectors. Whatever you have to do."

  "If we drain the tanks, what do we fill him back up with? You can't run a diesel engine on their crap Cyrus brews up."

  "There's a hundred gallons of diesel in the fuel tank on the north end of the bottom, over by the railroad tracks. I've been saving it to use during planting."

  Clark pursed his lips. "I hate to do that. You'll need that if we want to eat next year."

  Will clapped him on the shoulder. "After this is over we’ll go out and find more." He turned to go.

  Clark stopped him in his tracks "Hold up a minute. The hoses and hydraulics are apt to be shot on any equipment that's left sitting out in the weather this long."

  Will gritted his teeth, drew in a huge breath of air, and forced himself to relax. "Then replace them, Clark. Come on, buddy. Take ownership of this for me. They’ll need to go fifty, a hundred yards, tops. And I want to walk away right now, knowing you’ll make sure they do that and I never have to think about this again."

  Clark spread his hands and smiled. "Say no more. I am all over this. I'll get Terry and Rusty and the others and we’ll get right on it."

  "Thank you, Clark," Will said, already on his way to the next thing.

  Coy worked sixteen and eighteen hour days, carrying out two jobs along with running errands and helping out wherever he could. As usual, he left every day before dawn to hunt. When he returned, he and the old woman (in three months not once had she told him her name) set about cleaning the day's catches and kills and then salting, drying, and curing part of it for later use. More and more, Meghan joined them to observe, learn, and help where she could.

  In the afternoons, he and two other experienced crossbow shooters met at a makeshift range they'd set up over by Robert’s blacksmith kiln. They practiced their marksmanship for an hour, firing their bows at targets forty, sixty and eighty yards away.

  After an hour, they changed up. Coy would open a bag prepared for them that morning. At eight each day, Danny delivered four dozen bolts to a work crew comprised of three senior citizens and three teenagers. The members of the work crew took a bolt and attached a two-inch wide strip of cloth to the shaft, just below the barb. They wrapped the cloth around the bolt four times, tying it tightly in place with monofilament fishing line. After soaking the cloth-covered end of the projectiles in a bowl of Cyrus's fuel, they packed them in the bag for delivery to Coy.

  Armed with the specialized bolts, the marksmen resumed target practice, but with a twist. After they knocked the projectiles, but before they drew them back, they ran the fuel-laden tips through a small fire burning in a portable fire-pit at their feet. With a third of the bolt in flames, they drew back and fired. The front-heavy bolts flew in a far different manner than what the shooters were used to and they rarely hit their targets.

  “That’s okay, fellas,” Coy extolled time and again, “all we need to do with these bolts is get close to the targets.”

  The only specialized equipment they used with the flaming bolts was padded, fireproof gloves from the blacksmith forge. As a result, burns were the rule of the day. Flaming bits of cloth fell on their forearms and legs when they drew back bolts. When they loosed, showers of sparks fell on their faces and the backs of their necks. Red-hot embers landed on their hair and down their backs; one day a marksman named Michael watched in horror as his jeans caught fire.

  Coy kept them motivated through the peril and the burns. Whenever he sensed their enthusiasm flagging, he called everyone into a brief huddle. He looked them in the eye and passed along a message from Will, speaking with conviction and emotion. “I know this sucks, guys, but there is no alternative. I know the people leading the attack on us; I spent time with them. And I guarantee you, given the chance they’ll kill every last one of us. My Dad said whether our side wins or loses will depend in large part on how we do our jobs. Never forget- you’re protecting your home. Now suck it up and let’s get back to work.”

  Over at the other end of the quarry, before the curve on the stretch of road that ran up the hill to the top, Terrence worked long days on his project. It was slow, excruciating work that required his four-man team to use a system of sleds, planes, and a block and tackle to move the big limestone blocks scattered alongside the road into an enormous pile atop the bluff. Long strands of copper wire littered the ground around them as they worked.

  The traffic in and out of the quarry, the belch of the diesel engines on the heavy equipment, and the roar of the grain trucks as they groaned their way up the hill; the noise was a pounding drum line in the stillness. And with the noise came the dead.

  15

  * * *

  Danny was charged with creeper control. The assignment kept him busy; an unending flow of dead stumbled along the road from town and a steady stream emerged from the copse of trees around the quarry. But, for the first time since they left the ranch, his go-to action upon seeing a creeper wasn’t to put it down. Instead, he and his crew were charged with capturing them. That was no easy task. He had put down more than two thousand of the dead over the last year. He was more skilled than anyone in the community at punching their tickets. Jiri and Will were near his equal, and Andro when he was alive. But Danny had turned putting them down into an art form, and to stop doing so in order to catch them instead was as awkward as wearing woman's underwear.

  But catch them he was told, so catch them he did. His crew left early in the morning and drove to the edge of town, where they broke up in the teams of three. The teams made noise and caused commotion to draw out the dead. Each crew member had a role to fill when the creepers responded to the team’s activity. One person drew their attention on him; the other two attacked it from the rear. One attacker carried a gunnysack and the other an eight-foot pole with a large loop on one end. The person with the gunnysack brought the bag down over its head, chest, and upper arms to reduce its ability to bite. The team member with the pole placed the loop over its head to control its movements.

  With the sack over their heads, they became docile and easy to maneuver around. It was easy to use the pole to guide them up a ramp and into a cattle trailer. Once he had them inside, Danny left them hooded and tied their hands behind their backs. Three loops of rope — one around their neck, waist, and knees — held them to the panels that formed the trailer walls.

  They worked until the dead lined the walls or until the activity drew so many of them it was no longer safe to continue. Each team member’s most important job was to keep their head on a swivel and watch out for themselves and their teammates.

  "Getting bit while we're out here grabbing these guys is the dumbest way to die," Danny told them before they left the quarry on their first day of work. "There's only one person working at a time. The only job the other two have is watching their surroundings and putting down the dead that get too close. Keep your head moving- don't just watch in front of you, look to the left and right and turn around and check your six, too. If they start to herd, or there are enough to make you nervous, get in the truck and move somewhere else. Be aware of your surroundings. Don't get into a situation where you have a house on one side of you and a car behind you- always have four clear paths. We do this for a week and we’re done. For four hours a day over seven days, I need you to be more careful with these fuckers than you’ve ever been. I forbid you to get bit while working for me."

  When they returned to the quarry pulling the trailer full of creepers another team took over. Mark Hampton led this crew on an easier job easier than the one assigned to Danny's team.

  Four more cattle trailers were parked in a row on the quarry bottom. The workers opened the doors on the trailer containing the creepers and the first empty one in the row. Mark backed the trailer with the dead as close as he could to the empty one and his crew placed a sheet of p
lywood between them to act as a walkway. Two of his team members reached through the rails and cut the ropes that bound the creatures. They used a custom-made six-foot pole with a grabber on the end to reach through and pluck the sacks off their heads.

  Once freed, it was a simple matter to move the dead from one trailer to the other. The team gathered at the front of the empty unit and raised a ruckus. They played an AC/DC cassette on a battery-powered boombox with the volume turned up to ten and shined Maglites in the creepers faces. It worked like a charm every time. They flowed from the loaded trailer to the empty one, moaning and reaching through the side rails with grasping hands.

  Over a period of five days, they filled each of the four cattle trailers with twenty-five creepers. Each one was driven a quarter-mile deep into each of the four mine shafts along the west wall of the quarry and parked with the gated-end facing the tunnel exit. Only a few people could enter those tunnels. Guards stood at the entrance twenty-four hours a day, and the Council decreed that the punishment for any unauthorized people found inside was banishment.

  Of course, that made the trailers one of the most frequent topics for gossip amongst the community members, second only to talk of the attack. No matter how often they asked the council members about them, they always heard the same answer. "The people who need to know about the trailers already know. If you don’t need to know, don’t worry about it."

  Will added one line when he gave the standard answer. "Believe this, though- it will be a sight to behold.”

  16

  * * *

  It was evening at the end of the seventh day- the community was halfway through its ultimatum period. Will, Jiri, and Terrence sat on top of a block of limestone the size of a Volkswagen beetle. The sky above the bluffs was dark blue and mottled with clouds. It was dark on the quarry bottom- the rays of the dying sun weren't strong enough to penetrate beyond the bluff walls. Sickly yellow light spilled out of the tunnel behind them and to their left. Most of the tunnel-dwellers lived in those shafts, and the light from the various lanterns illuminated the entrance.