by Nick Randall
As he passed spots of cover he didn’t think she’d notice, he pointed them out. Like any new soldier, she wasn’t primed to look for small areas of cover, just big things.
Once they got in sight of Jon’s house, Roy called a halt, and got himself and Alex down behind a clump of bushes.
He took out his binoculars and spent some time examining Jon’s property.
He’d picked a good spot, Roy had to give him that, and had made some decent improvements since his last visit more than a year earlier.
The house was on a spot of high ground in the neighborhood, and was surrounded by what looked like an 8-foot tall cinder block wall. From where he and Alex were, he couldn’t see a gate.
He could see the second floor windows over the wall, but not the first. The windows were covered with metal shutters. Up on the roof was a little wind generator and what looked like a weather station.
There were no bullet marks or any other sign that the property had been attacked, as far as Roy could see, but there were also no signs of active habitation either. That was probably intentional on Jon’s part. What the enemy doesn’t know can’t hurt you.
He was about to give up on waiting and just approach when he saw movement. He hadn’t noticed it before, but there was an extra tube running up through the tower that held the wind turbine.
That tube was rotating, and as it did so, Roy saw a lens on one side at the top. It was a periscope.
When it was aimed towards him Roy took a chance, came up on one knee and pointedly set his rifle down. He slowly waved at the house, but since he’d put down the binoculars, he couldn’t tell if the periscope was still aimed at him anymore.
He also didn’t know if it had any optics that would let Jon see it was him out there waving.
Roy flattened himself down and wrote a note, putting it into an empty water bottle.
“Let’s go, soldier,” he said to Alex. “We’re going to go slow and stay low, leave a message to let him know we’ll be back.”
As they started moving closer to Jon’s property, Roy had to smile. Even though she was a good foot shorter than him, even when he was walking at a crouch, she insisted on mirroring him to make herself even shorter.
At least the lesson was sticking, he figured. She was getting used to thinking small.
It took them about ten minutes to get up to Jon’s wall. Roy threw the water bottle over the wall, and waited a few minutes.
He didn’t hear anybody come out of the house inside, so he signaled Alex to start heading back.
“He’s not going to let us in?” she asked.
“He doesn’t know it’s us yet, and I’m not sure it’s him. So I told him to show us something tomorrow that only he would know. We’re going to come back with the car in the morning, and if we see that, we’ll know it’s safe.”
“Like the password when you or mom needed to send somebody else to get me from school?”
“Exactly that,” Roy said.
She laughed. “It’s funny to see grownups following kid rules.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Roy chuckled back.
They were about halfway back to the truck passing by a little stand of buildings – gas station, restaurant, and antique store, when somebody said, “You all need to stop right there.”
He instinctively raised his hands, but kept hold on his AR-15, holding the stock in his left hand, ready to get his right onto the pistol grip and bring it to bear the second he saw a target.
“What do you want?” Roy asked.
“Put it down,” a second voice said.
Roy looked towards it. The two that had spoken were behind a couple of cars, wearing hunting camouflage that wasn’t right for the area.
He caught the first person that spoke looking to his left, and this gave Roy the location of a third person.
“Alright,” he said, then very quietly, “Cover, Alex.”
With a little turn of his head and flick of his eyes, he showed her where he wanted her to go, behind a concrete pillar that kept cars from hitting the gas pumps.
Alex saw where he was directing her, and mouthed, “Now?”
Roy gave his head a very small and fast shake while he made a big show of going down on a knee to ground his AR-15.
As he did so, he took a big step backwards and twisted slightly to conceal his right hip and the pistol holstered there from direct view of all three people.
“I don’t want any trouble,” Roy said. “Why don’t you just let me be on my way?”
“Just shut up and put it down,” said the first person who’d spoken.
“I’m doing it, just slow so I don’t get shot,” Roy said, looking directly at the second person who’d spoken.
That one had the best bearing of the three and looked the most prepared.
He finally got the rifle to the ground, but hadn’t let go of it yet.
“Go, Alex!” he yelled, and used the bend he had in his legs to spring in the opposite direction of his daughter, drawing the others’ attention and then their gunfire away from her.
It took him three steps to get behind the corner of a building. This gave him complete cover from the first two he’d seen, but left him exposed to the third.
However that third person would have been better off just throwing his rifle at Roy. He was jerking the trigger to spray bullets wildly and wasn’t in any stance that gave him a chance at aiming effectively.
All Roy had to do was raise his own rifle, and smoothly squeeze the trigger as soon as he had a sight picture. He fired two more shots as insurance after the first round slammed home and staggered the guy.
By taking a couple steps back, Roy could see through the store windows to pick out the first man. He was still taking cover behind a car, aimed right at the corner of the building Roy had disappeared behind.
Roy was tempted to run around the building to flank, but he couldn’t bear to put Alex out of his sight. He had to take a risk that the man waiting for him was as untrained as the one he’d just taken out.
He took a breath, approached the corner and took a knee. He pictured in his mind what angle his target would be at once he leaned out. To his great relief, as he started to take aim, his target had indeed expected him to be standing, and had to readjust his aim.
Roy’s experience carried the exchange, as he was able to again get a solid sight picture and a smooth trigger pull while his opponent panicked and yanked at the trigger, getting off just two wild shots before going down.
That left one more opponent, the only one that looked halfway competent in his first assessment.
Roy kept low and went around the corner, breathing as little as possible. That’s when he heard what he was hoping for. Footsteps running, going towards the back of the building.
He backtracked to the corner, switched the rifle to a left hand grip, and leaned around. A couple seconds later, he saw a head peek around. One shot was all he needed and the man’s head snapped back in a spray of blood that splattered across the wall.
Roy looked back at Alex, still curled up behind the pillar. She was watching him, and he signaled for her to stay still.
He just stood there in silence for a full minute, listening for any sound. Nothing but insects and a little bit of wind.
“Great job, soldier,” he finally said. “Let’s get back to it.”
Chapter 6
Ben remembered an old movie line from The Shawshank Redemption.
“I had to go to prison to become a criminal.”
His time in prison had taught him a lot about how to survive when surrounded by some of the worst that humanity had created. He learned to see opportunities and how to take advantage of them.
He could look at people and tell who knew how to get things, and how much they might cost. Not in money, but in other less tangible and more expensive means of exchange.
After seeing how much Josie wanted to get out of the camp and find her husband and daughter, that guy that knew how to get things was
the first thing Ben looked for.
Two kinds of people tended to land comfortably after something went wrong in prison, those with power and those with connections, so Ben went looking for who was set up best in the tents that hadn’t been torched in the riot.
Powerful and connected men carried themselves very differently, making it easy for Ben to narrow his search down to somebody that was comfortably profiting off of the camp’s black market.
It took only a short conversation for Ben to give the right cues that he was a former inmate who had managed to get into the general population of the camp instead of the secured wing. This implied that Ben had survival skills and some cunning. A little more negotiation, and Ben had a mission.
At two o’clock the following morning, he showed up at the infirmary wearing his blanket like a cloak, with a fever and a foul smell emanating from the bandage on his leg.
It was a delicate balance Ben had to strike, to look like it was very important he be seen promptly, but not so critical as to kick in the whole emergency rigmarole.
There were a few other people being brought in for assorted injuries and illnesses.
At the early hour, there was just the right combination of tired staff and bustle that Ben was able to distract one person one way, another somewhere else, and get himself shuffled from room to room until he was on his own in one of the examination rooms.
He knew he had only a short time before somebody would come into the room, so he quickly rifled through cabinets, pocketing an assortment of medicines, syringes, some supplies, chemical cold packs, and insulin from the refrigerator.
He had hoped that the cabinet with the really good stuff would have been carelessly left unlocked, but it wasn’t.
Still, assuming the black market in the camp worked roughly the same as the economy in prison, he had a good eye for the next best things, as far as their barter value. All of this he stuffed into a big pouch he’d folded into his blanket.
He was back to lying on the exam table by the time a medic came in to check his vitals. While the stress of quickly rifling through the exam room had him genuinely sweating, and his skin was warm to the touch, he wasn’t able to fool the thermometer.
When the medic unwrapped the bandage from Ben’s leg, though, the skin around the sutures was indeed red, warm, and infected.
The rotting garbage he’d smeared in between layers of the bandage had seeped to the wound and gotten into it. The actual infection was not as bad as the one Ben was faking but was still real.
Fortunately, the late-night medic was too tired from working an understaffed camp clinic to really bother investigating the irregular symptoms.
He just cleaned and re-sutured the wound, gave Ben a shot and a packet of antibiotic pills, and sent him on his way.
Fortunately, Ben’s blanket didn’t make any noise as he picked it up and shuffled out of the old school building and back to his tent block.
Instead of going to his own tent, he went to his well-connected gentleman. A little bit of negotiation and barter, and Ben walked away with two small pistols and a spare magazine for each, and the secret handshake to use with one of the soldiers who guarded the camp.
He barely slept when he got to his tent. He cracked one of the cold packs – supposedly good for eight hours - and wrapped that and the insulin up tight in his blanket.
The two pistols he wrapped up in his change of clothes, which he then curled up with like a kid cuddling his teddy bear.
The fear that somebody would take either the drugs or the weapons had him listening carefully for every single sound in the tent.
Breakfast came and went, then lunch, without him. He simply couldn’t leave his valuables, for as much as he knew he needed to get food into him to help fight the infection he’d given himself.
He had to when it came time for supper, though, because he needed to meet up with Josie to let her know the plan.
She looked shaken by something that had happened to her since he’d last seen her, but wouldn’t tell him what it was.
When he filled her in on the plan and told her he had bartered for a gun for each of them, she was very noticeably relieved, and very thankful.
“You trust that this is all good? We can meet up with this guy and get out?”
“You can never truly trust anybody that deals with people like me bartering stolen goods,” Ben said. “The best you can rely on is that they won’t screw you unless it’s in their best interest, and I don’t see how they gain anything by screwing us over.”
“Do they know you’re an escaped prisoner?” Josie asked.
“They seem to buy me as an ex-con. I got into the general area of the camp, thanks to you, so the lie is plausible. Plus, if I get caught, I’ve got names I can refer to.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Josie said.
“You’ve got more to lose than I do,” Ben told her. “But maybe you think it’s worth it for you to take the risk to see your husband and daughter again.”
“It’s also a big risk for you to take for me.”
“I owe you my life, though, remember?”
Josie nodded, but didn’t say anything further.
“Tonight at twelve thirty, be at the back gate. Be there and ready, because we won’t be able to wait for you.”
“Got it,” Josie said.
The two parted ways, and Ben went back to his tent to fret over the guns and insulin until it came time for him to meet the soldier.
Getting out of the camp was a surprisingly quick affair. The soldier carried a clipboard and this certain businesslike bearing.
He had Ben follow him to the single female’s block, where they picked up Josie and continued their wordless trip through camp to a motor pool.
This was the only part of the trip where the soldier had them sneak around, moving as stealthily as they could between two rows of vehicles to the fence around the camp.
Just like prison, there were two fence lines, with a patrol lane between them. The soldier had them crouch down until after a foot patrol passed, then pulled back a portion of the fence, just wide enough for a person to go through. The second fence had a similar secret passage through.
As soon as Josie and Ben were out, the soldier waved them on.
“Go, and keep going,” he said, looking around to make sure no one was watching.
As he and Josie ran off, Ben took a look over his shoulder, to see the soldier picking up a large satchel that had been hidden in the grass.
“Where to now?” Ben asked, when they were out a couple hundred yards from the camp.
Even in the depth of night, there was enough moonlight for them to tell the school grounds were on the edge of a suburb of some sort.
Unfortunately, the school, “Frank Church Senior High School” didn’t tell them much about which suburb.
“Looks like a main street down there,” Josie said. “Wanna see if there’s a reasonably intact gas station with some paper maps in it?”
Ben shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t have any better ideas.
As they got closer to town, though, he noticed something better.
“There,” he said, pointing to a big box sporting goods store. “They’ll have food, and maybe a cooler and decent gear.”
“And topo maps,” Josie said.
A little over thirty minutes later, they were inside the store, staying as silent as they could in the darkness.
Fortunately, it appeared they had the place completely to themselves. As near as they could tell, the military was keeping an uninhabited zone around the camp. Ben guessed they would send out patrols to round up any squatters and take them to the camp, so people tended to avoid the area.
“We’d best be careful when the sun comes up, then,” Josie said.
With the arrival of daylight, they discovered that all of the clothing had already been looted, as well as all of the survival food, guns, ammunition, knives, and multi-tools.
There were some smal
l coolers still, and a few first aid kits.
Ben and Josie each took one, and scavenged the cold packs out of the rest. Even better, there were a few disassembled bicycles in the back that hadn’t been taken.
They put them together, and loaded up the cooler full of insulin, and a few other odds and ends they found that might be useful.
By keeping a careful watch, they noticed several patrols move past the store, suggesting that Ben was right about there being a depopulated zone around the camp. As much as the delay hurt, they decided to wait until after dark.
At least they found the Gazetteers, which gave them large-scale topographical maps of the area.
Neither Ben nor Josie truly knew how to read one, but they figured they could at least use a compass well enough to get them to Carleton.
“How hard can it be to miss an entire city, right?” Josie asked.
With the sunset, they rode out of the store, and found a set of residential streets that ran parallel to the main road. They soon found a gas station that had been thoroughly ransacked, but there were still maps.
Unfolding one, it took a while, but they finally found Frank Church High School, which oriented them to the correct suburb. They realized they were not far from a library.
“Better chance at finding actual city maps there,” Ben said. “We will need to find the exact street once we get to Carleton.”
“And maybe some survival books,” Josie added.
They picked their way in the darkness to the library, and both remarked out loud that they were glad nobody had burned it down just for fun.
They slept in shifts until dawn, when they could actually read. While Josie went searching for the maps, Ben went to a different section of the library, looking for the oldest medical texts he could find.
There was a small shelf full of very old books, some dating back to the 1930s. He scanned the indexes and picked up anything that mentioned diabetes or insulin.
