by SD Tanner
At the end of the long day, he stood staring out of the window of the town hall, and with some satisfaction, he thought building an army for Gears was doable.
Chapter Sixteen: Troops
Greg
Burying the Horsemen had been a grim affair, and seeing Gears and Pax made him feel the world was finally right again. They lost over half of the seventy thousand troops in the battle against Ruler and his super hunters. After his squad killed the super hunters attacking the Ranch, the medic on duty in the barn had refused to let them rejoin the battle. It was Tess who continued to fight on the front line, and although he and his squad had already taken down one of the main artillery guns, he wished he could have returned to the battlefield to fight by her side.
He remembered looking down at the bodies of the Horsemen behind the main house at the Ranch. Ruler was lying next to a limousine, gutted from crotch to chin. Given the bloody state of Ip’s sword, he assumed she was the one to finally kill him. Mom and Pop had prepared their bodies for burial, and he’d helped them zip each one into a black body bag. When he finally found Tess, they stood silently holding hands, while Nelson gave a brief eulogy and prayer. Their ending seemed flat to him, and he didn’t understand how their vibrancy was so easily lost. They had no injuries, and even at the time, he thought they looked like they were sleeping. Looking at them on the podium facing Axe’s army, he realized he’d been right, the Horsemen clearly hadn’t been dead.
After the funeral, he and Tess wandered around the country, living rough and looking for somewhere to call home. In their travels, he got to know Tess. She was a strong woman who lost her husband and two children on the day of the outbreak. Once a peaceable dental hygienist, Tess had turned into a fierce fighter, and he fell in love with her independent and aggressive nature. Eventually they’d settled in a town in Kansas, but the longer they stayed, the more they argued. After their adrenalin-fueled days at the bases, domesticity didn’t suit either of them. Every night they both woke with nightmares, and growing equally exhausted, their brawls only got worse. Finally Tess sat him down and said they were at their happiest when they wandered, and maybe they needed to hit the road again.
The woman was never wrong, and without any further discussion, they loaded their packs and walked away from trying to fit their scarred minds into an idyllic world. In their travels, they met more wanderers like themselves, and craving the camaraderie of the bases, they’d jumped at the chance to join Axe’s army, but it wasn’t the same. Axe didn’t know what he was doing, and although he didn’t have much knowledge about the military, he knew what Axe was doing was wrong, and he and Tess were about to leave the town. He hadn’t known the helicopter base was run by someone who worked for the Horsemen, but in hindsight it was obvious. Why else would anyone have an airbase in Eden?
Listening to Gears speak, he settled into a familiar sense of comfort.
***
Marcus
Finally, he thought with satisfaction, someone who knows what the hell they’re doing. He couldn’t really remember what he did before the outbreak, it was a lifetime ago and another reality. After the hunters turned up, he’d joined several groups, always leaving when their stupidity annoyed him too much. His father had been a keen hunter and taught him how to live rough and handle a gun. Preferring to be alone, he travelled around the increasing hell the country had become, barely surviving one day to the next. Just when he thought there was nothing left of the world, everything changed, and he woke up in Eden.
Eden was weird and he didn’t like it. Bunnies and flowers, he thought dourly, it ain’t any more right than the last thing. Hell on earth hadn’t worked for him, but this fresh, new, full of love, kind of world didn’t make much sense either. He might not bother to remember what he did for a buck before the world ended, but he knew he liked things the way they were before. He had friends, family, trivial problems, and a world at his fingertips thanks to Wi-Fi. It was all good and he didn’t see why it had to change. After the outbreak, the hunters wrecked the world. With his skills, he became adept at avoiding them, and when he couldn’t, he was equally as capable of bringing them down.
We’re just flitting through realities, he thought miserably, and this one won’t last either. Unwilling to settle in a town, he met one of Axe’s teams while he was travelling around. They were of the same mindset as him, and they didn’t intend to be left high and dry, unarmed and unprepared for the next life that rocked up unannounced.
He’d been with them for eighteen months, and was casually seeing several women while he waited for the world to change. It was an easy life. He had access to weapons, shelter, women and food. No one bothered him much, and Axe never seemed to use his army for anything other than gardening. Every day he would head out into the forest to hunt, and his success with women was in part due to his ability to supply them with fresh kill. If anything, he was becoming bored with this life and itching to get back on road again. His naturally restless and cynical nature that always drove him to move on before the outbreak, was making him want to move again.
The arrival of the ones they called the Horsemen was exactly why he joined Axe. For the first time he felt he was ahead of the change curve, and hopefully in the driver’s seat. These guys looked like they might shake things up a bit. Content to find himself in the right time and place, he returned his attention to the ape-shaped man, who was telling them how their new army would be structured and trained.
***
Genevieve
Stretching out her legs and watching the men on the podium, she listened while they told her the new organization structure, and how she would be trained to kill. About time, she thought dourly. Three months ago, she’d been living happily in Tuscaloosa, Alabama where her town specialized in drilling and processing oil. Having worked as an engineer for one of oil contractors, it was Harry’s idea to set up a refinery. Originally a mother of two, she loved the job and had worked side-by-side with Harry for four years. Together they’d scoured the country looking for skilled people, and after three years, finally got the drilling and processing working.
Just as Harry predicted, people still needed oil. Almost overnight, they had tankers on road and filling the gas stations in towns across the country. Their problem quickly became clearing the highways, and the townspeople formed crews to make the roads passable again. That was the problem, she thought unhappily, once the roads were clear, it literally paved the way for trouble. With gas readily available, people began to move around, learning about their neighbors, forming allegiances and making enemies. It was only a question of time before someone would want control of the refinery.
The Crusaders first attacked a year ago. They weren’t successful, and with over five thousand people in the town, they held their ground. More attacks followed, and Harry told her to hook up with the only army available. She tried to talk to Axe, but he was obsessed with taking control of the airfield. In her view, he was putting the cart before the horse, and without their oilfields, the birds would be grounded anyway. Hoping to gain more than rejection, she’d hung around for the past six weeks wanting to have a sensible conversation with Axe. She thought the man was an irritating idiot, and eyeing the large uniformed soldiers on the podium, she thought at least they looked the part.
Harry was relying on her to bring back an army, and she was determined to do exactly that. If these soldiers really controlled the airfield, then they must know access to fuel was critical. Although he had stores of aviation fuel, Hatch and their engineers had already met several times to talk about processing gas for aircraft. Last she heard, the engineers had worked out how to do it and production was imminent. The soldier with the scar down his face said the airfield was his, and she assumed Hatch worked for him. She needed to talk to him, and it was with some relief she stood up and raised her hand to speak.
***
George
His wife wasn’t going to be happy about this. He met Molly in Jonesboro after the world chan
ged. They settled in the town and Molly had popped out a kid every year ever since. Four kids and one on the way, he thought miserably. His kids were hard work, and he thought they were wild, illiterate and ill-mannered. It was Molly’s idea for them to move and join Axe’s town. It had a school and she desperately needed to be able to send their brats somewhere while she tried to cope with the next baby. With plenty of condoms, he knew contraception was available, but Molly wouldn’t hear of it. She’d made it her personal mission to repopulate the planet, and his consent was not required. He wasn’t even sure if all of the kids were his, and he didn’t dare ask.
A condition of joining Axe’s town was enlistment into his army, which was fine by him, as he’d already served in United States Army before the end of the world. Admittedly, he didn’t reenlist after his first tour, but other than being just as tidy, Axe’s army didn’t seem the same to him. In the real army, as he thought of it, they got weapons and field-based combat training. His lieutenant assessed him, his performance was graded, and anywhere he was weak he was given more training. He didn’t think he was a particularly good soldier, in fact his evaluations called him adequate in pretty much everything. Average was another word he remembered from his record. In the end, he left the army quietly and honorably, moving on to become a security officer for a large contractor. He wasn’t really a security officer, but more of a doorkeeper in a dull, blue uniform. The word adequate followed him to his next job, and his new employer didn’t seem to mind any more than the army did.
Listening to the apeish man on the podium, he thought Molly wasn’t going like this one little bit. Molly didn’t like a lot of things. She didn’t like the new species wandering around, she thought the temperate weather was boring, she missed junk food, and was forever complaining about having to cook. Molly whined a lot, and always assured him he wasn’t good enough for her. As she often said, in a world with less women than men, she could always find another sperm donor. According to Molly, he was lucky to have her, but he didn’t feel that lucky when she was screeching at him. No doubt she’d be screaming again as soon as she heard Axe had been deposed.
While Axe ran the show, it was an easy ride. He didn’t really do anything other than mow lawns and cut back the flourishing forest around them. In his opinion, he was more of a gardener than a soldier. The man on the podium was describing how they planned to train them, and it sounded like the army he used to belong to. Leaning forward in his chair, he began to feel a flutter of excitement. Maybe now someone other than Molly would tell him what to do, and he welcomed the change of command.
***
Ashley
Fidgeting in her chair, she wondered why the stocky man was still talking. Shut up, she thought impatiently. Being only nineteen years old, she was twelve when the outbreak happened. One day she was at school, and the next she was following a band of teenagers across the country looking for somewhere to hide. They ended up finding cabins in the Appalachians, and as time went on, they were attacked by other groups, hunters and animals. It was a terrible time, and she preferred not to think about it. Eventually she was caught by another group and assigned to several men as their woman to share.
Dismissing the memory, she told herself she did what she needed to do to stay alive. When Eden turned up, she ran away and headed to the nearest town. Believing her to be older than fourteen, they told her to find a house and set up a home. She didn’t really want to, but the people there didn’t do anything to hurt her, so she stayed. It was alright for a while, then the Crusaders came and took her with them. The townspeople did nothing to save her, and bitterness filled her face at the memory of how willing they were to hand her over.
The Crusaders told her she could be a Sinner or a Follower, providing she did what they wanted, and what they wanted was what all men wanted. She complied until they trusted her enough to be left unsupervised and then ran away. All her short life had taught her was nowhere was safe and nobody cared. Staring bitterly at the highly animated man talking noisily about what he thought needed to happen next, she knew he was just another jerk with a hidden agenda. When push came to shove, he’d screw them all over to get whatever it was he wanted.
Tuning out the man’s words, she studied the frayed laces on her boots, prepared to do as she was told until she moved on again.
Chapter Seventeen: Gears
He thought the meeting with Axe’s army went well. Three thousand armed men and women, and a good supply of heavy and personal armaments, perfectly stored, ready for someone who knew what they were doing to use them. A woman called Genevieve also solved another problem for him. He’d been worrying about access to fuel, but she had a refinery that needed protection, and with his new army, they were a good match. After flying Genevieve back to her town in Tuscaloosa, Hatch was taking him to the Marine supply base. He left Pax and Ted at Poplar Bluff to start organizing the army. They needed a better structure, well any structure at all would help. After talking with Pax, they concluded the soldiers had enough skills with basic weapons to try training them in the field. They weren’t at war with anyone yet, so they figured their missions should be fairly straightforward.
Axe was helping Pax get his people organized, and once done he would join TL and Jack on their mission to enlist the town leaders to join a Council to run the country. He agreed with Axe he could head the Council. It was a small price to pay to take over his army and he remained surprised Axe was happy with so little. Axe seemed to be a genuine guy with big ideas and no way to implement them, but he thought ideas were a dime a dozen and making them happen took experience and skill.
“Whatcha worryin’ about, Gears?” Hatch asked through his headset.
With no one other than he and Hatch in the bird, he was sitting in the co-pilot seat enjoying the expanded view. Without taking his eyes off the ground ahead of him, he asked dourly, “What makes you think I’m worryin’?”
“That big brain in your oversized head never stops worryin’, dude.”
“You know me too well, Hatch. Can’t bullshit to ya anymore.”
“You never could, Gears.”
What was he worrying about? The endless green expanse in front of him was a testimony to the end of Ruler’s reign. People were healthy, and those that weren’t could heal themselves in the Lake of Life. Other than the odd skirmish, the towns seemed fairly stable and content. The Crusaders were making their presence known, but he figured they sounded like an undisciplined bunch of religious fanatics. They were only succeeding while they were fighting against barely defended towns. He didn’t figure the Crusaders would be much trouble against a real army, not that he had one, but Pax would get him one like he always did.
“I dunno what’s botherin’ me,” he replied distractedly.
“But you’re worried, right?”
“I wonder what happened to those nukes at the Submarine base?”
“Seriously, Gears, are ya gonna nuke Eden?”
Admiring the rich green world around him, he thought dourly, I would if I had to. He wanted his bases back, fully armed and ready for anything. Mentally ticking off the things he needed, he thought about supplies, weapons, fuel, transportation and personnel. Picturing the different types of transport, he remembered Philip had led a flotilla of ships from the UK and then got a commercial jet working again. Back then, with Ruler turning the country into hell on earth, people were starving. Without Phillip, they would never have been able to send twenty thousand people to the relative safety of the Isle of Wight.
“Where’s Philip?”
“He headed the expedition back to the UK and Europe.”
It would be good to know what happened across the pond. Ted said the expedition was due back six months ago and no one knew why they were late. Anything could have happened to delay them, bad weather, mechanical problems or they simply decided to extend their trip. Philip was a very capable man and he wasn’t worried about him, he was more concerned about getting an update on the UK and Isle of Wight. He t
hought it might even be worth a trip across the pond to see how the survivors were doing and find out if they wanted to come home.
Landing at the Marine supply base, he was met by Cutter, who walked with him to the almost endless rows of containers. The containers had been the army’s new housing for Forward Operating Bases. They’d scoured the country finding thousands of them waiting to be used and brought hundreds of them to their bases. Being fully self-sufficient, made of metal like a shipping container and configurable, they’d proven to be a brilliant solution to quickly setting up the bases to house and care for tens of thousands of people.
Stepping up to the nearest one, he opened the door and peered into the gloom. It smelt of dust and old sweat. Rays of light were shining brightly through the slim cracks between the windows and their metal shutters. Two sets of bunk beds were lined up against each wall and he could see the doors leading to the shower and toilet. All the containers were configured in roughly the same way. A few had kitchens, but mostly people got their food from the dedicated kitchen containers. When operational, each container collected power from the solar panels on the roof and many were connected to a water supply.
Climbing into the container, the grey steel creaked when he opened one of the metal shutters. Sunlight streamed into the box-shaped room and he thought it looked dismal. In a collapsing world, the containers were a luxury few took for granted, but against the backdrop of Eden, they were cramped and resembled a prison cell.
