by John L. Monk
“I got it,” Sheila said, aiming for the kid on the hood shooting the big gun everyone was afraid of.
Then, in the way of war (and life in general), things got worse.
Automatic gunfire blasted their way from another stairwell, more than a hundred feet away. Dwayne, running to help Sheila, was taken out in bloody fashion, sending his hunting rifle skittering across the concrete paving. Sheila—still aiming—fired a single shot.
“Got him!” she shouted, oblivious to their sudden danger.
Greg wasn’t the best shot in the world, but he did have his rifle with him. He’d never used it against another person, not in his life. Never intended to. Not in a million years. So it surprised him when two remarkably Greg-like hands squeezed off round after round into the stairwell. His rifle, not being an automatic, was far more precise than the airport kids’. With the enemy grouped so closely, even his mediocre aim knocked down three of them right away. The remaining three tried to run and tripped over the fallen and each other, then hunkered down with their arms over their heads while Greg picked them off one by one.
Shocked at what he’d done, he looked at the low, concrete wall behind him, now perforated with two-foot groupings.
“Oh …” he said.
It was too much—shooting and getting shot at, almost dying again for like the tenth time that year. As a commander, he’d lost his first crew, and now a kid named Dwayne. But he’d saved Sheila … which made him sort of a hero.
“Jack’s gonna flip,” he muttered breathlessly. Why was he breathing so heavily? His hands shook so hard he couldn’t hold the rifle anymore. Best to let it tumble to the soft, inviting ground.
Much better.
Greg made it five steps before the last few minutes caught up to him. The world twisted sideways, the sky spun overhead, and he fell over in a dead-away faint.
47
Jack and Larry’s cautious re-entry to the terminal was a step into a nightmare land of crying, screaming, and nonstop gunfire—and even a little demented laughter coming from somewhere.
The huge glass windows were holed and crazed from floor to ceiling, and the stench of blood, shredded bowels, and gun smoke hit Jack like a punch to the stomach. The broken bodies at the top of the escalator couldn’t have been dead more than a few minutes. A quick peek down the steps showed a similar-sized pile.
“All right, you guys. Go downstairs and hide,” Jack told the children with him. “Don’t shoot anyone unless they shoot at you. Stay out of the fight.”
“What about Trevor?” one said. They were all afraid of Trevor.
“Screw that guy,” Larry said. “Now, git!”
Not waiting to be told again, the children slipped and stumbled down the bloody escalator and then vanished from sight.
Most of the live fire in the vast building was now of the single-shot variety, coming from the boat kids, who blasted anyone they didn’t recognize. To Jack, it was clear what had happened: the airport kids, with their automatic weapons, had run out of ammunition. Probably hadn’t kept more than a magazine or two handy, if that. Even his own people balked at carrying extra ammo around, complaining it was too heavy. Which was what Jack had told his nervous new allies.
As nice as it was to see his theory validated, the regular patrol by the water and the seemingly competent watch at the front entrance had worried him greatly. Now he felt confused. It almost seemed like the defense here was of two minds.
From an ammo perspective, the boat kids weren’t doing that much better than the enemy. They kept shooting their targets long after a threat had been neutralized. But they also carried at least five extra magazines with them, at Jack’s suggestion.
“We did it!” Trevor yelled, standing next to a pup tent, a duffel bag in one hand and his pistol in the other.
“Would you look at him?” Larry said in disgust.
“I am,” Jack said.
Three days ago, when Trevor asked Larry to join him, Larry said he’d think about it but never gave an answer. Then—the day before the attack—Trevor and his friends sweetened the deal, promising Jack’s share of the loot and a leadership role. For that, Larry had to get rid of Jack, Lisa, her brother, and anyone too loyal. The plan was to do it after the airport kids were all dead.
Larry had agreed to the offer … and then promptly told Jack.
“Look at all this great stuff!” Trevor said, spilling open the duffle bag, which was filled with hundreds of small packages. “FEMA bars, like I said! Last our whole lives!”
A single gunshot from inside the tent blew the back of the kid’s head off. After the body hit the ground, a boy with a mohawk emerged from the tent, grinning like a demon. He looked quickly around, then ran in the direction of Terminal A. Along the way, embattled airport kids joined him.
Jack was about to fire at their retreating backs when a fresh round of automatic gunfire erupted off to his left, forcing him and Larry to duck behind a couple of columns. After a tense exchange of bullets, whoever it was finally hit empty, and Jack gunned him down easily. By the time it was over, the mohawk kid and his companions had vanished from sight.
“Lisa’ll get them,” Larry said confidently, coming to stand beside him.
“I hope so,” Jack said. “You see that haircut? Looked like a mean dude.”
Larry snorted. “I’m meaner. But hey, we should probably scoot.”
Together, they slipped downstairs to check on the children, who were hiding inside a baggage carousel. After that, they followed the signs to Terminal A.
Dylan fingered the strip of cloth that girl, Lisa, had tied around his arm.
“Um, shouldn’t I have a gun too?” he said hopefully. He’d told her about Aaron’s group—how they’d locked up him, Tony, and Chelsea, and how he’d had nothing to do with the attack on her home, some place called Big Timber.
Lisa looked at him guardedly, taking his measure, then got a pistol from someone and came back. “Don’t shoot anyone with an armband. Got it?”
Dylan nodded. “Got it.”
She got on her walkie-talkie and called repeatedly for a kid named Jack and her brother, Greg, as they proceeded back toward the ticketing counters. They left Tony and Chelsea at Gate 9, along with a couple of guards for the children.
He liked that she cared about the children. A good sign.
He’d had a little water—not too much—and something made of meat called pemican. After that, Dylan’s energy came back surprisingly quickly. Now he felt anxious. And angry. Here was this girl, a stranger, doing what he and Aaron had been charged with: protecting the children, caring for them. With everything in him, he wanted to confront the freaky-haired jerk and see how he liked rotting in a cell with nothing to eat or drink.
Dylan glanced back and saw they were still coming, though slowly as Lisa stopped to test the radio and look outside. “Jack?” she’d say. “You there, Greg? Over.”
Along the way, he glanced at his gun, wondering as always what the little knobs and levers were for. When he’d gotten that first batch of guns and ammo with Aaron’s dad, he’d figured out the M4 enough to shoot it and that was it. Some of the other kids practiced a bit more—out of boredom, more than anything else. Only a few had tried the pistols, because machine guns were cooler.
Dylan quickened his pace, passing a donut shop, a cafe, and a newsstand along the way. But by now, all the books and magazines were gone—cut up and used for toilet paper after they’d run out of the real stuff. Sometimes, when he went outside for more than a few minutes, he was shocked upon re-entry because of the smell coming from the open trashcans. People were supposed to tie off the plastic bags and set them aside for whoever was on removal duty, but almost no one did.
“When this is over,” Dylan said to himself, “we’re getting out of here and never coming back.” Maybe with Lisa and her friends, if she’d take them. Tony and Chelsea seemed like good people.
He entered the baggage claim/ticketing area and felt momentarily spooked. The place was empty.
A good thing. But he was alone. A bad thing. He started to turn back when a voice from the entrance to the long corridor to B/C said, “Well, if it ain’t King Twerp.”
Dylan whirled, gun raised, already pulling the trigger … and then staring dumbly when nothing happened.
Aaron and his friends gaped in shock at how close they’d come to being filled full of holes.
Aaron recovered first. “What’s a matter? Ain’t got no bullets? Hold on, twerp. I’ll give you some of mine.” Then he raised his pistol and fired.
If Dylan hadn’t already been running, he might have gotten hit. Aaron fired again and missed again, and then Dylan was gone, heading back to the others and screaming for help the whole way.
Lisa quickened her pace. She was definitely worried about Jack. Her brother was almost certainly safe, way up on that tower with Brad to talk sense into him as needed. By now, someone should have answered. Jack was supposed to call when the bulk of the fighting had ended, but so far, nothing.
Far away down the long line of gates, sudden gunshots rocked the relative silence of that part of the airport complex.
“Dammit, what now?” she said. Someone was running their way—Dylan, arms and legs pumping, clutching his pistol like a racing baton. She raised her voice: “Everyone, take cover!”
The boys and girls of Legion might not have liked her very much, but they listened. As one, they hid behind columns, rows of chairs, kiosks, and even a floor buffer.
“Heeeeeelp!” Dylan screamed, turning to look behind him every few seconds. “Heeeeeelp!”
A group of kids, all boys, were hot on his tail, firing wildly but not hitting him. Lisa dropped to the floor, then crawled for cover behind a trashcan shared by a girl with long, blonde hair.
“What’s wrong?” the girl said.
“Shush. And stop pointing that gun at me.”
“Sorry,” the girl said and angled her rifle more toward the ceiling.
When Lisa looked out, Dylan was gone, but the kids were still coming—slower now as they approached gate six. Lisa recognized one of them, based on Dylan’s description, and her eyes narrowed dangerously.
“Everyone—hey!” she called out to those in her immediate vicinity. “I got Mr. Haircut. Kill the others.”
The girl beside her nodded.
“Now!” Lisa shouted.
Muffled shuffling, then steady blasting as her raiders picked their targets and squeezed off precise rounds, according to their training. Very easy shots—less than a hundred feet.
Mohawk fired wildly with his pistol while his friends fell over like rotting trees around him. When he ran out of bullets, Lisa dropped her rifle and ran at him as fast as she could, quickly covering the distance. The kid fumbled in his pocket, probably for another magazine, and then she tackled him, clipping a leg behind his so he couldn’t get up. When they hit the ground, she pulled her pistol and lodged it against his Adam’s apple hard enough to choke him.
“So, you like killing little kids?” she said through gritted teeth. “Is that it?”
“What?” Aaron said. “No! Lemme go!”
“I was there,” Lisa said, dragging him up by his shirt to stare deeply into his eyes. “I was there when you did it. I just wanted you to know.” She smashed him in the nose with her pistol and felt it crunch. “You see Carter in that hole you’re going to, tell him I said hi.”
When she saw the change in his eyes … Understanding? Relief? That’s when she pulled the trigger.
It felt okay.
Jack and Larry met Lisa and the rest of her small army in a museum section, of sorts. There were cool model airplanes on the walls, a domed layout of the airport, old black and white photographs, and artifacts with little placards he didn’t have time to look at.
“Where the heck have you been?” she said.
He tried to conceal his shock at her appearance. Her face was speckled chin-to-forehead in someone’s blood, and there were smear marks around her eyes from where she’d wiped them.
“Sorry … uh, lost my radio,” he said, then brought her up to speed on the events in the other terminal.
“So, we won?” she said.
Jack nodded. “Yep. They’re in there looting and high-fiving each other right now.” He stepped forward and addressed the others. “You all look healthy. I said you’d be fine, didn’t I?”
Grudging nods and murmured assent all around.
“Right,” Jack said. “And what else?”
Someone near the front said, “If they don’t have an armband … uh … and if they aren’t little kids … we gotta pop ’em.”
Jack nodded. “I don’t like it any more than you do. But it’ll be over soon, and then we can go home.”
He led them down the long hall and into the next terminal, where the boat kids scrounged among the dying and the dead arguing over the guns and food they’d won. When Trevor’s friends saw Jack, they yelled the secret signal for Larry and his friends to kill Jack and anyone loyal to him.
Larry just smiled.
None of the boat kids had been given little white armbands, and all were promptly cut down by Jack’s Legion.
The battle for Reagan National Airport was over.
Epilogue
The little kids were brought to yet another airport—Dulles International, near Centreville—where they were taken in with open arms by the group of older girls living there, whom Jack had met only once. After some pointed questions, they admitted to having a huge stash of FEMA bars of their own. Somehow, the girls had managed to avoid the disastrous split that Reagan had undergone. Jack wondered if every airport had a similar hoard of food or only the ones around D.C. Dylan Timmes—a senator’s son—told him his airport had been packed with the sons and daughters of rich and high-ranking people.
Jack had tried one of the FEMA bars and found it utterly disgusting. But if they could keep people alive while food was still scarce, then they solved a major question: what to do with the little kids, and how to feed them all?
In the face of so much death—from the Sickness to their latest battle—it felt nice to do something a hundred percent good for once. He said as much over his parents’ unmarked graves behind his old townhouse in Centreville, which he hadn’t seen in half a year.
“A lot’s happened since you died,” he said. “Stuff you’d never believe, even though you prepared me for it.”
He spoke of his dead friends, Pete and Mandy. And of their killer—a bully and a rapist named Carter. There was another kid named Blaze, he told them. A different sort of bully, and one Jack saw himself becoming more like each day.
He spoke of the animals he’d slaughtered to stay alive, and how he felt worse killing them than he did certain people.
“You told me killing was wrong,” Jack said quietly. “And I think it is. But what you never told me … you never said how easy it is.”
He’d killed in self-defense and in cold blood. Or simply to send a message. But always, he hoped, for their survival. He’d wiped out the airport kids before they could get stronger and more dangerous. He’d butchered the boat kids for their treachery and their willingness to slaughter the most vulnerable of their number for a chance at easy food.
Jack drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I thought it was only me, but I see it everywhere now. The killing. Some of the others … they don’t treat it like something bad. For them, it’s just work.”
Looking through his old house, Jack had found everything destroyed. Nothing anyone wanted. But it still felt like home because his parents were buried there.
“Tony wants to be our treasurer,” he said in a light voice meant to be cheerful. “We’ll use these for money.” He held up a shiny gold eagle dated two years ago. “They’re solid gold, and the picture’s so good no one can counterfeit them. Other gold won’t count. It’s gotta be official.” He smiled, thinking of Tony’s Mayan gold, and how Lisa and the others had teased him about it. Everyone needed a reason to laugh now, and Tony—
surprisingly—had played into it willingly.
Jack spoke of other things: chickens and roosters, bulls and cows and sheep. And horses. Some of the new kids knew about horses and how to ride them. Jack had them busy working to preserve the breeds they’d found. He didn’t want to rely on racehorses to plow fields when the tractors finally failed. To last that long, they’d first have to grow something and save the seeds for next season. The books said there’d be pests to deal with and blight that could ruin their crops, like during the potato famine in Ireland.
Lisa had picked the smartest kids she could find to come work with her at the university in Front Royal. She had plans to bring back antibiotics and vaccinations for people and animals. And if she had time for side projects like explosives or poisons, well … those could come in handy if they ran into another group who’d gotten hold of military weaponry.
The weapons Dylan and Aaron had collected were taken to Phoenix Base for analysis. There had to be a good reason to shoot a zillion bullets a second. The rifles had SEMI and AUTO selectors, so at the very least they could replace the AR-15s for his best raiders.
“And I hope never to use any of them,” Jack said before standing up.
He stepped over the charred remains of their old fence and sat in the passenger seat of one of the AVs. Dylan, who’d driven the military Humvee many times while on patrol, was teaching him how it worked.
Jack had plans for Dylan. With Greg and Tony off hunting treasure, and Lisa lost in her books and test tubes, he couldn’t think of a better person to run the new fishing base in Occoquan than someone who’d taken initiative and protected the defenseless. Dylan might not have been much of a fighter, but he’d stayed with Tony and Chelsea when he could have thrown in with Aaron and saved his skin. He had character. And these days, character was more valuable than guns, bullets, and all the gold in the world.
Mayan, or otherwise.
Dear Reader
