Banks nodded at his two underlings, and they started for the door once again.
“Wait, I know other things. There’s … there’s this guy named Levi with a hideout near here with a lot of food. Guns and ammunition too, and a generator, I think. And a lot of other stuff, gold and silver too. I … I know where it is. He tries to keep it quiet, but I heard him talking. I’ll tell you, just let me go.”
Banks stopped his henchmen again and rubbed his chin, deliberating. After a moment he nodded and his men returned Singletary and dumped him down on the couch.
“All right,” Banks said, “start talking. And it better be good or your death ain’t gonna be near as easy as the one you just avoided.”
Skyline Drive—Northbound
Approaching Front Royal, VA
Day 14, 1:00 p.m.
Bill Wiggins gripped the wheel, white-knuckled as he negotiated the twisting switchback, tires squealing on the asphalt. Tex looked up from the map.
“You’re not going to do your family any good piled up at the bottom of a cliff in the back of beyond.”
“Sorry,” Wiggins said as he came out of the turn and focused on the next one. “I guess that thirty-five mile an hour speed limit might be pushing the envelope on some of these turns. I thought the Blue Ridge Parkway was winding, but this damn thing’s a corkscrew. I bet there’s not a hundred yards of straight level pavement on the whole drive.”
Tex smiled. “Yeah, it might even be enjoyable if we weren’t trying to get home in the middle of the apocalypse.
“That would be if you’re not driving.”
“Hey, I offered,” Tex said.
“You did, sorry for bitching. But anyway, you’re the mate. That naturally makes you the navigator.”
Tex nodded, and they lapsed into silence as Bill’s mind wandered back over the last thirty-six hours. As Levi predicted, the run to the Blue Ridge Parkway had been the most harrowing leg of the journey thus far. Two weeks into the power outage, gasoline was scarce and the roadside littered with stalled cars, making a moving vehicle all the more conspicuous. Even on secondary roads they encountered haggard pedestrians, undoubtedly refugees leaking into the countryside from the nearby interstates and major highways. They were a mixed bag, both individuals and family groups, many with haunted looks as if they no longer had a destination, but continued in the forlorn expectation wherever they were going was better than where they’d been. The children were the worst, crying from hunger or thirst, or both. It was all Bill and Tex could do to resist stopping and sharing their food.
At stream crossings, camps had sprung up—odd collections of tents and shelters improvised of plastic or blankets, as if some had concluded there really wasn’t any better place, and they could best cheat death a bit longer by conserving their energy. Mostly they flew by these places, transiting before the residents knew they were there. Mostly. At one small bridge they’d been confronted by a human chain, four dirty desperate men spread across the road, armed with a collection of hunting rifles and pistols. Bill floored it as Tex leaned out the window, firing the Glock over their heads to scatter them as the Highlander roared over the bridge. They rode on in silence for some time, each aware it could easily have been them on the roadside were it not for Levi’s generosity.
They reached the Blue Ridge Parkway with three hours of daylight left on the first day, and again as Levi predicted, found the route empty. The popularity of a twisting, scenic road-to-nowhere wasn’t great during a disaster. Their next major concern had been near Roanoke, where the parkway skirted the more congested urban area. They pressed on the first day and stopped for the night fifty miles south of Roanoke, pulling well off the road into the trees. Feeling a bit foolish, they’d strung fishing line knee high between trees and attached bells as a crude ‘early warning system.’ They ate a cold supper to avoid a fire, then sacked out in the hammocks Levi provided. They both slept fitfully and were on the road north at first light, transiting the Roanoke area without incident.
Bill brought himself back to the present as they passed a mileage sign for Front Royal, Virginia. Tex still had her nose buried in the map.
“Front Royal in five miles. That’s the northern terminus for Skyline Drive. Where to, navigator?”
Tex looked up. “It’s complicated. Find an overlook to stop and I’ll show you.”
Bill snorted. “Shouldn’t be a problem. There’s one about every ten feet on this damn road.”
Sure enough, they rounded a sharp curve and he pulled into a scenic overlook. He put the car in park and leaned over to study the map Tex spread out on the seat between them.
She traced a route on the map with her finger. “We’re about eight miles west of the AT at Front Royal, but it starts running northeast at this point, through a couple of state parks to where it crosses US 50 near Paris, then continues northeast to cross Virginia State Route 7 just west of Bluemont. Our best bet is to go through Front Royal and take Happy Creek Road out of town. That’ll get us under I-66 at a place where the road passes under the interstate with no interchange and gets us to the Shenandoah River. There are a series of interconnecting rural roads paralleling the river, which also parallels the AT. Our access point to the AT will be everywhere a substantial road intersects both the river and the AT. At those points, we can jump on the road, go a mile or two east, and have access to the AT as a backup, just like Levi said. That works as far as Bluemont. After that, we’ll take another look.”
“You think we’ll have any problem getting through Front Royal?”
She shrugged. “Who knows? It’s not real big, maybe fifteen thousand. I’m actually more concerned about I-66 because we’re only about sixty or seventy miles out of DC. Given what we’ve seen on the secondary roads, I gotta think the I-66 corridor is a horror show. What I like about this route is this Happy Creek Road approaches and leaves the interstate at a right angle and transits under it with no interchange. If we’re lucky, maybe we can blow right under the interstate in a hurry, with minimal contact.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Bill started the car.
Five minutes later, he exited Skyline Drive to turn north on the broad expanse of Stonewall Jackson Highway. There was the usual collection of convenience stores, fast-food restaurants, and motels increasing in density as they neared Front Royal, all closed, of course. There were hollow-eyed pedestrians as well, some registering surprise at the moving car, but most moving mindlessly to some undetermined destination.
“Notice anything strange about the pedestrians?” Bill asked.
Tex nodded. “They’re all walking away from town. That can’t be good.”
Two miles up the highway, just past the intersection with State Route 55 East, two police cars were drawn across the road. A police officer got out of one of the cars and raised his hand as Bill approached and stopped fifty feet from the roadblock. The cop approached, well to the side, his hand on the butt of his holstered sidearm. A cop got out of the other car and approached from Tex’s side. Both men’s uniforms were rumpled and dirty, and neither looked as if they’d shaved in several days.
“This doesn’t look promising,” Bill said, as he rolled down his window. “Is there a problem, officer?”
The officer grunted. “Yeah, there’s a lot of problems. You interested in one in particular, or would you like a list?”
Bill smiled. “Sorry, I guess I meant is there any problem with us coming through?”
The officer shook his head. “No refugees. I’m gonna have to ask you folks to turn around and go back the way you came.”
“We’re not refugees,” Bill said. “We’re headed north. We just want to go as far as Happy Creek Road and take it out of town. If you’ll let us by, we won’t even slow down in Front Royal.”
“Yeah, that’s what they all say.”
“No, really. How about you escort us? That way you can make sure.”
“And does it look to you as if we have enough manpower to be providing ‘private escorts’
through town? Walt and I’ve been here over twenty-four hours without relief. So again, I ask you to turn around.”
“I understand, but we really don’t want to stay. If you’ll just let us—”
“Sir, you DON’T understand. Nobody’s getting into Front Royal who doesn’t belong here. We tried to help at first, what with all those folks fleeing DC and running out of gas, coming down from the interstate on foot. They were grateful for a day or two, and then more people kept showing up and they stopped asking and started demanding, and it got real ugly. A lot of good folks got killed before we sorted it out, and there’s plenty of hard feelings. So even if I was to LET you past, driving a car full of who knows what, I reckon you wouldn’t make it out of town alive, so you might say I’m doing you a favor. Now TURN AROUND.”
Tex leaned across the seat and looked up at the cop. “Is there any other way north, officer?”
“None I’d recommend,” he said. “You can take State Route 55 East to US 17, but 55 parallels the interstate for five or six miles at least, and it’s like the Wild West out there. The gangs started coming out from DC, hitting the outlying communities as long as the gas held out, and we didn’t have enough manpower to do anything but establish control here in town. Even now, they’re still coming out on motorbikes and hitting farms and homes near the interstate. A moving car at this point might as well have a sign saying ‘Good Stuff—Take Me.’“
Bill looked at Tex. She shrugged. “I guess we take 55 East and hope for the best.”
“Your funeral,” the cop said, and Bill backed the car around and turned east at the intersection as Tex stuck her head back in the map. In the distance, Bill saw another police cruiser on the side of the road, positioned to observe all of the cross streets leading off of State Route 55. He had no doubt if he attempted to turn north into town, the police would be on him in short order.
Bill passed the cop and watched in his mirror until he was out of sight. They were just passing Remount Road.
“I assume you’re working on plan B?”
“Absolutely. If they’re spread as thin as he says, the cops can’t be everywhere. I see one last shot at getting up to Happy Creek Road. The third street ahead on the left should be Jamestown Road. It connects to a lot of surface streets winding through subdivisions on the east side of town. It’s convoluted, but it should get us where we need to go.”
Bill nodded and began to study the left side of the road. He saw Jamestown Road about half a mile later and made the left. They hadn’t gone a hundred yards when the center of the windshield shattered with a heart-stopping crack. He slammed on the brakes, throwing them forward against their seat belts, staring at the hole in the middle of the shattered glass.
“Crap!” Bill said as he jammed the gear shift into reverse and stomped the gas, looking over his shoulder as they raced backwards and another round struck the front of the car.
He slammed on the brakes again when he hit the highway, barely managing to avoid crashing into the opposite ditch as the tires squealed and the car shuddered to a halt. He slammed the transmission into drive and raced east on 55, not stopping until they were a mile out of town with nothing on either side but trees. He sat there, afraid to let go of the wheel because he knew his hands would be shaking.
“Are you all right, Tex?” he asked.
“I … I think so, but what the hell was that? No ‘turn around’ or ‘halt’ or anything.”
“I guess the cop was right,” Bill said. “That’s a town full of pissed-off people. One thing for sure, we’re not going through any part of Front Royal. Is there any other way to get over to the river?”
She shook her head and reached for the map. “I don’t think so, but I’ll have another look.”
“Okay. I’ll see if that second shot hit anything vital.”
Bill got out and was relieved to find the second round buried in the composite bumper. Had he been just a bit slower, the bullet would have likely gone through the radiator and then done more damage in the engine compartment. As it was, they got off light with a hole in the windshield and a bullet in the bumper. A few inches either way and one of them would be dead or the vehicle disabled. He was beginning to appreciate Levi’s caution. It was amazing how being shot at clarified the mind.
He got back in the car. Tex was frowning.
“We’re screwed,” she said. “Like the cop said, in a couple of miles this road veers north and converges with I-66, running right beside the interstate for almost six miles, in places no more than a hundred yards away. Whatever bad guys came out of DC likely used the interstate, and a lot of them might still be there. If we run that gauntlet successfully, then we head back north on US 17 to Paris, where we can take US 50 a few miles west and get back on our ‘parallel the Shenandoah’ plan. The problem is, US 17 is also a major road, so I’m thinking it may have attracted its share of desperate people leaking off from the interstate. That’s the bad news.”
“There’s good news?”
“The whole distance back up to Paris is like eighteen miles on good straight roads. If you wind this baby up to seventy or eighty and bob and weave around any obstacles, and I get ready to hang out the window and pop some warning shots off at anybody who looks like they might even be thinking about stopping us, we could be back on track in half an hour.”
Even under the circumstances, Bill couldn’t suppress a smile. “Wow, you’re getting into the postapocalyptic stuff. That’s like Mad Max in a Toyota Highlander.”
Tex bristled a moment, then chuckled. “Eat your heart out, Tina Turner.”
“How about access points to the AT? Given what’s happened in the last hour, I’m a bit less skeptical about Levi’s paranoia.”
“The next one’s actually on this road, about four miles east and smack in the middle of the area where this road parallels I-66. The AT emerges from the woods and crosses under the interstate, running due north on Turner’s Lane, then branches off back into the woods about a quarter mile north. Then it runs through two state parks. The next access is where it crosses US 50, west of Paris and after we run the gauntlet.”
“How about behind us?”
“All the way back by Front Royal and back up Skyline Drive about five miles, which would mean we’d have to hike at least a half day to get back to the I-66 crossing just ahead of us, and still have to cross under the interstate in the open and on foot,” Tex said.
“Well, that’s not happening,” Bill said. “I guess it’s Mad Max. You ready, Tina?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”
Bill nodded and pulled back on the road, accelerating eastbound. The road was empty and he was doing eighty a few minutes later when Tex pointed out the AT crossing at Turner Lane. Almost immediately thereafter they began to encounter stalled cars, a few in the middle of the road, mixed with scattered pedestrians, forcing him to slow. However, he was able to maintain a steady fifty miles an hour as he slalomed around the obstacles, hoping no pedestrian wandered out from between the stationary cars. Not that they seemed so inclined. In fact, their heads rose sharply at the sound of the approaching engine, and the refugees hurried away from the roadway.
“Not exactly Mad Max,” Tex said as they wound through the obstacle course, “but I guess it’ll work.”
Just as she finished speaking, the woods on the right opened up on a vast expanse of pasture jammed with refugees and a mass of crudely constructed shelters.
“What the hell—”
Tex glanced down at the map. “Water,” she said. “Looks like a pretty substantial creek parallels the road. I guess all these poor bastards gravitated here for the water.”
A sickening smell wafted through the open windows, redolent of too many humans living together without benefit of basic services or hygiene. They shuddered as hundreds of refugees turned toward the sound of the car, their body language telegraphing anxiety, even at a distance.
“I’m not liking this at all,” Bill said as he swerved around an
other car. “What’s ahead?”
Tex glanced down at the map. “There’s an interchange just ahead at a wide spot in the road called Markham. There’s not much there but a vineyard. Then we’ve got three or four miles of this before we head north on US 17. No guarantee what we’re gonna find there either.”
Bill nodded and kept driving, pushing the speed up to sixty as he wound down the highway.
They saw a sign announcing their approach to State Route 688, then passed a large attractive building on the right, with a sign identifying it as the vineyard sales office. There were multiple vehicles in the parking lot. They whizzed by and then heard engines cough to life behind them.
“Motorcycles?” Tex asked.
Bill glanced in his mirror as two motorcycles rocketed out of the parking lot, engines snarling.
“Motorcycles,” he confirmed, and accelerated.
Tex turned in her seat. “Maybe they just want to talk—”
They both cringed as the back window of the SUV shattered.
“Or maybe not,” she finished, unbuckling her seat belt and crawling between the seats into the back. “I guess this really is Mad Max shit.”
The back of the SUV was piled high with stores, and Tex crawled across on elbows and knees, pitching with the car as Bill swerved around stationary vehicles. She steadied herself with her right hand and balled her left fist to hammer at the shattered safety glass, managing to dislodge a large sheet, which hit the pavement behind the car in a dazzling display of flying glass shards flashing in the sunlight. Only then did she reach behind and draw the Glock from its holster and assess the situation.
Which sucked.
She was on a swaying, bouncing platform, shooting a handgun at equally (and unpredictably) mobile targets. The only upside was the targets were getting closer, but since they were armed, that was a somewhat dubious benefit. But their attackers had challenges as well. Steering a motorcycle one-handed while negotiating obstacles and shooting with the other hand wasn’t easy. When they shot, they had to slow a bit, negating the added agility of their vehicles and allowing Bill to draw ahead. After their initial (and lucky) fusillade with no return fire, they’d apparently decided to concentrate on closing the distance. That would change as soon as they started taking fire. She had to take them out quickly.
Under a Tell-Tale Sky: Disruption - Book 1 Page 23
