Dark New World (Book 1): Dark New World

by Henry G. Foster

  Cassy said, “I have a top-end laptop in a faraday cage in my bunker, Ethan. You can use that, so long as it won’t bring danger to my farm. Radios, too – a dozen short-range and a good HAM radio.”

  Ethan paused to consider this, then said, “Perfect, actually. Then I only need to bring a thumb drive with my files and programs. We’ll bring a few of my own hand-held radios, too, for the trip. Do you have wire, or signal relays?”

  “I have lots of wire in different gauges, but I don’t know what a signal relay is.”

  Ethan shrugged. “Okay, then I’ll need to bring half a dozen Raspberry Pi modules. They’re small enough to fit in an Altoids tin, so they’re light and easy. Carrying a spool of wire and a HAM radio would have been a bitch.”

  For the rest of the day, Ethan led the clan in gathering food and supplies for the journey. He also checked and re-checked that he had everything he’d need to set up his satellite linkup and broadcasting once they got there. It was a lot of stuff to pack, and they didn’t get to sleep until late in the night.

  * * *

  0900 HOURS - ZERO DAY +6

  With increasing impatience, Peter Ixin sat encamped within a copse of trees and waited for his prey to emerge. The woman had led the invaders right to his community of farmers, yet he’d almost caught her before she got away. Just when he was about to take her down, a rookie Scout on his team had gotten herself killed and the spy woman took the Scout’s rifle, which then led to Peter’s concussion and allowed the bitch to escape altogether.

  Peter had managed to get out of medical imprisonment and then caught up with the Scouts who had been sent after the spy, sure, but then the Enemy had come. The invaders bombed his community and sprayed the fields with something brown and noxious. In all the noise, the spy had escaped a second time.

  He had almost caught up to her yet again when she was badly wounded by an exploding vehicle, and some new person had emerged from the smoke to complicate the picture, and saved her. Spy and savior had disappeared into the smoke together, and Peter hadn’t yet found the entry hatch they must surely have gone through. No way she could have escaped through the smoke on her own, in her condition—she had to be underground, maybe in a bunker, and now she wasn’t alone. She had help.

  Peter, however, was alone, having sent the Scout team he’d commandeered home. At this point, they would only get in the way and alert his prey. Maybe they would find enough of their community intact to salvage some pieces, but he doubted it.

  Well, maybe he couldn’t get justice for the invaders but he could damn sure get justice on that woman for killing someone under his command and for leading the invaders straight to them. Bitch. But if she didn’t come out of her hidey-hole soon he’d have to leave to find more food and water, and then she might escape. Again.

  His stomach growled, protesting his careful supply rationing, and Peter considered just how long he could remain in place. Then in the morning light, he saw movement. A man moved like a ghost through the remaining smoke and fog. It must be the man who had saved the spy. Peter watched as the man seemed to glide across the field from cover to cover, stopped for one minute here, another minute there, then moved on. Soon the man returned to the middle of the field, stooped down, and disappeared.

  A thrill went up Peter’s spine, and he lost all thoughts of leaving just yet. He was a patient man—one of his best character traits, in his opinion—and he sat rock-still as he looked through his binoculars at the field. Hell, he’d already been there for God knew how many hours. A few more wouldn’t kill him. His heart began to race when his hunter’s patience was rewarded, as it so often had been throughout his life. First one person, then another and another filtered out from whatever hole they had hid in, moving in a single-file line away toward the south.

  His eyes went wide when he saw what they carried. Every one of the adults had an M4 and two backpacks, one in front and another on their backs, both of them stuffed to the brim. Radios and bottles and pouches dangled from ties so they appeared loaded down like mules. His spirits leapt. If they carried this much stuff with them, they must have left twice that much behind. Even better, they moved like they had somewhere to go. Somewhere safer and better supplied, Peter decided. And the woman spy was among them, icing on the cake.

  A thought hit him and he frowned. Should he go back to the Farms and let them know about the cache, and gather more Scouts to track the spy and her companions? Or should he trail them first to see where they went, and then return to the Farms for help?

  Peter clenched his jaw, and made his decision. He’d follow that woman wherever she went on God’s Earth, and then go back for his own people. They could leave their bombed and blighted fields. Peter would lead them to whatever land of plenty the spy was headed toward, and he’d be the savior of his people, Moses leading his people out of the wilderness... and then that bitch would die.

  * * *

  1000 HOURS - ZERO DAY +6

  Taggart sat with Pvt. Eagan, one of the three members of his unit who had survived this far. They ate a can of chili and a can of peaches each, courtesy of the Resistance, as they awaited a meeting with one of the Resistance leaders.

  Eagan said, “Look, Sarge, I mean Captain. I’ll follow your orders ahead of anyone else’s no matter what their rank is. I was just wondering if that Major had the authority to give you a field promotion.”

  Taggart was silent a moment as he thought about how to respond, and finally said, “Eagan, I got no doubts about your loyalty. You never did give a shit about chain of command, you unsat shitbird, so I trust you. But yeah, I think he did have the authority. I mean, we ran around with him all day yesterday, and then through the night picking up stragglers and survivors from other units. I have no idea how these resistance guys got the intel about their locations—one of them said something about a group called the 20s.”

  He glanced over at Eagan. “However they get their intel, it was mostly accurate. How many soldiers have we saved, twenty or so? We have most of a platoon now, scattered through half a dozen Resistance safehouses. I’m the one holding the intel, the one who did the saving, and now the highest ranking soldier among us. It would have been the major, but he ate a grenade to get that last group away to safety with you and me. I think we better honor that field promotion he gave me. He won’t be handing out any more of them.”

  Eagan stuffed his mouth with chili and didn’t continue until he’d swallowed it. “So what you’re saying, Cap, is that this Major saw enough of what’s going on to think you were the most battlefield-expedient option for leading a crew of soon-to-be-dead soldiers? What with him dying next and all.”

  “Pretty much. Who is it says, ‘Adapt, Improvise, and Overcome’? That’s the long and short of it.”

  “That’d be the jarheads, Sir,” Eagan replied with a grin, though he skipped a beat before adding the courtesy ‘Sir’.

  Calling Taggart “Captain” and “Sir” would take getting used to for Eagan and his other three guys, but Taggart also knew that the FNGs—fucking new guys—would never know the difference. Especially not with him wearing the Captain’s Bars the Major had handed him just before the poor guy went out in a blaze of glory. Now, by God, he had over thirty grunts under him, in different safehouses, each with local Resistance liaisons. Every team had radios, which Taggart learned the 20s had stashed in galvanized garbage cans. Somehow—he didn’t understand the explanation really—this had kept the radios safe and functional through the EMP wave. Inexpensive civilian models, but they worked just fine.

  Taggart’s thoughts and his meal were interrupted by a knock on the door to the bedroom where he and Pvt. Eagan were encamped. He looked up, calling, “Enter.”

  The door swung open, and his liaison came in, smiling. “Sir, please let me introduce the man you’ve been waiting to meet, Mr. Black—not his real name, of course. He’s a subleader in the Resistance. It’s his patronage that got you these quarters, intelligence, food and ammo, so in effect you’re under h
is command. ‘Temporary Additional Duty’, he calls it. Anyway, Mr. Black, this is now-Captain Taggart, the guy commanding those grunts we got holing up in your houses.”

  Mr. Black, ironically, was just a touch lighter than midnight in complexion. He wore baggy jeans with some sort of silly civilian imprint, expensive white sneakers with blue accents, and a black net wife-beater shirt. He topped it all off with a damn ridiculous fedora. To Taggart, it seemed a rather silly costume, but Black radiated an iron confidence that suggested he’d had a hard and violent life. That might be good, given their new realities. Taggart decided it would be best to show him at least a pretense of respect, if only for his importance to the mission.

  “Mr. Black. Although my boys and girls are outside of any kind of official chain of command, I welcome you, and I am glad to finally meet you.”

  Mr. Black frowned. “Shut the fuck up, soulja boy. I don’t give two shits about you or your posse, other than they can help my cause. You got me?”

  Taggart laughed out loud, then struggled to regain his composure. “Mister, I understand you completely. You’re a fucking civilian wearing a wannabe gangsta cover—that means hat—and you look like a fucking cartoon. But you’re in charge here, and you earned it somehow, so either way we’re in your debt. Bark away little Chihuahua. I’ll listen to you, and my grunts will listen to me. So now I’ll ask you if we’re clear.”

  Mr. Black first grinned and then let out a belly laugh. “Oh yeah, grunt. I get you. We’ll get along fine. Don’t much like you, but I need you, and you sure as fuck need me. Yeah, we’ll get along like applesauce.”

  Whatever that meant. “So what’s the SITREP, Mr. Black? What can we do for each other?”

  “Two things. First, you already know that the 411 we gave you about where to find more soldiers came from the 20s. We got no idea who they are, but they been right by us with everything they give us so far. Keep an eye out for anything that might help figure who they is.”

  Well that much was obvious, and Taggart already wanted to know who they were. So, it would be easy to agree to that. He nodded. “Roger that. Anything else?”

  Mr. Black continued, “And thing two is, we need you to run licks for us when we got targets.”

  “What the fuck is a lick?” asked Taggart. Pvt Eagan coughed, probably trying to keep himself from laughing, and Black rolled his eyes.

  “We got lots of info from the 20s,” Black told Taggart. “Invader troop movements, supply caches, that sorta thing. I want you runnin’ and gunnin’ to get those supplies, and run some ambushes. Run a lick, grab what you can, and fade. Crystal?”

  “Yes. We can do that. The fact is, mister, I want to use my groups to harass the enemy so much their soldiers have to guard caches and look for us, not be out there conquering America and squeezing civilians.”

  Mr. Black grinned, the smile getting wider and wider as Taggart spoke. “Soulja boy, let me tell you about the first supplies you gonna grab out.”

  As Black went into details, Taggart’s face gradually took on a nasty, predatory grin.

  * * *

  1300 HOURS - ZERO DAY +6

  Frank sat with the rest of his newly expanded clan as they ate lunch. Michael wasn’t present, since he had gone out a half hour before to scout after Cassy said there were roads and settlements ahead, going by her local map.

  Sipping at his water, Frank heard the warbling call of a quail. That would be Michael returning, notifying the clan he was coming in so no one got jumpy and shot at him. Frank stood, wiping dirt from his jeans, and waited for Michael to arrive.

  “Welcome back,” he said when he saw the former Marine scout. “Find out anything useful?”

  Michael spat. “Sure did. Reese Road, going north to south, with houses and little businesses on it as far north as I went. There’s people there, too, all of ‘em armed. They were hid, but not well enough.”

  Frank frowned. “Damn. Well, we knew we’d find people eventually. This little forest we’ve been walking through couldn’t last forever. Can we go around to the south?”

  “Negative. I-76 is over that way, and the Pennsylvania Turnpike. People with guns are on the turnpike, too. It’s a mess.”

  Cassy shifted the sling that held up her wounded arm and stepped toward them. So no one else could hear her, she said in a near-whisper, “We can’t go south of I-76, either. There are more towns along the south side of 76, and there’s a group of whack-job armed farmers somewhere down there too. I don’t exactly know where. Could be I ran across their main encampment when they shot at me, but we can’t take the chance that I only stumbled into a temporary camp. They were bad dudes, shooting first and asking questions never. I was lucky I got away, and I’m pretty damn sure they were still tracking me when the van blew up next to me and Michael saved my life.”

  Michael nodded, acknowledging her and her information. “Well then, we have to dogleg north a bit and try to thread the needle—there is a thin strip of trees running between an auto body shop and the next house down. With luck, the trees won’t be guarded. Everyone, check your weapons and make sure you’re on single-fire. I’ll double check each rifle to make sure we’re squared away. Fire discipline isn’t something I can teach in five minutes, but this will make sure you don’t burn through ammo. And don’t shoot unless I yell for covering fire, or fighting already started and you have a real clear shot.”

  He paused for a sip of the water Frank offered him, then continued: “We will move out at dusk. That’s enough light for us to see where we are going, but will make it harder for them to notice us.”

  Frank clenched his jaw. The odds of a small, in-town strip of woods being unguarded, when Michael had already seen people in the buildings to either side, were pretty small, dammit. He had to make sure everyone was on high alert when they went through. Maybe he should tell his clan to shoot anything that moved? No, that wasn’t what the clan was about. But they’d sure as hell better draw down on anything that moved and looked armed. And of course, Michael would have to be up front, catching any surprise heat.

  Sometime soon he’d have to set Michael up to mentor at least one other person in the skills and tactics that he’d picked up in the Middle East, but for now Michael had to make announcements about how to proceed. And god damn if he knew why the scout had suddenly stepped into a leadership role with these misfits—his friends and family, as far as you could get from military discipline. As long as they were in a nearly combat environment that was fine, but Frank knew that as soon as they were safe, Michael would step back again, and leadership would fall on him once again. Cassy better heal quick, he decided, so he could drop this dog turd of a job onto her and hope she saw it as peaches and ice cream.

  * * *

  Cassy accepted Frank’s plan without comment. She doubted she could come up with a better one. It grated that he put her in charge of herding the children, but with her arm in a sling she could only fire her pistol. The M4 over her left shoulder, which Ethan had passed to her from his stockpile, was just a decoration until she healed up enough to use it.

  Hell, she was just happy to be able to keep up with the group, given the severity of her wounds. The metal shard that impaled her right shoulder at the joint had done some serious soft tissue damage, and no one could say how fully it would heal. For now it was stable and she had plenty of Percocet and antibiotics from Ethan’s medical supplies. Yippee!

  She saw her mother edge toward her as they finished preparing to move out. “Hey Mom,” Cassy said. “What’s up?”

  Grandma Mandy, as the kids called her, smiled. “How are you holding up, honey? The kids and I worry, you know.”

  “C’mon, Mom. I’m fine. It hurts, but I made it this far. I won’t crap out on you guys. But you knew that already. What do you really want?”

  “Fine, sweetie. The kids and I want to know if you’ll join us in a prayer before we get walking again. From what I overheard, the next little bit of our journey could be rough, and they need reassurance
. The Lord will provide, if they only ask Him.”

  Cassy fought an urge to roll her eyes and managed to keep her reaction in check. Praying to God would not help them, she figured, but it might help her kids. And anyway, it couldn’t hurt to throw a word upstairs to the Big Guy. “Okay, Mom. We can use all the help we can get, right? I’m in.”

  Mandy smiled and led her to the kids. They all grabbed hands and stood in a circle as Mandy led the prayer. Cassy couldn’t help but notice how her mom seemed somehow stronger, more potent, while she prayed. That was probably just a trick of her imagination.

  Lost in her thoughts, she almost missed the end of the prayer and hastily replied, “Amen” with her kids. And it was time to move out.

  * * *

  1400 HOURS - ZERO DAY +6

  Capt. Taggart moved from cover to cover with Eagan behind him. Two soldiers they’d picked up earlier followed behind Eagan. They’d all ditched their uniforms and were now dressed like normal civilians, only carrying pistols and a few grenades. Being out of uniform without rifles made Taggart uneasy, but dammit, uniforms were not the right garb for running and gunning “licks,” guerrilla-style.

  Taggart stopped at the corner of an older brick building. He recognized a row of gouges in the brickwork as bullet holes. Four evenly-spaced, dry blood stains showed that it was probably an execution. The enemy was shooting anyone too old or too young to work, or who had disabilities. Fuck, the bastards were mowing down able-bodied adults, too, when they rounded up more than they needed. The word was that they were breeching random buildings and just taking however many people they needed for one task or another. Then they simply killed whoever was left. Slave labor beat dying, Taggart figured, but not by much.