by David Peters
“I added nearly a thousand pounds to this beast and there was no way those old leather carries were going to work. I stole these off the old blue bus. I also strengthened the spokes on the wheels to make sure they don’t give out. The entire wagon has been beefed up really. It’s like a Civil War era tank for the apocalypse.”
“Can the horses still pull it?”
“If we use the Draft horses, no doubt. We are coming in just under four-thousand pounds by my best guess. A single Draftie can pull seven or eight easy, two of them doubles or triples that depending on who you talk to.”
Caperson slapped his hand on the bench seat, “I’m happy with this part of the excursion, when do you head out and get us some good intel, Dylan?”
“Tomorrow morning, first light. I want to take a look at how the rest of the wagons are going before I wrap up for the day and start packing. I’ll see you guys in a bit.”
~5~
Dylan held up the wine glass, “Here’s to discovery.”
Niccole clinked her glass against his, “And a total lack of anything bad.”
“I’m sure it will be fine.”
“You could take another scout with you. There isn’t any reason you should go alone.”
“Those guys are already some of the hardest worked people in the town. If I take one of them with me, someone else is going to have to double up to cover the ground. I simply can’t ask anyone to do that.”
“You know they would.”
“I do know they would. I also know someone would wind up so damn tired they would fall asleep on their horse, fall off and break their neck.”
Dylan cut another piece off of the large, elk steak, “You pretty confident that all the stuff will get done while I’m gone?”
Niccole picked at her salad but didn’t say anything.
“Is everything okay?”
“Can we talk about something else?”
“Sure. What do you want to talk about?”
“Anything but the fact that you are riding off into the sunset just to see what badness is waiting for us out there.”
“Done.”
She smiled at him and he smiled back.
“You remember that tree out on the back-nine? You could just make out the Snake river about ten miles away and other than the grain elevators down by the river there wasn’t a building to be seen.”
“The one you built the hitching post near?”
“That’s the one. Do you remember when we rode the horses out there during the spring?”
“It rained on us the second we got there,” she remembered with a smile. “We were absolutely soaked by the time we got to the tree.”
“But I was prepared.”
“That you were.”
“An old blue tarp, that quilt from the back of the couch and a picnic basket with a few beers.”
“Neither one of us was twenty-one yet. You were such a bad boy.”
“I wanted everything to be perfect.”
“I think it was beyond perfect. I still think about that day sometimes. You were so nervous. It was almost comical.”
“Can you blame me? I wanted everything to be just right.”
“When you finally proposed, you still had a little chicken salad in that thing you insisted on calling a beard.”
“For my age, that was a mighty-fine beard, thank you very much.”
“Do you remember the rest of the day?”
“How could I forget?”
“Did you get enough to eat tonight?”
“I think so, why?”
“I thought we would retire to our room and talk about what we did after I said yes.”
Dylan smiled and dropped his napkin on his plate.
~6~
“See you in cuppa days, Daddy!” Daniel said as he gave his father a fierce hug. “I miss you much!”
“I’ll miss you too, buddy! You take care of mommy and Erica, okay, Little Bear?” he said as he set the boy back on the ground and held out a clenched fist. “It’s important, you’re the man of the house while I’m gone. Take it seriously.”
“Okay, daddy!” Daniel said excitedly as he bumped fists with Dylan. “Doug too?”
“Yes, especially Doug. I think that cat might be up to something,” he added with a wink. “Keep a real close eye on him, he gets a pretty shifty look in the morning and I think he may be planning something.”
“And you take care of yourself, Dylan. No heroics, nothing stupid. You look and leave,” Niccole said in a motherly tone.
He kissed Niccole gently, “No heroics. Look and leave. I’m not feeling inclined to start a gunfight in the middle of nowhere so I don’t think you need to worry about it.”
Dylan mounted his horse and gave the animal a gentle kick toward the barricade. He tipped his hat to the two armed guards standing on the top of the wall and heard the wheels grind behind him as the heavy door was slowly pushed closed.
As he made his way down the gravel road, he smiled to himself briefly. Part of him was actually looking forward to getting away for a few days while another part was terrified of what he would find. What if there was another Folkesburg sized hive and he suddenly drew their attention? Could Paradise Falls fend it off? Would it be smart to run in another direction? How far would he have to go before they couldn’t track him back to camp? They would follow him until he bumped into another hive. He would have to make a run for home and prepare for the worst.
Both he and Caperson felt they could fight off an attack of that size. Their defenses had come so far in the last year that they felt confident that they could hold off just about anything the Corrupted could throw at them. He also knew that feeling that way had a tendency to backfire quite hard. They could easily crush the initial waves but simply having the attention would be unwanted. Follow-on attacks would eventually overwhelm them. They knew it but didn’t like to talk about it out loud.
He found himself more often than not playing the devil’s advocate, poking holes in defensive plans and doing his best to think like a Corrupted. Find ways he could defeat their own defenses or exploit a weakness. Figure out how he could successfully attack his own home, breach the walls and burn the homes to the ground. Then he would shore up the problem and add to their growing level of confidence and safety.
Sometimes it was something small, a tree that was growing in the wrong place or a hose that couldn’t reach all the potential hot spots that it needed to. Other times it was something large, a wall that was showing signs of wear or Dust lines that hadn’t been sealed well enough and moisture had worked its way in and hardened it.
Things were getting safe enough that both he and Caperson were beginning to get concerned that people might start to lower their guard. People walking the walls may not notice the Hunters on the perimeter or a scout may not look as close at a set of foot prints. All of that was behind him for the time being. He needed to keep his head in the here and now.
He looked down the long highway in the direction he was used to traveling. It felt odd to ride past the normal turn off for patrols, even Buck seemed confused by the path he was choosing.
He continued down the gravel road and turned to the west. Again, that odd feeling swirled around and filled him with self-doubt. West had started to feel like a no-mans-land more than two years ago. Dark and unknown. They knew Portland and Seattle were wastelands of Corrupted. Some hives stretching so far they grew into adjacent hives. Millions of Corrupted swarming around the nearby countryside seeking out lone survivors. The wide, twisting valleys and mountains formed a natural barrier from the coast, a barrier that he was now crossing through.
He smiled as he thought about all of the movies he had seen in the past. How the world would look after mankind had finally dropped the bomb or some plague ripped through humanity. They had it so wrong. Sure, some places, take Sumter for instance, looked exactly as the movie makers had predicted. Other places looked untouched. Houses on the side of the road looked as if they simply hadn’t
had the lawns mowed. Some stretches of highway merely looked untraveled while others were overgrown and almost lost back to nature. It was strange how random the world turned out to be. Some things never changed while at the same time other things had changed completely.
He drifted past a rustic looking rambler just off the stretch of highway. A small green tractor was parked on the side of the garage, all four tires flat and scaling from disuse. A wave of sadness drifted over him, the mailbox flag was up, waiting for a mailman that would never come. A bill that would never be paid or a letter to a friend that would never reach its recipient.
He pushed the thought away and looked more for things that they could use to help those still alive. The engine in the tractor could have parts that Travis might want. The old style curtains hanging in the windows were made of valuable cloth, not the cheap plastic blinds they were so used to seeing. They could be turned into any number of things that they needed now. At the far side of the house was a haphazard pile of cut lumber, looked like mostly two-by-sixes as far as he could tell, but they were covered with a worn blue tarp. Those tarps were worth more than gold and pre-fall cut lumber was a close second place. He made a quick note in his journal, the scavenging crews would want to hit this place with at least two wagons.
He was anxious to sit down with the ship captain and get information about the rest of the world. The fact that they were adrift and alone meant things didn’t go any better anywhere else. Part of him had always wondered about Hawaii or some of the more remote islands out in the Pacific. They were isolated and surrounded by water, shouldn’t there be survivors there? Wouldn’t they be safe? As far as he knew, no one had any idea how the Corrupted spread in the first place so what made him think anywhere was safe? Hell, those chameleon ‘Rupts could walk just about anywhere they wanted as long as they were smart about it. If they were anything, it was smart.
Captain Lewis would probably be moored in Pearl Harbor if that was the case, wouldn’t he? Even if it were safe and there was some crazy reason the captain and three-thousand people decided to wander the ocean, Hawaii might as well have been the moon for all of their ability to get there. Part of him had secretly held out hope that life continued uninterrupted on the distant volcanic rock. Somewhere, humans had to be carving out a living like they had. If they could pull it off in the middle of the Oregon mountains, someone, somewhere was able to do better. Weren’t they?
The highway steadily climbed out of the valley and allowed him to see a side of Sumter he hadn’t seen in nearly five years. Most of the town was gone, swallowed by the ever growing Lake Sumter. What did remain was being steadily reclaimed by the slow growth of trees and brush, returning once again to the forest it had been carved from more than a century before. From this height and direction, it was hard to see there ever was a town. High on the hill behind the receding town he could see the thin columns of smoke from the chimneys in Paradise Falls. Lost behind the forest and high ground from where he was traveling it already made him feel lonely for home.
The lake had created another four miles of beach in the previous year, the product of a small tactical weapon Caperson had brought when he and his crew had arrived in town and the constant erosion of the ground around the crater. Although they had been unable to verify it, the depth of the new lake was somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred feet. As the sides slowly collapsed into the man-made sinkhole, the shoreline continued to grow. Doc was estimating that it would eventually swallow the bulk of the town and part of the far hillside before it finally settled down.
Ahead of him was the Smith Tunnel. A dark and forbidding doorway of blackness with just enough bend that the far side wasn’t visible. The tunnel was a quarter-mile of enclosed darkness and would finally put everything he knew behind him. He would no longer be able to see the town of Sumter or the smoke climbing into the sky over Paradise Falls. His hand-held radio wouldn’t work once several million metric tons of rock and soil were between him and the radio tower high on the hillside above the town. He would be truly alone.
He tried to coax the horse forward into the darkness and Buck hesitated.
“Fine you big baby, I’ll walk with you. Will that make you happy?”
Dylan climbed down and started leading the horse into the tunnel. Again, Buck hesitated.
“I’m right here with you big guy. It’s no different from getting back from a late patrol and walking into the dark barn. Accept this is ten times longer and filled with unknown crap.”
He pulled the horse again and Buck reluctantly followed him into the dark.
He looked over his shoulder one last time as the shadow passed over him. He had no fear of the dark tunnel ahead, he was scared of what he would find on the other side. This was the furthest point west anyone in the town had traveled in more than five years. An icon symbolizing the limit of their reach, of their knowledge of a world so changed that it was no longer known.
As the shadow of the tunnel entrance swallowed him, the sound of the hoof steps on the pavement took on a rhythmic echo as the sounds bounced down the long, darkened passage. He felt a chill as the darkness closed in. He could just make out the light at the far side of the bend, a murky halo in an otherwise pitch-black wasteland. He breathed deeply as the thick darkness closed its maw around him. The Hunters would make enough noise in here for them to be heard and dispatched. There was nothing to fear in the tunnel, there would be no Corrupted, no demons, and no monsters. The only thing that he could find in the tunnel is the fears he brought in with him.
As his eyes continued to adjust, darkened masses of moving Sappers became the shadows of abandoned cars. Crouched Hunters ready to spring became small bits of rubble where the ceiling had fallen in. The sounds of claws against pavement gave way to bits of garbage thrown by erratic winds that would funnel from one valley to the next. There was nothing to fear here but his own imagination. He focused on the growing patch of light another one-hundred and fifty feet ahead.
Dylan found his mind drifting back to his home life and living in Paradise Falls. They had taken out the hive that had grown out of the town of Sumter, turning the entire town into a lake. They had used the Dust to take out a massive hive in the town of Folkesburg, several hundred miles to the east. The small attack team had nearly bought the farm when the Corrupted army had attacked in full force. Not one single patrol had been lost since the Dust grenades became mandatory on any out-wall travel.
Out-wall. The term had come to mean so many things. The area beyond their defenses, the place where bad things roamed. The place where their nightmares still ran free. On paper it was nothing more than orange and red crayon marks but the word out-wall was always spoken quietly and with concern. The salvage and flower crews went out there frequently and were nearly idolized because of it.
That didn’t mean the town didn’t feel they could fight. Their growing band of survivors had done more harm to the Corrupted than they ever thought possible. The cost was high, they had lost people in those fights but not one person had died to a Corrupted inside the walls in more than two years. Sure there were the stragglers but that was why you never left town alone unless you were very well armed. His hand absently moved down to his belt where three of the Dust grenades were hanging. If he had enough warning, how many could he fight off? A patrol would be a cakewalk even if they got close. He could kill even the largest Corrupted Guard with one of these tin cans or a few, well-placed shots from his rifle.
He was scouting out in order for them to launch an offensive attack toward another hive. They were reaching out, widening the safe zone around their home. The potential of three-thousand new people in town, new weapons, supplies and the people-power they needed to get the work done.
They would come with an even more powerful set of tools, knowledge and ideas. It was the ideas, the people that thought through the problems and came up with solutions that had gotten them to where they were now. There was no book to read, no training they could take that could pre
pare them for what the world was today. Two or three hundred years ago it was all about fighting the environment. Surviving the droughts and winter blizzards with enough food to keep you alive. Today, there was the added fear of a competitor that moved humans down the food chain. People took some time to come to terms with that change.
As the tunnel exit loomed ahead of him, the sunshine bright to his eyes, a smile crossed his face. Their time was coming, their time to stop hiding and cowering behind walls. The time when they would began to take back what was rightfully theirs all along. They may not have the ability to save the world, but he sure as hell would make this part of the Pacific Northwest safe for his family and friends.
He and Buck stepped into the sunlight and Dylan no longer felt as if he were in an alien land. He was still home and it was time to remove those who weren’t welcome in it. The people of Paradise Falls had grown weary of hiding behind walls. They wanted their world back and they were willing to fight for it.
~7~
Travis leaned against the side of the barn as he tried to wipe the grease off of his hands with an even dirtier rag, “That’s the last of them. Every single one of those ancient wagons should be good for the long haul. I greased ‘em, washed ‘em, even told a few of them they were pretty and smell nice.”
Caperson sat on a bench as he drank from an old canteen, “Kind of funny how well the older stuff has held up and the new stuff kind of falls apart.”
“That’s just because the older stuff that was crap was thrown away when it broke. These wagons are made of solid spruce and oak. Some of the strapping had to be replaced but we don’t have any shortage of that. Even the fasteners that were showing wear are so large that I can fabricate them in the shop a dozen at a time. This is real old-school tech.”
“And the war wagon?” Caperson asked, referring to the wagon they would take out shortly after Dylan’s return.
“Done. All I need to do is load the powder cans. Didn’t see any reason to leave them out in the weather for now so I left them in dry storage. Also don’t have anything in the ammo cans under the bench. I know how picky you and Jokester are about what goes in them so I left that part up to the guys with the guns.”
