Reaper's Run - Plague Wars Series Book 1

by David VanDyke

  ***

  Just before night fell, Jill and Python made their way to the tunnel building, each with a bagful of equipment. “We’ll sneak back later,” her sidekick told the crew of lookouts. She found it hard to lie to her faithful sheep, so she let him do it.

  It was time to abandon this flock. Perhaps not forever, but for now.

  As they opened up the floor, Python asked, “Do you think Drake will let them live?”

  “The ones he’s keeping inside his block? I planted a bug in his ear. I hope he sees it my way.” From glimpses through the doorway, she’d realized the convicts kept haggard women, and possibly a few men, prisoner inside. Probably as sex slaves. Also, each one had a ration card they could exploit.

  Jill and Python had gone around and around on the subject. They both wanted to rescue the captives, but had finally concluded the best way to do that was to have the convicts take themselves out of the way by escaping. Hopefully this would give the SS fits at the same time, and possibly divert resources from chasing him and her as well.

  “I’m still not happy with leaving them behind,” Python grumbled.

  “You want to wait one more night and try to go when they do?” It was the first time she’d really given him a chance to second-guess her, and it clearly made him uncomfortable.

  “No, I guess not.” He resumed dismantling the floor.

  “Think you’re skinny enough now?” Jill asked. Hard work and deliberate lack of food had reduced her five-foot-eight frame to under a hundred pounds. Python was two inches taller and perhaps only ten pounds heavier.

  “I guess we’ll find out,” he replied.

  Three minutes later they dropped through to the space beneath the building, and began to replace the concealing floor from below when they saw a flashlight shine from above.

  “Well, well,” came Drake’s voice. “Glad I thought to check on things. You wouldn’t be thinking of selling me out, would you?”

  Jill looked up at him but kept back out of the way. “No, Drake. We’re just leaving a bit early, and by a different route. Good luck, and goodbye.”

  “Wait…just because I’m interested.” He squatted down at the hole, turning the light away so it wasn’t shining in their faces. “Tell me how. You can’t possibly break out of the pipe from the inside, not just you two skeletons.”

  “Sorry, Drake. If you’re going to rat us out to the SS, we’re not going to make it easy on you.”

  Drake stared. “I won’t, but I understand why you’d think that way.” For some odd reason he sounded disappointed. He seemed to care what Jill thought of him.

  Perhaps that will be enough for him to spare his captives.

  Drake covered up the hole with the modular tiles, and they heard him leave.

  Once they had dropped down into the big irrigation conduit, they saw the PVC sewer pipe within, just as Jill had predicted. It led off to the east, toward the treatment plant, leaving the irrigation pipe relatively clean and dry. Because they had broken in near an intersection, they had a choice of three other cardinal directions as well.

  First they donned improvised knee pads, gloves, and taped tiny battery-LED lamps to their foreheads. Then they turned south, directly toward the SS compound.

  Jill had made careful estimates, and now they counted their steps – if that was what a unit of crawling on hands and knees could be termed. They passed a standpipe above at one hundred yards, and an intersection at two, then another standpipe at three, and finally they came upon more PVC descending at nearly four hundred.

  When they’d seen three more vertical pipes drilled through the concrete from above they knew they were under the SS compound. A score of yards farther they reached another intersection, where they rested. PVC sewer pipe ran off to the east from here as well.

  “What do you think?” Python asked, apparently more to fill the time as anything.

  “I think you’d have made a good tunnel rat,” Jill said cheerfully. She took out a water bottle and a sandwich from her satchel and ate ravenously. “Eat,” she ordered. “With this kind of caloric expenditure we’ll need it.”

  “Right.” He gladly followed her orders. “Glad we saved up during our diet plan.”

  “It better pay off, or we’re going to be two very unhappy moles.” Jill slapped the concrete pipe wall. “Like Drake said, no way we’re breaking through this.”

  “Don’t worry, boss. Your plan will work.”

  “Damn well hope so.”

  After a few minutes they pushed on south. One hundred yards later they found their objective: a standpipe above their heads.

  “I can see stars,” Python said, peering upward.

  “Soon we’ll see them in the open.” Jill unwrapped the grappling hook she’d formed out of bunk parts, and tied it to the length of parachute cord she’d smuggled in so long ago.

  The line was thin, but had a test strength of five hundred fifty pounds, plenty for her purposes. Whittled dowels tied every foot provided something to grip with hands and feet. The only question was: were their bodies thin enough?

  The standpipes were eighteen inches inside diameter. They could certainly fit, but could they climb?

  Without fanfare Jill made her first, experimental throw. The hook fell far short. Because the standpipes stood ten feet above ground level, she had to launch the thing more than twelve feet straight up and have it catch, with the ability to swing it only three feet to gain momentum.

  “We should have brought that collapsible pole you thought of,” Jill said after several tries. “But it would have been awkward as hell.”

  “Let me give it a shot.” Python did no better.

  “All right. Plan B. I climb up the standpipe. You can push me part of the way. Then I have to power up the last part, and I’ll hook the line on when I get there for you. Get on your hands and knees.” When he set himself beneath the hole, she pushed herself in, arms up and holding the hook, line dangling down. She stepped up on his back, then widened her elbows, and braced her feet and knees up inside, supporting her own weight.

  “Okay, get up and grab my feet, my ankles or something, and start pushing.”

  Python did, awkwardly lifting. Jill used his strength to move upward as far as she could, then braced with her hands and forearms. Then she lifted her feet again, and set them against the sides, aided by his hands. Soon she stood on his palms as he extended his arms straight up.

  “You all right?” she asked.

  “No problem. I can do this forever.” His voice held no strain, so she believed him.

  “All right. I’m going to try to throw this thing up. It’s only about three more feet, but I got almost no way to swing it.”

  The fifth time she managed to get it caught on the rim, and with the line, climbed to the top. Once there, she boosted herself onto the rim and settled the hook solidly. She looked around at the cold, overcast Iowa December and wondered when the first snow would arrive. It was a week to Christmas.

  “Send up the gear,” she said quietly. Soon she had brought everything up on the line, and dropped it gently to the dirt below, then jumped down. Just a football field to the north she could see the SS compound and the internment camp beyond, lit up like an outdoor stadium. Fortunately all the light pointed away from them. They should be invisible.

  Python climbed the line easily, hand over hand, and came down the same way. He flipped the hook off the rim and caught it. “Lamp,” he said, removing his and turning the tiny thing off. She did the same. “We’d feel pretty stupid if they caught us because we were wearing ‘catch me’ lights on our foreheads.”

  “Yeah,” she replied. “You ready to run?”

  “Gonna really suck if we don’t come across a vehicle to steal.”

  Jill grimaced. “We could try for an SS vehicle. They don’t even have a fence around their parking lot.”

  Python stroked his chin. “That’s not a bad idea…”

  “I was kidding.”

  “No, really. W
ho’s going to notice a vehicle gone, with all the new people and the comings and goings?” Python’s eyes shone with reflected floodlight as he looked northward. “They’ll just assume someone else has it, running errands or whatever. They might not miss it for days.”

  Jill thought for a moment. “All right. We’ll take a look. Let’s go.”

  They crept across the field, crawling the last forty yards until they were in among the fifty or sixty various trucks, SUVs and Humvees there. The parking lot was poorly lit, and the vehicles haphazardly arranged.

  “Damn,” Python muttered at the first SUV. “This model has kill chips. Can’t hotwire it without a bypass module.”

  “How about a Humvee? All we need to find is one without its steering wheel chained…” She opened the first one she came to. “Like this. What schmucks. I’d have their asses if they were my troops, leaving their vehicles unsecure.”

  “Down!” Python hissed, and they flattened and rolled under the Humvee. A truck with a half dozen troops in the back pulled into a parking spot twenty yards away, and they dismounted. With the driver and passenger in tow, they gaggled back toward the main SS building, rifles slung over their shoulders.

  “Don’t even think it,” Jill said in a low voice as Python stared at them. “We don’t need weapons bad enough to risk getting caught. Stealing this Humvee is already dangerous.” She watched the eight men’s feet as they dwindled in the distance, then said, “Come on.”

  They slipped into the vehicle, Jill in the driver’s seat. Once she was sure the patrol had entered their building, she hit the starter and a moment later the diesel rumbled to life. She didn’t wait, but immediately pulled out and turned on her lights. Leaving them off might have helped avoid being spotted, but if they were seen, someone would wonder what she was doing driving dark. Most people saw what they expected to see, and wouldn’t think a Humvee leaving was unusual.

  She hoped.

  Only when they were headed south on state route 169 did Jill finally relax. She let out a whoop, and grabbed Python by the back of the neck with elation. “Free at last, free at last, thank God I’m free at last!”

  “I didn’t know you were religious,” Python remarked.

  “It’s from a speech by Martin Luther King,” she replied. “Although right now I’d join the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster if it helped us get away.”

  “Amen, sister. Preach it.”

  They both began to laugh, and didn’t stop for a while.