The Last Full Measure

by Trent Reedy

  TJ called down from the turret, “You guys seeing this?”

  “Yeah,” Sergeant Kemp answered. He turned around to look back into the ambulance module. “Jo, go get Pierce. We need her up here yesterday.”

  Becca came up to the hatch and looked out the front. “We can’t give them all fuel.”

  “They might not ask so nicely,” I said.

  As the tractor got closer, one of the riflemen waved at us. “We don’t want any trouble,” he called out. “We need fuel for this tractor, and just a little extra. Then we can plow our fields and take care of our crops. Take care of our people.”

  Mrs. Pierce made it back to us surprisingly quickly. She took one look at the mob approaching and turned to shout at Cal. “Cut that fire truck off! Wrap it up! We’re rolling now!”

  The group had come around the trees, so everyone in the buses could see them too. “This is just what I was talking about,” Mr. Grenke said over the Motorola network. “Now they’re going to take all we got.”

  Kemp keyed his Motorola. It must have been dead, because he tossed it aside and took mine. He keyed the mike. “Damn it, Grenke! Stay the hell off the net.”

  Cal ran up into the back of Pale Horse, taking TJ’s place on the turret. “I don’t care what they’re packing. A few seconds with this fifty, and I’ll mow them all down.”

  “No, you won’t,” Mrs. Pierce said. “These aren’t bad people. They’re just desperate.” She looked around the ambulance pod. “Eric, close her up. Stations, everybody. Sergeant Kemp, radio the go call. We’re moving out.”

  Kemp called on both the tactical and unsecured radio. “All units, this is Pale Horse. We’re going now. Keep the vehicle interval tight. Tap bumpers if you have to, but nobody gets between us. Whatever happens, keep moving. Do not stop! I say again, do not stop. Pale Horse. Out.”

  As soon as they saw our convoy moving, circling around so all our vehicles could follow Pale Horse in a tight line, the riflemen spread out, raising their guns. “We just want to talk,” one of them called out. “Come on, you gotta help us.”

  I drove ahead, pulling around the side of the tractor. “I’m just going to drive slow, let them get out of the way. Cal, stay low in that turret!” But when we reached the two riflemen in front of us, they didn’t get out of the way. They started yelling, telling us to stop so we could talk. They slapped the hood, getting more and more pissed. One of them ran back a few steps and aimed his rifle right at me.

  Cal screamed from overhead, “If you shoot, I will kill you all! This fifty-cal will mow you down, and then I will shred your precious tractor. Back off!”

  I sped up a little, hoping to get us the hell out of there before the whole situation went to shit like in Boise. Soon we were driving through a crowd of hundreds of people. Almost the entire lane from the golf course back to the highway was filled with folks after our fuel. They slapped the side of Pale Horse. Rocks hit us. Cal shouted at them, threatening to fire.

  “Riccon, get down inside here!” Mrs. Pierce said. “You’re not using that machine gun on them. We’ll be clear soon enough.”

  “They’ve busted one of the windows on the door of bus one. They’re trying to get in,” someone radioed.

  “It’s like a damned zombie attack,” Cal said.

  A girl with jet-black hair and a black eye, maybe eighteen or nineteen, jumped up on the hood of Pale Horse. Others tried to follow her or maybe to pull her off, but she kicked them away. I swerved and she rolled off.

  A gunshot went off. Another one.

  “Hit the gas, Danny. Don’t worry about who’s in the way. More people are going to get hurt if we stay here,” Mrs. Pierce ordered.

  “But I can’t just hit them,” I said.

  “Drive, Wright!” Mrs. Pierce shouted.

  “Get out of the damned way!” I shouted at the mob. Then I hit the gas and we charged ahead. The front cattle-guard-steel-bumper-type thing hit one man with a sickening clunk. Then another. Finally they ran. More shots rang out. At last we cleared the crowd.

  “Pull to the side,” Kemp said. He keyed the mike on the ASIP. “All Exodus elements. All Exodus elements, roll on past us. We’ll cover your six.”

  First the fuel truck, then one bus, Mr. Hooper’s RV, Becca’s dad’s pickup and horse trailer, and the last bus drove past.

  I hit the gas to follow our convoy. Now that we were clear of the mob, I’d have to pass all our vehicles so we could take the lead again.

  Kemp turned and looked at Mrs. Pierce. “Orders, ma’am?”

  I felt her hand on my shoulder. “Drive on, Wright.”

  The next four days were rough. On that first day, we headed south on torn-up Highway 3, making good time, until we came up to a giant wall made of dirt, junked cars, parts of houses, and other crap. A sign said: BOVILL! WE TAKE CARE OF OUR OWN! TRESPASERS WILL BE SHOT!

  The whole road was closed and dozens of people stood on top of the wall, aiming guns at us. We might have won in a fight, but not until after too many people were dead. So it was almost three hours back north to hook around onto Highway 6, which was a far rougher drive that went up and up and up for like twenty miles. Mr. Hooper’s RV overheated three times on our way to the peak. It was a pain in the ass to try to keep that old thing running, but it had a lot of our tools and most of our medical equipment. Then on the way down, I seriously worried about the brakes on the buses.

  All through the night, we corrected for wrong turns and navigated around blasted-out roads, sometimes backtracking for miles to take a different route. At dawn, we pulled off to make camp on a side road off Highway 12 just north of Kamiah.

  The next night, we skirted around the town on an impossible series of back roads. Mr. Grenke and his friends kept getting more and more pissed every time we took a wrong turn or couldn’t figure out where we were. Highway 12 took us to 14, and then to another series of crazy back roads where we almost got stuck about half a dozen times before we finally made it onto Highway 95 south of Grangeville.

  Once again, a drive that should have taken a few hours took us all night, and we began to worry about our food supply. We’d prepared the best we could, but in the end, we’d still been forced to leave Freedom Lake before we were ready. Now we all prayed for good hunting and fishing up around the school. Worse yet, more and more of our group was starting to split between the Grenkes, the Keelins, the Ericsons, and people on their side, and the Monohans, the Beans, the Robinsons, the Blakes, and people on Tabitha Pierce’s side.

  At daybreak, we made a hidden camp on a little road off Highway 55, clear up on a pass. We were above five thousand feet, and although it was nearly June and the sun was out, we were all pretty cold. The next night we would drive through the city of McCall. After that, we’d head deep into the wilderness toward the tiny village of Hindman and then on to the Alice Marshall School. Gunfire and a few explosions echoed in the distance. We were closer than ever to our goal, but it sounded like we’d be passing through one hell of a battle to get there.

  A bunch of us on Mrs. Pierce’s side gathered around the front of Pale Horse. Me and JoBell huddled close together with my trusty old Army poncho liner over our shoulders. Becca and Sweeney had the same idea with a wool blanket from the horse trailer. Her mom and dad both stood close to her. Her parents had blamed me for getting their daughter into the war. Becca hadn’t spoken to them much since then, and her dad selling Becca’s horse hadn’t helped matters. I’d stayed out of the situation, figuring Mr. and Mrs. Wells might still be mad at me and I’d only make everything worse. But with both my parents dead, I knew how important family was, and I was happy to see Becca and her folks had made up.

  An extra-loud blast sounded from far down the road ahead of us.

  “What the hell is going on down there?” Mr. Macer said.

  “It sounds like the fighting on Victory Day,” Becca said.

  Sweeney snorted. “Victory Day.” Becca kissed his cheek.

  Brad Robinson spoke up. “How are we
going to get through all that? Wright’s rig is unstoppable, but our other vehicles aren’t anything much.”

  “I’m worried about us driving down there,” said Mr. Morgan’s wife, Teresa. “We have some guns, sure, but we also have a lot of bus seats filled with scared little kids and some elderly people. We aren’t soldiers.”

  “Maybe it’s not as bad as it sounds,” TJ said. “Maybe we could drive through quick and avoid whatever is going on.”

  “Is there another route to the school?” asked Chaplain Carmichael.

  Mrs. Pierce shook her head. “There are two routes to Hindman, one straight east out of McCall, and the other far south of McCall on Highway 55. Either way, we have to go through the city. And once we get to Hindman, we still have a hell of a drive back into the mountains to Alice Marshall.”

  “We need to send someone on ahead to see what the trouble is,” said Samantha Monohan’s stepmom.

  “Maybe,” said Mrs. Pierce. “But I’m not going to make my decision until I hear from everyone.” She sighed a little as she looked over at the other cluster of people in our camp.

  She called a meeting, and minutes later, when everyone had gathered around, she told us the situation. “At the rate we’ve been going, we’re about a day from the Alice Marshall School. But we’ve all heard a lot of gunfire up ahead. Unfortunately, we’ll have to go through whatever is up there. Some people want to send a recon party ahead to find out what’s going on, and I think it might be a good idea. We have this well-armed and armored Humvee ambulance. We just need a team to volunteer to man the thing.”

  I felt sick as soon as she brought up the idea. I didn’t want to go on any advanced recon party, but nobody was driving Pale Horse except me and my close friends. More importantly, splitting up seemed like the wrong idea. If we drove down there and got in trouble, who would be left to bail us out? Mr. Hooper in his broke-dick RV? And who would protect the group while we were gone?

  “I’ll go,” Cal said. His eyes flicked to Jaclyn, who sat with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, staring off into space like she had been through the whole journey. “I’ll help any way I can.”

  Sweeney and TJ stood up at the same time. Sweeney leaned on his cane. “If that big bastard is going, I guess I’m in,” he said. The three guys looked to me.

  “Hell no,” Mr. Grenke said before I could speak. “What about rule number one? Nobody goes alone, remember?”

  “Three of us just volunteered. We wouldn’t be alone, dumbass,” Cal said. A chorus of people jumped on Cal for saying that. “Well, it’s true!” Cal said. “And we’ll be in Pale Horse. We’ll be fine.”

  “If we’ve learned anything from fighting the Fed, it’s that armored Humvees aren’t invincible,” said Mike Keelin’s dad. “What if you get killed?”

  “Or what if you just break down?” said Dylan Burns’s dad’s girlfriend. We had one complicated mess of families on this mission. “Tire trouble or engine trouble, or what if you just get stuck on a torn-up road?”

  “Well, we’ll have radio contact,” TJ said.

  “But then we’d have to send someone else on ahead to rescue you,” Mr. Grenke said. “And if you’re dead and we never hear from you? Or if the Brotherhood or some other psycho manages to take you out and steal the vehicle, then we’ve lost our most valuable weapon.” He wiped his hand over his sweaty bald head and smoothed down what little hair he had in back. “No. You can lecture me, threaten me. You can go on and on about how Mrs. Pierce is in charge until we get to the school and set up a council or whatever, but I call bullshit. I demand the right to vote now. I will do everything in my power to prevent you sacrificing our main weapons and leaving us alone up here without them.”

  “Damn it, Ryan,” said Mr. Robinson. “You’re just determined to ruin this whole venture, aren’t you?”

  “No, Dwight,” said Mr. Grenke. “I’m trying to save it.”

  Robinson pointed at Mrs. Pierce. “That woman is responsible for putting this whole thing together. Without her, we’d all still be back there in Freedom Lake, some of us damn near starving. They’d probably have strung up Mr. Shiratori’s whole family by now and come back for Jaclyn —”

  “Whoa!” Mr. Morgan’s daughter, Tessa, shouted.

  Grenke took a step toward Robinson. “I’m getting real sick and tired of being accused of —”

  “He’s right,” I said. In the past, I never would have dreamed of jumping into a big thing with adults. Most of the time, they bored the shit out of me and didn’t really take me seriously anyway. But that was before the war. “Grenke’s right. There’s no fuel, so nobody’s on the road. Until we can recharge our night vision glasses, we have to run with headlights, so if we drive Pale Horse anywhere near that city we’ll be spotted. Say there are dangerous people down there. Say we gotta throw down. That means that our recon party would drive in, fight our way back out, and meet up with the rest of you. Then we’d all drive back to town, where the psychos would be waiting for us with a bunch more of their backcountry friends for round two.”

  JoBell raised her eyebrows like she was impressed.

  “See?” Mr. Grenke said. “I hadn’t even thought of that. But the boy’s right.”

  Cal took a couple steps toward Grenke. “Hey, ease off the ‘boy’ shit, or I’ll break your damned arms. Show you who the man is.”

  “If you think I’m scared —” Mr. Grenke started.

  “Come on, you guys,” Skylar spoke up. Others joined him in trying to get everyone to calm down.

  “And as long as this isn’t a democracy,” I said, fixing my eyes on Mrs. Pierce, “Pale Horse is mine. I built her up from a wreck, installed all the gun ports. Me and my friends salvaged the guns and ammunition. Maybe things will be different up at the school, but while we’re on this mission, I’m telling you, sending in a recon is a jacked-up move. Whatever’s up ahead, we’re going to roll through it fast, taking them by surprise if we gotta. Fighting if we gotta.”

  Mrs. Pierce’s ice-cold glare cut right through me and did not break away. My eyes dropped first. When she finally spoke, her words were calm but precise, like she was reading each word she said. “Well, then. That’s settled. Rest up, everyone. Fuel up our vehicles. We will roll out at sunset and plunge into whatever battlefield awaits us in the dark.”

  * * *

  We came down out of the mountains, running fast on Highway 55. The closer we got to town, the more jacked-up stuff we saw. Burned or scrapped cars littered the road. We had to swerve around more than a few wrecks, some with bodies.

  Once again, Kemp was riding shotgun in Pale Horse while I drove, leading the group. He keyed into both our radio networks. “Everybody stay tight and keep moving. Speed is the key here.”

  The city’s electricity was out, and only a tiny sliver of moon hung above Payette Lake. It was tough to see just with our headlights, but it looked like most windows were boarded up, and makeshift walls and fences had been built around some properties. Unlike Freedom Lake, where everybody was all walled in together, the people here seemed to have divided the city into different sections.

  “This used to be a resort town,” Mrs. Pierce said through the hatch behind the cab. “What happened?”

  “I can see over some of the walls up here,” Cal said from the turret. “Some Brotherhood guys are gathered around a fire a few blocks off.”

  “The Brotherhood is all the way down here?” JoBell asked.

  “I saw their armbands, but you’re right. This is the first I’ve heard of it. Maybe they’ve just moved into the area, looking for new territory,” Cal said. “Maybe the people here are fighting back.”

  “Everybody look alive,” Sweeney said. “We got trouble. I see those bastards, I’m gunning them down.”

  “Not unless we take fire first,” Mrs. Pierce said. “We’re not starting anything.”

  “I think someone else just started something,” I said.

  We’d hooked a right to stay on Highway 55 and had ju
st cleared the McCall Hotel. Two cars rolled out to block the street in front of us. Men with guns had pushed them into position. They aimed at us now.

  Pierce and Kemp checked the map. Kemp radioed. “Trouble! Hook a left onto Lake Street!”

  “It’s blocked!” someone radioed back.

  “They’ve blocked the road behind us too.”

  “Stop right there!” a man shouted outside. He wore the Brotherhood armband. “You’re in the Brotherhood section of the city. We’re going to need some of that fuel.”

  Had Crow and the others up north told these guys to be on the lookout for us? Did they know we had their stolen fuel truck?

  “We’re just passing through,” Cal called back calmly. “We don’t want no trouble.”

  “Well, you found trouble,” the man said. “We ain’t letting you take all that fuel and them supplies into Vandal territory.”

  “Into what?” Crocker asked.

  “The Vandals are the McCall High School mascot,” JoBell said. “I remember they went to the state volleyball tournament one year.”

  Cal must have ducked down into the ambulance pod back there, because I could could hear him better. “They got some shooters up on some of the roofs of the buildings nearby.”

  “We can’t stay here,” Kemp said. “They’ll set up on us and take us all out.”

  It was like that day back in Spokane, the first day I ever killed someone. Me and Staff Sergeant Kirklin had been gun to gun, and if I had waited much longer, he would have shot me. So I shot him first, to stay alive and to protect my friends and my mother. At least that’s what I’d thought at the time. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  “We gotta make our move now,” I said.

  Kemp radioed to the convoy. “Everybody who isn’t armed needs to duck down out of sight of the windows. We’re going hot. When you hear gunfire, shoot anyone out there who has a gun.”