He stopped at the water hazard to refill his bottle, which had a built-in filter. The women splashed water on their faces and rubbed it on their arms and necks to wake them up and get rid of some of the sweat and grime that had built up during their journey so far.
Another half hour through some less tightly-packed neighborhoods on the other side of the golf course brought them to Marston Lake. There they joined a ragged stream of refugees walking around the lake on a paved nature trail. Most were silent, staring at the ground or straight ahead, still in shock at what they’d been through. A few eyed McLean’s gun fearfully, but he kept it pointed down at the ground and nodded respectfully at those they passed.
On the other side of the lake they followed a quiet road that bordered a comfortably spread-out residential area and some open fields. Up ahead they could see the mountains rising attainably close, and quickened their pace. The road started to parallel another freeway that curved down from the north. On the chance that the main routes were being watched, they turned south and then continued west through a large subdivision.
Just as they were about to exit it into more open land, they were challenged by a homeowner who brandished a shotgun just like McLean’s. He had two teenage boys with him that were carrying hunting rifles.
“Hey! You can’t come through here, especially not with that gun,” the man said, pointing at McLean’s shotgun. He obviously didn’t feel threatened by the sight of a man escorting two unarmed women through the neighborhood, so he wasn’t pointing his weapon at McLean. But the group had come up behind the informal checkpoint, which was probably meant to restrict access into the subdivision from outside, and they had surprised the man.
“It’s okay. We’re headed out toward the foothills,” McLean told him, keeping his gun in a non-threatening position. “You’re doing very well to guard your neighborhood, but I’ll share some information with you, if I may.”
The man nodded for him to continue.
“I don’t know how much you’ve seen of the rest of the city. It’s a mess, and gunmen have been attacking civilians and police, both downtown and in some of the suburbs. It looks like they haven’t bothered you here yet, but if they come, you’ll need more men to keep them out. The ones we saw were in groups of six and seven, and they had some level of training. You’d better get your neighbors up and armed if you plan on boxing yourself in here. And make sure you post some people at the other end of your neighborhood; we came through without anyone even seeing us, much less trying to stop us. If you don’t have anybody guarding the other entrances to the area, they may get in behind you like we did.”
The man’s eyes had grown wide as McLean relayed the gravity of his situation. “Aren’t the police doing anything? Where’s the National Guard?”
McLean shrugged. “Probably home with their families trying to find a working power generator. Or dead. The gunmen I saw were dressed in black, carried tactical rifles, and seemed to be actively preventing any coordinated response.” He kept the girls moving and left the man behind to figure out his defenses.
In his younger days, McLean might have attempted to share more of his skills. He probably could have helped to organize the people around him and maximize their ability to withstand the destruction that was upon them. But he was no commander, and he had been let down by other people too many times, seen people fail to shift for themselves on too many occasions.
He knew if he got bogged down here or in any one of the other thousand little battlefields raging across Denver that day, his friends in the mountains wouldn’t be able to count on him. It was every man’s responsibility to guard his own home now, and McLean had a very defensible one waiting for him to return to it. Denver was on its own.
The subdivision’s exit had put them in an open area fronting the freeway that ran north and south along the mountains. To the north was another east-west freeway, one of the arteries that would have led him home through the mountains if he had been in his truck. On foot, he wanted to avoid it until he was clear of the valley.
To the south was a small reservoir. Their way forward to the mountains was between the freeway and the reservoir, across a mile-wide strip of open land that ended in a foothills subdivision. If they could make it that far safely, they’d be able to wind their way up into the foothills without any further danger of attack.
“Okay, ladies,” he said, crouching with the other two in the grass just outside the subdivision and scoping out the area with some mini-binoculars from his bag. “We have to cross all this open ground, get into that neighborhood, and then up into the hills. It looks clear enough from here, but there’s always the chance that snipers are covering the entrances into Denver, and might spot us. Or something equally as bad. So we need to move carefully, but keep moving until we get across. Are you ready? Stay with me, and if I say ‘drop’, you drop to the ground and crawl to the nearest cover. If I say freeze, crouch down where you are so our movement doesn’t attract attention.”
Shauna nodded, her blonde curls bouncing around her round face. A smudge of dirt marred her otherwise pale countenance, and she trembled slightly. McLean wondered how much longer she could hold up before shock, stress, and physical strain broke her. What would they do if she broke down out there, at the worst possible moment? He didn’t think he could physically carry her very far.
Carrie crouched quietly and steadily, bouncing lightly on her haunches to keep limber and ready. McLean admired her more than ever before. Instead of getting worn down by the emergency they were facing, she was increasing her personal ability to the level of the need. Again he felt deep down that he’d picked a good woman to help. Her hair was somehow still tightly tucked up despite all their running, and her lively blue eyes sparkled in the sun over her cute nose. It wasn’t a moment for idle thoughts, but he was simply in awe of her.
They crossed the freeway using a stalled semi-truck for a moment of cover, then jogged across a long stretch of open field. McLean kept his head on a swivel, checking ahead, then behind, then all around for signs of movement. He had no way of knowing where a sniper or other observer might be hiding. He’d seen no sign of any with his binoculars, but he kept himself ready to change direction at a moment’s notice if they heard the report of a rifle.
A low hill rose ahead with a house on its crest. They followed a crumbling asphalt road around it and across a field on the far side. With the hill behind them they weren’t quite as exposed to view from the town, so McLean stopped worrying so much about snipers and concentrated on the subdivision ahead. It looked calm and intact.
As they neared the outer street of the subdivision, however, a rumbling noise broke the morning stillness. It was the sound of loud truck engines, which they hadn’t heard for what seemed like days now. It wasn’t coming from inside the subdivision, but from somewhere to the north. McLean couldn’t see any vehicles moving, but the sound was growing steadily louder and clearer, so he pushed the two women ahead of him toward a ditch in front of a landscaping wall where they all three lay on their bellies in the bark chips and shrubs.
Down the freeway from the direction of I-70 a military convoy of trucks was rolling steadily toward them. As they came into view, McLean trained his binoculars on them. It was a small convoy, somewhat ragtag in appearance, obviously cobbled together from whatever trucks had survived the EMP. McLean knew that the military had hardened some of its equipment against EMP in the past, and it seemed that at least some of it was still working, perhaps dredged up from underground storage bunkers after the second burst.
In the lead, a bulldozer was pushing stopped cars out of the way, sliding them off the side of the road and leaving them piled in the median. Behind it came six trucks of various sizes and shapes, some troop transports and some cargo haulers. They were going slow, and around them were clustered about a hundred soldiers on foot. It looked like an Army company, or what was left of one, perhaps National Guard. They had their battle rifles and full kit, and they marched tightly n
ext to the vehicles. There weren’t enough vehicles to transport them all, so McLean surmised that they had moved in leap-frogging turns throughout the night.
“Oh my gosh, is that the Army?” Shauna asked, getting to her knees. “Thank goodness! Maybe they know where my boyfriend is!”
“Wait!” McLean said, but Shauna had already stood up.
“Let’s go talk to them! They’re here to save everybody,” Shauna told the others, relief flooding her voice. Without waiting, she trotted off toward the convoy.
McLean put a hand on Carrie’s ankle where she lay in front of him on the ground. “Don’t go. Please don’t go. We don’t know why those soldiers are here or what they’re going to do. Even if they’re here to help, we don’t want to be caught in the middle if a firefight breaks out. Let’s just watch.”
Carrie nodded. “Shauna! Shauna, come back!” she called, but Shauna ignored her and continued toward the road. Several people from the subdivision had also heard the convoy and come out to watch, and she was joined by two of them who were obviously as desperate as she was for news and assistance.
The convoy stopped near the interchange between the north-south and east-west freeways. McLean could now see markings clearly on the side of some of the trucks that said
‘3rd Btn. Army Reserve’, which he knew was based in Grand Junction. More people were coming out from the populated areas, including refugees that had been hiding in culverts and vehicles across the area. They all approached the convoy, arms outstretched for aid. Shauna was among the first to get there.
“Halt and stay where you are,” the voice of a soldier riding on the sideboard of the lead truck boomed out. He held a bullhorn that echoed all the way to where McLean and Carrie lay. He spoke with the authority of a commanding officer. The soldiers near the bulldozer were now pointing their rifles at the gathering crowd of refugees, and some of them were holding up one hand in a halting gesture. “Do not approach the trucks. We have no food or water to give out,” the officer continued.
Most of the people slowed their advance toward the troops, but one man staggered onward anyway. “I need a phone!” he shouted, voice cracking. “You have to help me make a phone call, it’s very important.”
“Stay back!” the officer shouted into his bullhorn. “Halt, or we will fire!” The man stopped, shocked into silence. “One of you, not this man, will approach slowly and with your hands in the air,” the officer commanded. “I want to know what’s going on in the city, whether there are any functioning military units in the area. If any of the rest of you move, you’ll be shot. Do I make myself clear?”
Shauna raised her hands and walked toward the officer at the same time as several others. The officer shouted at them and one soldier fired his rifle into the air over the heads of a cluster of refugees. The rest stopped but Shauna continued forward waving her hands and pleading with the soldiers. They made her drop her flimsy backpack, which only had a flashlight and a couple of granola bars in it, and then allowed her near the bulldozer where two soldiers roughly frisked her. Finally she was allowed to speak to the officer.
“Why are they being so threatening?” Carrie asked. “Why don’t they help those people?”
McLean shook his head. “Who knows what they’ve been through in Grand Junction, or on the way here. As far as they know, anybody from here could be a terrorist. I’d be cautious too.”
“Can I see?” Carrie asked, and McLean handed her the binoculars. Shauna was animatedly speaking to the officer, pointing first toward Denver, than across the fields toward McLean and Carrie’s position. The officer looked in their direction, then said something to Shauna.
At that moment a woman standing in the median behind one of the trucks pointed at its open back. “What’s in those boxes? Are those medical supplies? My son is hurt, I need those!” The other people started edging closer, clamoring to be let through.
Another shot rang out, but it didn’t come from the soldiers this time. It was the loud crack of a high-powered, large-caliber rifle. Out of the corner of his eye, McLean caught a muzzle flash in the second-story window of a house on the edge of the city. He didn’t see anybody go down near the convoy and assumed the bullet had hit a truck or the ground. But it was enough to elicit a massive reaction from the soldiers.
They opened fire in all directions, unloading on the refugees, the nearby houses, and the vehicles surrounding them. Taking cover behind the bulldozer and the trucks, they continued sporadic fire as the civilians scattered and dropped to the ground, screaming and crying out in pain and fear.
About half of the soldiers formed up behind the bulldozer and left the road, heading directly toward the subdivision where the shot had come from. They double-timed it, weapons out and on overwatch. The rest, sticking to the cover of their vehicles, rounded up Shauna and the woman who thought she’d seen medical supplies, and shoved them to the ground by the officer’s truck. Soldiers stood with rifles pointed at their backs until they were handcuffed, and then they were hauled into the back of the truck.
“Carrie, we gotta go,” McLean said. “If they find us up here with binoculars and a gun, they’ll shoot us too.”
Carrie, frowning in consternation and concern for her roommate, nodded and followed as McLean crawled around to the concealment of the low wall and then into the foothill subdivision’s streets. Hidden from view among the houses, they stood up and sprinted through the neighborhood toward the hills.
Chapter 7 : Into the Hills
After a minute of flat-out running they got away from the houses into a draw filled with scrub oak. The draw and the dirt road above it parallelled the two-lane highway that curved around a small mountain community labeled Indian Hills on McLean’s map.
“McLean, do you think Shauna’s going to be okay?” Carrie asked. “They aren’t going to kill her, are they?”
“I don’t think the soldiers will. But if they get into a real firefight with whoever touched off that little massacre back there, she’ll be in the middle of it again. She seems to have a knack for that.”
“Yeah, she really does,” Carrie admitted. “What was she thinking?”
“Well, she likes soldiers, I guess. Wanted to find her boyfriend. There’s nothing we can do for her now. She made her choice and she’s where she wanted to be. Heck, maybe they’ll even find her boyfriend for her. After she’s no longer useful as an informant.”
Carrie sighed. “I just wish she hadn’t exercised such poor judgment. We’re apparently in the middle of a war zone, and she goes running off toward the soldiers. We’re dropping one by one! First David died, now Shauna’s gone. I just don’t know how to even make sense of everything that’s happening to us.”
“It’s pretty overwhelming,” McLean agreed. “But I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. We’ve been living on borrowed time these past several years. I just feel bad for those caught really unprepared, like the clientele of the rescue mission.”
“No, they’re the last ones to worry about,” Carrie said. “They’ve been living in crisis for years. They’re probably going to weather this better than anybody. No luxuries to lose in a fire, no money to be robbed of. No reason for anyone to shoot them.”
“Well, I still wouldn’t trade places with them. At home I have plenty of food, shelter, and equipment, and we’ll be safe there for the foreseeable future.” He looked over at Carrie. “How are you doing? Do you need a rest or a drink?”
“I’m okay,” Carrie said. “I think the adrenaline’s mostly left my system now, as much as it’s ever going to again. Thank you. Where are we headed, exactly?”
“There’s a valley west of here, thirteen miles past Indian Hills. I have a friend there who owns a little horse ranch. We can stay there tonight, and I’m hoping to either meet up with or at least get news of my other friends. From there, we’ll plan our route westward to my ranch, another fifty to seventy miles, depending on the path we take.”
He looked Carrie in the eyes and then continue
d. “It’ll be a hard trek. It’s going to take a few days. But I promise we’ll get there, and once we do we’ll be a lot safer than anyone in Denver. Will you stick with me and trust my judgment?”
“Yes,” Carrie said.
McLean handed her his backup gun, a 9mm Beretta in a hard shell holster, with two clips. “I hope you won’t have to use this, but there are some bad people out there, as we’ve seen. Have you ever shot a pistol before?”
Carrie took the gun and removed it from the holster. She checked the safety and slowly, cautiously removed the clip and put it back in. Then she strapped the gun to her leg. “Not for a long time,” she finally answered. “But if we’re attacked again, I bet it will all come back to me in a hurry.”
McLean nodded. “You’re gonna be all right. We’ll shoot a few practice rounds when we get deeper into the mountains. For now, just make sure you don’t shoot me, that’s all I ask.”
“I promise.”
The sun was getting high and hot, so McLean took a moment to break out a small bottle of sunscreen from his pack. Once they were lathered up, he shouldered his bag and started to move out.
“Wait,” Carrie said, stopping McLean with a hand on his arm. “I haven’t really thanked you yet for all you’ve done. You didn’t have to come back for me at the rescue mission yesterday, but you did and I’m really grateful. And I know you’ve taken a lot of risks you didn’t like, some of which almost got us killed. I’m sorry for that, and I’m very glad to be with you now.”
McLean smiled. The words were music to his ears. He had no right to be happy during full societal meltdown, but right at that moment he felt great. If he was going to share the road with anyone on doomsday, Carrie Alton was the one he’d most like to travel with.
Get Out of Denver (Denver Burning Book 1) Page 7
