“Why can’t we stop every day for food?” Courtney asked, stopping to where Luis almost bumped into her.
“The smell carries. We’ll eat our food cold as much as we can in the big cities. Too many people around still.”
“You think it’s going to be any better once we leave Chicago?” Mel asked me.
“Yeah, I do. I’m sure the first hundred miles is going to be pretty bad, though. Everyone in the city probably fled to the countryside. I don’t think we’ll be safe to have a hot meal for four or five days at least.”
“That sucks,” Luis said. “Especially as I got some MREs in my pack.”
“Oh man,” I groaned. “Why pack that shit?”
“It’s all I could get,” Luis said, somewhat indignant.
“Well, good news - most of that shit is already cooked. It tastes bad cooked and tastes worse cold but… You know, who am I kidding. It’s food. If you have some MRE heaters to go with it, it won’t be horrible.”
“That’s looking at the bright side,” Jamie said.
“Thank you,” I told her, smiling.
“I was being sarcastic…”
“Oh… Shit… Well, you guys and gals ready?” I asked, pulling the NVGs on my head.
“Yeah. How far do you think we can make it in a day?” Courtney asked.
“To the edge of West Chicago,” I told her.
“No way,” Luis said. “I did a bike-a-thon a thousand years ago in school and did twenty miles in an hour. West Chicago isn’t too much farther than that, is it?”
“In your bike-a-thon, did you have to watch out for people looking to steal your supplies, shoot you in the back, kidnap your wife and rape your daughter?” I asked him.
I was angry again, and part of me understood why, and part of me didn’t care. I mean, to have responsibilities like this… I’d warned him how this was going to be, how it was going to go. He didn’t have to ride with us; I’d already gotten the promise from Mel and Jamie to ride when I said ride, duck when I yelled duck, and run for cover when the bullets flew… and I had no illusions that there would be lead exchanged at some point. The world was just too damned ugly. Despite being the market guard, Luis was a little slow on the uptake.
“Don’t,” Luis said, looking at Mel. “They don’t need to hear that.”
“Why not?” I asked him. “Some of us have already experienced it,” I said, looking at Courtney, who was turning about half as red in the face as Luis. “I don’t want to see it again. I’ve already told you, I’m not going to go faster and risk our safety.”
“Yeah, but I mean, we’ve got five hundred and twenty miles on the first trip to drop these two off,” Courtney said, looking at Mel, who was riding on the pegs as her mom pedaled slowly. We’d all gotten on the bikes and started riding, and I shifted my weight and settled the pack into a more comfortable position.
“Yeah, and we’ll be lucky to make twenty to thirty miles a day,” I told her. “Then we turn south and we ride through Arkansas, where I leave off.”
“I think you're too conservative on how fast we can move, Dick,” Luis said.
“Road’s wide open. If you want to go ahead, that’s ok, but leave me the NVGs.”
“What? Why?” Courtney asked.
“Because I’d rather Jamie have a pair to wear if I had to choose between her and your corpses.”
“Dick,” Jamie cautioned, “it’s ok. Let’s just see how we do, and not fight about this?”
I took a deep breath, then another. After a full minute, I had my anger back in check.
“Ok. I’m sorry. Let’s see what we can do, but I think I'm too generous with the distances.”
Luis just shrugged his shoulders, and Courtney looked away, as if embarrassed. The two bikers had large packs, though not as big as mine, tied to the luggage racks. There was just enough room on the one bike for Mel to sit down, but not on Courtney’s. She was standing, holding on to Luis’s shoulders.
“Sounds good,” Luis said after a long pause.
He was pissed, but I didn’t care. We’d had this argument already. I’d shared my math with them, told them how I was going to do it. I wasn’t going to stop them from going, but if they were going to go biking at speeds where they couldn’t safely assess their surroundings, I’d rather keep the gear than try to loot it from their corpses. Such was life right now.
After thirty minutes of riding and quiet complaints by Mel and Luis whispering to Courtney, I stopped pedaling. They actually rode for another minute without seeing me stop, and I watched them almost topple when they realized I wasn't there anymore. I did this to prove a point, one that would hopefully save their lives. Jamie and Mel looked around in the dark, but it was Luis who told them where I was. After a few moments, the two bikes turned and pedaled back to me.
“What's up, Dick?” Jamie asked, getting close enough to see me in the dark.
“Yeah, why are we stopping? We haven't been on the road long,” Luis said.
“Because you guys aren't paying attention,” I whispered, being as quiet as I could. “And you're too noisy. Sound carries a long way.”
Mel and Courtney stepped off the bikes and stretched. Then they stood around me in a semi-circle.
“What do you mean we're not paying attention?” Courtney said.
“How long did it take you to notice I'd slowed down and stopped?” I asked her, knowing it was her man I should be addressing.
Jamie and Mel were meant to follow me, riding close enough to see me in the dark, and Luis was the eyes for him and Courtney.
“I couldn't really tell,” Courtney admitted, looking at Luis.
I pulled my NVGs up, and Luis did the same.
“How about you?” I asked Jamie. “You were supposed to be riding close enough to see me.”
“I was talking to Courtney,” Mel said. “I figured you dropped back so you weren't in the middle of the conversation.”
“Quieter,” I said, motioning with my hands. “Sound carries out here.”
“Sorry,” she said sheepishly.
“Sorry, Dick,” Jamie apologized. “I was trying to see ahead of me. I can sort of make things out in the moonlight. I just lost track for a minute.”
“You're doing this to prove a point, aren't you?” Luis asked.
“Yeah, actually I am. So what?” I asked him. “If this was a live-or-die moment, you all just died,” I hissed.
“Why are you so pissy all of a sudden?” Courtney asked, matching my quiet voice, making an effort to contain her emotions.
“Because, if you guys don't learn this now, don't get a handle on this, it'll cost us our lives.”
I let the words sink in, and Courtney nodded. Mel walked over and gave me a big hug. “Sorry, Dick, I don't have a hairbrush. Would that help?”
I sat there in shock for a moment, and then couldn't help the grin that cracked my seriously bad mood.
“No kid, I just need everyone to be on the same page. Once we get out of the populated areas, it won't be so bad. You've all seen or heard what it's like on the road. Taking bikes is a huge risk, and we'd probably be safer on foot.”
“But we'd starve before we got there,” Luis said. “We've had this talk.”
“I'm all for going slow and living longer,” Mel said, breaking contact and then stepping on the pegs behind her mother.
“Yeah, let's not argue about this again. We're going to be in each other's hair for a while anyways,” Courtney said, giving me a smile I could barely make out in the dark.
“Ok, let's go, and remember, while we're riding we need noise discipline. Don't speak unless it's an emergency or you see something.”
“Yes, boss, whatever you say, boss,” Luis said in a mock whisper.
“Go on then,” I told him. “Just give me back my gear, Luis. I'm done arguing with you.”
“Knock it off,” Courtney said, smacking him in the arm. “Dick's done a lot for me, for all of us.”
“You, of all people...” Luis
said, turning to face Courtney, but she raised a finger across her lips as if to tell him to STFU.
“Fine, then, let's go,” I said and started pedaling. “Jamie, you follow my rear tire. I'm your eyes. You see me move or steer, it's to avoid something,” I told her, lowering the NVGs again and watching as the inky darkness was lit by a neon green color.
“Got it,” Jamie said, though I could hear that she was biting her lip.
I wasn't making friends today, but I wanted them all to live, more than anything.
3
That first night we pedaled, and when we got to the western edge of town, the interstate started clogging up with stalled cars. We were forced to slow down and walk the bikes in some cases. I tried to keep my temper, but Luis kept muttering about the pace. More than once in the past two weeks, I’d wondered what had made him turn from the easygoing guard to a surly crybaby. I didn’t understand his need to hurry.
We had to stop as a bright light overloaded the NVGs, and I motioned everyone to get down. They had remembered the lesson well, and I pushed the useless goggles up to see what it was that had shone in our direction like a search light. It took me a moment, and then I saw it. Somebody was camped out on top of an overpass about half a mile ahead, and they had turned on a twelve-volt spotlight by the looks of things.
“Nobody was talking,” Mel whispered, kneeling between her mother and me behind an Acura that had been left where it'd died when the EMP fried out all non-military electronics.
“I know,” I whispered back, and everyone huddled closer, “but sound carries a long way. There's no background noise anymore. No cars, no planes. If anything, with the wind blowing that way, it was the bike chains making a sound.”
“What do we do?” Luis asked.
“We can backtrack and take the service road and get back on down the line, that's option one. Option two is we wait and see if they move on. Option three is to try to sneak past, but I think that's the worst of the choices.”
“As much as I hate to lose the forward progress, I guess backtracking is the safest if we want to make some more miles tonight?” Luis asked.
I looked at the sky and guessed we had at least another hour or two until dawn.
“Yeah, probably, but we need to be quiet and fast,” I told him. “Something feels off here.”
“I'll do whatever,” Jamie said. “I just want to get home.”
“Me too,” Mel whispered to me.
“Ok, we'll keep our eyes peeled,” Luis said, nodding.
For the most part, it went off without a hitch. It took us probably half an hour to backtrack to an off-ramp, and we rode in silence. Coming back to the overpass, we started pedaling quickly, and the light snapped back on. I was waiting for this, and had already pushed up the NVGs. I saw four figures lit momentarily as the light moved around. It shone down in our direction but never came close to actually lighting us up. The light snapped off, and we were past them. We rode in silence for a while, and when I pointed to an on-ramp, Luis nodded. We took it and rode in quiet until the sunlight started brightening the sky at our backs. Although we weren't all the way out of Chicago, we were close. Parks dotted the map I'd looked at, and a smug portion of me was silently pleased that we’d made more or less the exact amount of time I thought we would. Yes, going further would have been great, but you take Murphy into your planning.
“Over here,” I called softly, getting off my bike and pushing it to the edge of the road.
I dropped the NVGs and took a quick look, but it appeared to be a small area, overgrown with some trees.
“Anybody see the last mile marker?” I asked.
Mel nodded and told me. I had to grin. I was almost on the money, and this was definitely the park I’d wanted to try to stop at.
I could hear everyone groaning as they dismounted. I wasn't as worried; standing up straight with my pack had me popping at every joint, and I groaned as well as my back threatened to seize up.
“We camping here?” Jamie asked.
“Yeah, let me scout it out first. If there's any trouble, give a shout.”
“Will do,” Courtney told me, and Luis gave me the nod.
Mel took my bike, and I dropped my pack on the road. Walking slowly, I held the KSG up in front of me. The shotgun was loaded as normal, buckshot, and it would knock down anything man-sized. Walking through the tall weeds from the road to the park covered a good hundred feet, but the park proper was exactly what I was looking for once I got in there. It was lightly wooded with a small pond on the far side.
Park benches had been placed near the pond, which was the side that was accessible to the road running parallel to the highway. I'd worried that, as a water source, this place might be taken, but being this far west of town, I didn't think that would have been a problem. FEMA had come and evacuated people early on, and the law of averages foretold a ninety-percent mortality if something like this ever happened.
I circled the small pond. It didn't have much water in it, and I could see dried footprints that had packed the once soft mud of the bottom of the pond into a dirt path leading to the remaining water. I circled, trying to gauge how recent the footprints were. The prints were small and looked malformed. That told me they had been made when the mud was wet, and it had dried. The path stopped a good couple of feet short of the water. Whoever it was hadn't been here in a while.
I headed back, pulling the NVGs off my head and letting the cooler night air leach away the heat.
“Is it safe?” Courtney asked.
“Looks like it. We'll camp in the high stuff between the two pine trees. Everybody have a ground sheet?” I asked them and got blank stares. “A tarp?”
Recognition lit their eyes, and they nodded. If they were half as weary as I felt, they wouldn't be awake for very long. Great.
“Follow me, guys. We have to set a watch all day until nightfall, in case someone comes out,” I told them.
“Thank God,” Courtney said, picking up the backpack I’d dropped on the road and handing it to me.
“Yeah, thanks. We're gonna set up a dry camp here. No fire, no cooking,” I told them. I looked at Mel, who was doing squats and trying to get the circulation flowing through her legs again.
“Don't worry, Dick,” Jamie whispered. “We'll be okay, but we’re going to be sore.”
“You can say that again, Mom,” Mel said, standing upright and twisting at the waist to stretch her back out.
They followed me into the park, and it wasn't long until I showed them where I was thinking about making camp. At first everyone started putting the kickstands up on their bikes and leaning them against a tree, but when they saw me laying mine down on the ground, they followed suit. I dug into my pack and pulled out some camo netting that Jeremy had traded for with the guy who had helped outfit us from the sporting goods store. Since it was a hot, dry summer, the netting didn't match the overgrown, nearly dead grass that was the once-manicured park.
I covered the bikes with the netting and then started pulling handfuls of the brown shoots, working them into the netting. Everyone stopped and stared as I obsessively wove it in. It seemed rather tedious, but in ten minutes’ time, I'd effectively made the hump that the bikes were hidden under look like any other random blob in a grassy, overgrown lot.
“That's pretty slick,” Luis told me. “Is it how ghillie suits are done?”
“Yeah, it's like it's not even there,” Courtney said.
“Exactly,” I answered. “Just like a ghillie suit. You use local vegetation and make it blend in. The camo pattern is to break up the profile, but it was too dark by itself. So I used what we had.”
Because everyone looked dead on their feet, I opted to take the first watch and let them get some sleep. Louis just nodded his thanks and took a long drink from the canteen. We'd all been very careful with our water usage because we would have to stop frequently to refill them and use the filters. We were definitely gonna have to get water from the pond before we left. I looke
d on while everyone was setting up a tarp to keep themselves dry (what a joke), and soon they all settled down to sleep.
Since I had no intention of going without, I pulled out some of my travel food that I had brought. Despite hassling Luis about packing MREs, I’d done much the same. I didn't have as many MRE heaters as I would have liked, and I already knew how bad it was going to be when I dug in. Since nobody was watching and I didn't really care, I opened up dessert first. I ended up with some kind of fruitcake by the taste of it. I washed it down with lukewarm water and then opened up the makings of a sandwich. Yes, bread gets packed in MREs sometimes, and I dug around until I found packets of peanut butter and jam.
I listened to the soft snores, and then someone shifted. I could hear the tarp crackle from where Mel and Jamie were lying. The sun was starting to rise, and I took a quick look at our surroundings. Everything was dead quiet, so the sound of the tarp crinkling again really drew my attention. Mel sat up and looked over at me. She raised an eyebrow as if to ask a question, and I motioned for her to come my way. She kept her body low to the ground to avoid the wet tips of the tall grass, and then stopped close to my feet.
She grinned when she saw the empty packaging of the MRE.
“I thought you hated those things?” she whispered.
“I think it's better than a rat, but not by much,” I whispered back. I smiled when she made a retching face, her finger pointing at the inside of her mouth.
“Aren't you tired?” she asked softly.
“Yeah, I'm exhausted,” I said, once again looking around the area. Everything was still quiet, but I wasn't ready to let my guard down. “But we’re still too close to the city. I'm worried that there're people around,” I told her.
“Not all people are bad, Dick,” she told me quietly.
“I know, but hunger, fear, and the end of the entitlement era really push some people in some very scary directions.”
“Are you gonna get any sleep?”
“Yes, but I'm gonna wait a couple more hours before I wake up Luis. I figure he can take the next watch, and then in about six hours or roughly after lunchtime, we’ll all be awake anyway. We can take turns napping until dark.”
The Devil's Road: Devil Dog Book 2 (Out Of The Dark) Page 2
