Thunder and Ashes

by Z. A. Recht

  “A one-percent shot,” Matt muttered. Junko frowned at him, and Trev glanced back.

  “Like I just got through explaining,” Trev replied, “it’s a hell of a lot better odds than the lottery, and what else are we going to do? Sit in our cabin and rot for the rest of our lives?”

  “We have to do something,” Junko said, agreeing. “Anything’s better than this, just scraping by, barely living, and definitely not feeling very alive.”

  “All right, all right,” Matt acquiesed. “I’m good to go.”

  “Great,” Trev said, grinning at him. He turned back to face Mason. “So, like I was saying, we’d be happy to provide you with some of our food. In return, however, you’re going to have to let us come along to Omaha to protect our investment.”

  Mason, Anna, and Julie exchanged glances. The former NSA agent stepped forward with a hand extended. “I don’t think we have to have a huddle to make our decision. Welcome to the cause.”

  Trev accepted Mason’s hand and the pair shook, a single up-down.

  “We better get walking,” Mason said. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

  “Walking?” Trev said, laughing loudly enough to cause all five of the others to flinch. “Brother, you’re traveling with Trevor Westscott and his merry band now. We have a truck with a tank full of gas back at the cabin—we’ll be riding the rest of the way to Omaha.”

  Julie and Anna exchanged elated grins behind Mason’s back. Coming through town instead of taking the long route around was one risk that was certainly seeming to pay off.

  Northwestern Kansas

  March 07, 2007

  1423 hrs_

  DENTON LOUNGED IN THE REAR of the Ford pickup, legs stretched across the bed and crossed at the ankles. He held a chipped, battered Nikon in his hands and was carefully cleaning the lens as the vehicle rumbled along a stretch of swiftly-straightening road. The group was emerging from the Rockies and making their way onto the Midwestern plains. Denton was glad of it; despite being acclimated to cold weather due to his nationality, he had no love for it. He had even less love for the curving, unpredictable mountain roads that made land travel a veritable roller-coaster ride.

  “What’s that you’re doing?” Krueger asked, sitting across the bed from Denton. The soldier had his rifle laid out across his lap and had was wearing a faded boonie cap on his head, strap looped around his neck.

  “Keeping my gear in shape,” Denton replied, holding the camera up to catch the light. He caught a stray bit of dust on the lens and puffed out a breath, sending the mote flying.

  “Well, yeah,” Krueger replied, “but why? Didn’t you run out of film?”

  “Not all of it,” Denton said. “I have a couple of rolls left.”

  “What I don’t get is why anyone would want to take a picture anymore,” Brewster said, sitting cross-legged near the front of the truck bed, looking downcast. “Who’d want to remember this shitty little period of time in human history, huh?”

  Brewster’s attitude had been on the antagonistic side for the few days since Wilson’s death. Months of traveling together could make anyone friends, and Brewster and Wilson had been no exception. Nor, for that matter, had Denton and Krueger. All of them still felt as if Wilson should still be riding in the truck bed with them, ready to interject with a witty comment or carefully timed smirk.

  “Anyone who survives, my friend,” Denton said, answering Brewster’s question. “Think about it. Who’d want to remember the Hindenburg? Hiroshima? The Holocaust?”

  “No sane person,” Brewster grumbled.

  “No, no,” Denton disagreed, “Every sane person. Pictures are a moment in time—just one little moment—but it’s truth, Brewster, pure truth—you don’t get a lot of absolutes in this world. A photo is a little slice of solid, absolute truth. That’s why I want to keep taking pictures. If any of us survive this and the good old human race pulls through, a hundred years down the line someone’s going to ask the question, ‘I wonder what the truth of it was, back then?’ And then they’ll break out my pictures and there it’ll be in all it’s shitty glory. The truth.”

  The truck hit a small pothole in the road and bounced the occupants of the bed. Brewster re-adjusted himself and sighed.

  “Guess I see what you’re saying,” Brewster said. “It’s just getting harder and harder to find a reason to care about the future, you know?”

  Denton couldn’t blame the soldier. At Suez, the coalition force numbered in the thousands. Brewster’s attitude then had been that of a cynical, jaded, couldn’t-care-less jokester. By the time Sharm el-Sheikh had rolled around, the number of soldiers had been pared down to just over fifty. During the journey on the USS Ramage, their numbers had been reduced even more. A further dozen were lost in Hyattsburg, Oregon. Others had been killed in their eastward-bound flight since then, and now, including Sherman and Thomas, only four soldiers remained.

  “Doc Holliday syndrome,” Krueger said, still lounging comfortably. He had been just as upset over the loss of Wilson as Brewster had, but he had somehow managed to bury it.

  “What?” Brewster asked.

  “What you’re feeling,” Krueger explained. “Feeling about the future. What’s the point, and all. It’s called Doc Holliday syndrome.”

  “The gunslinger?”

  “The same,” Krueger said. “I used to read about him. Not just him, I mean, but cowboys in general. I was a big wild west fan as a kid. Holliday had tuberculosis. I think it’s pretty rare these days, but it was a lot more common back then. Anyway, it’s fatal. So, here’s Doc Holliday, and he knows he going to die from this disease sooner or later, and so he starts to take all kinds of crazy risks. He figured he was dead anyway, so why bother worrying?”

  “So what happened?” Brewster asked.

  “He died of tuberculosis,” Krueger said with a grin. “Managed to make all those risks pay off.”

  “All right,” Brewster said, nodding slowly. “So what are you saying? That I can take a ton of risks but in the end I’m going to end up a carrier?”

  Krueger raised his eyebrows, considered the question, and shrugged. “Just saying that maybe you feel like you don’t care because you figure you’re going to end up a carrier.”

  “Hey, man, I see a really old version of myself when I think about the future,” Brewster protested. “I’m just wondering what that old version of me’s going to be doing. What’ll be worth doing, you know?”

  “Rebuilding,” Krueger said. “I guess—and we’re talking a couple of decades down the line at least, right?—we’ll all be rebuilding. Working on putting what’s left back together. It’s all we can do. This is a big thing we’re living through, man—when people open up a history book a few hundred years from now the big event, the one recurring theme will be this pandemic and its effects, just mark my words.”

  “I’m surprised,” Denton said with raised eyebrows.

  “What, that I’m a far-thinker?” Krueger asked. “I’m a far-shooter, too. Maybe it’s a genetic thing.”

  “No, not that,” Denton said, waving a hand in dismissal. “I’m surprised you think there’ll still be history books being written in a few hundred years.”

  “I take it you don’t have quite the same vision of the future in mind?” Krueger asked, wincing as the truck hit another pothole.

  “Call me a pessimist if you want,” Denton explained, “but I just can’t see what’s left of humanity banding together to rise like some kind of a phoenix from the ashes out of this disaster. It’s not in our nature. We’ve got a good thing going right now with our little group. We help each other out. We look out for one another. I’m betting that’s not how things are working out in the rest of the world. I’m betting that most of the places that haven’t been overrun with carriers by now are tearing themselves apart from inside. Remember Cairo.”

  “That was panic,” Krueger said, shaking his head. “People have had more time to cool down and think straight now.”

&nbs
p; Cairo had been a disaster among disasters in the early days of the pandemic. The civilian populace was already on edge. Their city sat just a few hundred miles from the nearest cases of Morningstar and the virus was creeping closer every day. It only took a spark—literally—for Cairo to destroy itself. A fire had started, spread, and burned out of control. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, had burned to death, and thousands more were killed in rioting and panicked flights from the city.

  “If you want to know about Cairo, ask Rebecca,” Denton said. “She was there. Yeah, there was panic, but people had just—what’s the word I’m looking for here—shifted their perspective from being members of a community to being lone wolves, looking out for number one. You can’t blame them, but it’s no way to build or maintain a society when the surviving human race is stuck in survival mode.”

  The three men in the back of the truck hadn’t the foggiest idea of how relevant their conversation was to the little convoy’s situation, cut off as they were from a view of the road ahead. In the cab of the utility truck, the lead vehicle of the convoy, Sherman and Thomas grimaced simultaneously as they rounded a bend and saw what lay ahead of them. Three vehicles were parked across both lanes of the blacktop road at the edge of a bridge that spanned a two-hundred-foot wide gulley and stream. There was no way to circle around them and continue on their way without tumbling into the gulley and trapping themselves.

  “Tell me that’s just the leftovers from an accident,” Sherman said. In his heart, however, he knew the answer.

  “That’s a roadblock, sir,” Thomas said, shaking his head and applying the brake. The utility truck slowed to a halt, still a good distance from the vehicles.

  Sherman heard the familiar snick-snack of a round being chambered and looked over to see Thomas holding his Beretta close to his lap, thumbing the safety off. The General frowned inwardly. Two of his dwindling group of survivors had an uncanny knack for spotting danger before anyone else noticed the threat. Mbutu Ngasy was unsettlingly accurate when it came to the infected. He could spot an ambush before the group was even in a position to be attacked. Sergeant Major Thomas, on the other hand, was unsettlingly accurate when it came to people in general. The middle-aged NCO had been in Vietnam and Iraq and had no trouble knowing when he was being set up.

  If he was going for his weapon already, the situation couldn’t be good.

  “Might just be a town’s first line of deterrence,” Sherman speculated.

  “Might be,” Thomas grumbled, then slid out of the driver’s side door and walked around the front of the truck, eyeing the vehicles ahead of him. Sherman joined him after a moment.

  Behind them, Ron and Mbutu jumped out of the front seats of the sedan and came walking up, narrowing their eyes at the roadblock.

  “Seems abandoned,” Ron said, looking sideways at Sherman.

  “That’s why I don’t like it,” Thomas growled. The vehicles blocking the road were dirty, but otherwise seemed to be in good condition. You just didn’t leave a good truck sitting out as a roadblock; you used cement barriers or junkers. And if you were going to use a decent truck as one, you wouldn’t simply abandon it there.

  In the back of the pickup, Denton, Krueger and Brewster were straining to see what was going on through the narrow firing slits in the barbed wire.

  “Looks like we’ve got trouble,” Brewster said, peering out at the trucks blocking the road ahead of them.

  “Carriers?” Krueger asked.

  “Negative,” drawled Brewster.

  Suddenly there came the roaring of an engine gunning behind them. Sherman and the others spun around, hands going to weapons. Thomas already had his pistol raised and ready to fire. A good fifty yards behind the little convoy, another pair of trucks had appeared, pulling out of the brush that lined the road near the gulley and creek. They screamed to a halt on the road, rocking slightly, and the doors opened as men spilled out, taking cover behind their trucks. The glint of sunlight on steel gave away their shouldered rifles and pistols.

  “Worse than carriers,” Brewster said in the back of the pickup. “Bandits.”

  “They’re blocking off our retreat, sir,” Thomas said, gritting his teeth. “This is an ambush, sir. We don’t control this situation. Recommend we bug out.”

  “I’d be inclined to agree with you,” Sherman said, “but there’s nowhere for us to go.”

  Sherman was right. The creek bed was impassable except across the bridge, which was sealed off by the first roadblock. The new additions had blocked off the road to their rear, and the thick stands of brush and pine trees that grew close to the road prevented an off-road escape.

  They were trapped.

  Brewster and Denton kicked open the tailgate of the truck and scrambled out. Brewster knelt by the rear of the vehicle and held his double-barreled shotgun to his shoulder, aiming at the trucks that had blocked their retreat. The knowledge that the distance between him and his targets was enough to render the double-ought buckshot mostly ineffective didn’t comfort him much. Next to him, Denton raised his pistol. The pair felt horrendously under-armed as they stared down the a barrels of scoped hunting rifles.

  Krueger was still in the back of the pickup, mostly hidden from view by the thickly strung barbed wire. He calmly and carefully loaded his .30–06, racked a round into the chamber, and lowered his eyes to peer through the scope. He relaxed his breathing, felt his chest rise and fall in carefully measured breaths. In the scope, he watched as the crosshairs danced, then slowed, and finally settled on a burly looking man with a large-bore rifle taking cover behind one of the enemy trucks. Krueger felt his finger brush the trigger, but he halted himself, waiting for a proper moment.

  A voice from the direction of the bridge drew the attention of Sherman and the others near the front of the convoy.

  “Well, what have we here?”

  The voice belonged to a tall man with a medium build who had the look of a farmer, but moved with the swagger of a man who was used to getting what he wanted. He walked out from behind the trio of vehicles blockading the bridge, a pump-action shotgun in his hands.

  “Just a group of honest travelers looking to get back East,” Sherman cautiously said.

  “Didn’t anyone tell you?” the man asked, grinning. “This is a toll road now.”

  Another five men appeared out of hiding, using their vehicles as cover and aiming weapons at Sherman and the group.

  “This isn’t good, sir,” Thomas whispered out of the side of his mouth.

  “I know. Just stay calm. Maybe they’ll be rational,” Sherman whispered back, then raised his voice to address their accoster. “Last I heard the interstate highway system was toll-free. What’s your price?”

  “What’ve you got?” the man asked, earning a few laughs from the bandits behind him. “We’re not picky.”

  “Little we can spare,” Sherman said. “Look, friend, we’re not after trouble. We’re just looking to pass through. If giving you some of our food or ammunition can get us going on our way without a firefight, I’m all for it. So name your price, and we’ll see if we can meet it.”

  “Come on, George, let’s get this done!” called out one of the bandits from behind his cover, addressing the man who was negotiating with Sherman.

  George held up a hand in the direction of his men, forestalling any further protest. He looked Sherman over and quirked a grin.

  “I like you,” he said after a moment. “You sound reasonable. We don’t get a lot of reasonable people through these parts these days. But here’s the thing. We don’t normally just take a bit and go home satisfied. I’ve got eleven men with me here, and another couple of dozen back home, and they’ve all got to eat. So I’m afraid when I said ‘What’ve you got?’ I meant it. Unload your vehicles and we’ll clear the road for you. No one’ll get hurt.”

  Sherman’s expression darkened and George took a quick step forward, lowering his voice somewhat. Thomas kept his pistol pointed downward, but didn’t take his eyes off
of the man. He didn’t even blink.

  “Listen, guy, I just made a very reasonable offer to you given the circumstances. You’re at our mercy. Usually we kill people who give us lip or get in our way, and as I said, I like you, so I’m giving you the chance to drive out of here with your lives and your vehicles—just not your food or your ammunition.”

  “You might as well be killing us,” Sherman said. “Sending us out there without food or weapons is a death sentence.”

  George frowned and stepped back. “We can do this easy or we can do this hard, friend.”

  The bandits glowered from behind their cover and the sound of safeties being flicked off and the distinctive clack-clack of shells being racked into chambers echoed across the road. Sherman and his group of survivors bristled, backing closer to their own vehicles. Rebecca aimed her pistol through a half-open window on the sedan, sweat breaking out on her forehead. She’d shot carriers before, but had never faced down living, uninfected humans. She wondered for a moment if she’d be able to handle a fight in which her targets were actually shooting back.

  George began to raise his shotgun. “Just a heads-up: the hard way ends with you all dead.”

  “Then there’s no way we can do this peacefully?” Sherman asked one last time.

  “ ’Fraid not,” George said, shaking his head. His bandits laughed mirthlessly.

  “Well, that’s too bad,” Sherman said.

  A single shot rang out loud and clear, startling everyone on the scene, most of all George himself, who had suddenly sprouted a miniature crater in the middle of his chest. Dark red blood quickly soaked through his shirt and ran down his side. George looked down at the wound with a bewildered expression on his face, reached up a hand to touch it, and looked back at Sherman and his group.

  “Where?” was the only word he managed before pitching, face-first, onto the pavement.