Overture

by Mark Wandrey

  “We didn’t hear anything,” Samantha said.

  “There weren’t many guns,” he explained. “I think a lot of the guns the gangs found are running out of bullets. They’ve been shooting each other for days.”

  “Did you see any of the warehouses?” Mindy asked.

  “No,” he said with a shake of his head, “after we scouted the center of the camp, we split up. I was by the commissary.” The women became more alert. The man opened his pack. Inside was a motley collection of canned foods, mostly things used to top dishes like abalone, salad shrimp, and olives. They immediately opened the cans of shrimp and everyone began sharing them. Mindy could plainly see the group was protein starved. They saved two cans for the men who had yet to return. They only got a couple of mouthfuls each, yet Mindy felt her stomach grumble in thanks. The canned pears hadn’t sat that well after days without eating.

  It was 02:49 when several more men came running in. One of them had a fresh cut on his arm. It instantly caused the tension level in the ruined restaurant to increase.

  “We were attacked,” the uninjured man said. Two of the women grabbed a first aid kit and began attending to the hurt man. “We were inside warehouse #1, shit was scattered everywhere. It looked like a big group hit it. Apparently, when they found lots of farming equipment and machines, they started breaking everything. They tore open and emptied a few food crates. Wil tripped on a wet spot of floor,” he indicated the man receiving first aid, “and they were on us in a second. We barely got out!”

  Mindy ran inventories through her head. There was a lot of junk in that warehouse, things like generators, heavy machine tools (some so heavy they wouldn’t go through the portal), and a broken-down airplane, things that someone thought were important. But there’d also been overflow from her own lists, including the farming goods the man had mentioned.

  “Did you get to Warehouse #2?” she asked.

  “No,” Wil said, speaking to distract himself from his injury. It was a ragged tear in his bicep, deep enough to show muscle. “Jorge and a couple others went that way, because they knew you were most interested in that one.” Mindy hoped she hadn’t sent the men to their deaths. As the women finished tending to the injured man, Jorge and three others came running in.

  “Warehouse #2 looks pretty good,” Jorge said, excitement clear on his face. “A big stack of crates fell over and someone went through them, but they were full of rolls of plastic and office supplies.” Mindy nodded. That was good news. She had those crates sent there as a diversion, which appeared to have worked. There were more inventory details on her laptop, but that was still in the office cubical she’d shared with Samantha and Alexis. Another pair of men had gone to scout that. By 03:00, they still weren’t back.

  The laptop wasn’t high on her priority list. People bent on looting the camp for guns and food wouldn’t care about a laptop. Yet without it, she was in real trouble. There was no way to know what was in each warehouse without it. The crates were poorly labeled, and they had almost no manpower to go through them.

  “Hey!” someone yelled outside the restaurant. Several women screamed. “Who in ‘der?”

  Everyone looked at Mindy who shook her head. The men grasped what weapons they had, their faces grim with determination.

  “You be some of the big brains who used to run dis place, ain’t ya?” the voice asked. “Yeah, we see you sneakin’ around here. What you lookin for? The magic arch is still there.”

  “Magic arch?” someone asked.

  “The portal,” Mindy corrected. Someone was trying to enter through a broken window. They heard glass breaking, followed by low cursing. Hopefully, someone had sliced up their hands. Mindy decided silence wasn’t going to cut it.

  “There’s more than 20 of us,” she yelled back. “We’re armed and we want to be left alone.”

  “Dey gots women,” another voice said. Mindy snarled at her stupidity. She should have let one of the men speak.

  “Yeah, we seen what kinda weapons y’all got,” the first man said, “and we ain’t scared of no shovels or garden hoes.”

  “But we’ze like to see some of da otha hos,” someone else said. A smattering of hooting laughter drifted across the park. The women moaned. It sounded like there were dozens of people out there.

  “Come on man,” someone else yelled, “let’s kill those assholes and fuck their bitches!” Mindy had never liked guns, yet she found herself wishing for one at that moment. She’d never felt so helpless in her life.

  “Fine,” the first man said, “go get some. But, save me a nice-looking one!” A chorus of whoops and cheers went up, quickly followed by the sound of running feet.

  “They’re coming!” one of the women’s guards said. The men scrambled to defend the entrances, but there were too many of them to easily hold off. Plus, a long line of picture windows wouldn’t provide much protection. Sure enough, the sound of breaking glass quickly followed. Mindy felt around on the ground and found something round, long, and heavy. A metal table leg was her guess. There was a square piece of steel on one end, and rusted screws hung from a pair of holes. It would do. They heard a yell and the dull, sickening thud of something hard smacking into flesh. The fight began.

  Jorge was right, either there wasn’t any ammo left for guns, or the gang attacking them decided the restaurant full of people didn’t warrant the expenditure of bullets. They came in with clubs, knives, and improvised spears. Even though the restaurant was trashed, it still had limited points of entry that didn’t involve climbing through jagged, broken windows or over partially crumpled doors. Those points were the easiest to defend. The men pushed, clubbed, punched, or kicked anyone trying to get in.

  A few minutes after the attack began, the first person got in. He dove through a broken window and came up with a long, lethal looking knife. Several men turned toward him, uncertain what to do with an attacker in their midst. Samantha acted first. Somewhere, she’d found a baseball bat. It made a distinctive “clink!” when she hit the man in the back of his head. He dropped like a sack of potatoes.

  Seeing their cohort get his ticket punched took the fight out of them, and the gang retreated yelling curse words and slurs about everything from the women’s sexual practices to the men’s parentage. Inside the restaurant, they did a head count and came up short. Five minutes later, they found him, near the kitchen where he’d been holding a door closed with his body. Someone had reached through the broken window and slit his throat from ear to ear. Blood was everywhere, and he wasn’t moving.

  Finding him dead took away the feeling of success, and left them morose and confused. No one had heard the struggle, and it looked as though the man never gave up his position, holding the door closed even as he bled out.

  “What about him?” one of the men asked, pointing with a piece of pipe at the unconscious man on the floor. Samantha was standing on the other side of the room, making a point of not looking at him.

  “I got this,” Alexis said, and came around with a length of cord she’d found somewhere. She quickly hogtied the man who was slowly showing signs of regaining consciousness.

  “We’re just about done playing with you bitches!” the leader of the gang yelled outside.

  “Shoot a couple of them,” someone else said, just loudly enough to hear. If there was a reply, no one heard it.

  “Look,” the leader spoke up, “I know there’s more dudes in there than girls, so here’s how it’s gonna go. Leave the bitches, and the dudes walk. You got five minutes, and we’re coming in. If you’re still in there, we’ll kill all you fuckers.”

  All the women, even Mindy, glanced at the dozen men watching over them. Not one of them looked like they were considering the deal.

  “They’d kill us one by one anyway,” one of the men said, to which the others nodded.

  “Besides, it’s wrong,” another said.

  “Yeah,” said several others.

  “What’s it gonna be?” the gang leader called
after the five minutes were up. “You gonna walk out, or we gonna—”

  “Oh, shut the hell up!” Mindy yelled. “I’m tired of listening to your punk ass.” The women gawked at her. One of the men chuckled.

  “It might make them do something stupid,” he said with a shrug.

  “Or they could kill us,” Samantha moaned.

  “Better that than raped to death,” Alexis replied. They all fell silent. A second later, the gang rushed in.

  This time they concentrated on the main door and a huge, busted section of window, hoping to overpower the defenders. Instead, they created a choke point that allowed the defenders to use their improvised weapons to better effect. The defenders succeeding in killing an attacker.

  One of the gang members threw a lawn chair through into the fracas, and knocked a man aside. The chair bounced off his head, and he yelled more in surprise than pain. During the confusion, a huge Puerto Rican gang member jumped through the window, brandishing a big flashy sword he’d liberated from a comic book shop. The man next to Mindy took a step toward him, and thrust a long-handled garden hoe at the gang member, who slashed at the tool with his sword, severing the metal tip. Surprised, the defender continued his thrust which neatly pierced the gang banger’s eye, exiting through the back of his head.

  The defender screamed in surprise and let go of the handle, as the gang member took a step back, his remaining eye looking confused and surprised. He reached up and grabbed the handle, clearly intending to pull it out. But, he only managed to give it a feeble tug, before he toppled over, dead from his injury.

  “Fuck!” someone nearby cursed, backing away from the corpse. Others backed away too, and the defense began to fail.

  “Hold them!” Mindy implored, but it was too late. In the blink of an eye, six gang members shoved their way in. Wildly swung weapons grazed several attackers, but they just bulled through and created a perimeter for their leader, who shoved two others out of the way, and stood between his men.

  “Shit’s over with,” the leader said, and pointed to Mindy who was trying to rally defenses. With his other hand he raised a military pistol and swept it back and forth in front of the demoralized defenders. “You’re gonna wish you’d given up! Who dies first?” he asked, slowly moving the barrel around until he stopped it on Mindy. “I bet you was that mouthy bitch!” She glared at him defiantly. “Yeah,” he said and raised the gun to aim. “Boom!”

  Mindy jumped, expecting a flash of pain, then darkness. She blinked and missed most of the gang leader’s chest being torn away in a fountain of blood. She did see him fall. The room exploded in gunfire. The defenders dropped to their knees, cried out and covered their ears.

  In a couple of seconds, it was over. The gang bangers who’d gotten inside, and most of those in the entry area were all dead or dying. Mindy’s hand was over her mouth, and her eyes were wide with shock at the piles of bleeding, twitching, or screaming bodies. She looked over them and saw a line of men and women in police uniforms. They looked tired, worn out, and beat up, but they were all armed and determined. In the center was Detective Billy Harper.

  Mindy didn’t know how she ended up in his arms, it just happened. One minute she was kneeling on the ground, her ears ringing from the gunfire, the next he was holding her. Her tears poured onto his dirty uniform, and he whispered it was okay.

  “He said you were dead,” she cried.

  “I said he was gone,” a familiar voice said. It was the man she spoke to for a few seconds before the radio died. The nametag on his uniform said SGT Tall. “Billy took half our men to help in another apartment.” Mindy looked up at Billy, not understanding.

  “We’ve been a dozen blocks away,” Billy explained, “keeping as many safe as we could.” He shrugged. “You never called.”

  “It’s a long story,” Mindy said.

  “You said there was a way out?” SGT Tall asked.

  “There isn’t time to reach a bunker,” Billy said, “unless it’s in the city. That thing is going to hit us in hours.”

  “It’s not a bunker,” Mindy said and disengaged herself, cheeks burning as she realized what she’d done. Sometimes it sucked being a redhead. She looked at the assembled officers moving around, checking on the gang members who’d been shot. None of them offered first aid or seemed to care about the wounded. It was the clearest sign she’d seen that it was all over. An older police officer looking over the carnage stopped when he came to the man Samantha clubbed with the bat.

  “Not one of yours?” he asked Mindy.

  “No way,” she said. He nodded and calmly shot the man in the back of the head. Mindy jumped slightly, not fully realizing what she’d watched.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” someone said.

  “He’s dead, like all the others,” the older cop said, his face hard. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”

  “How many of you are there?” Mindy asked Billy, turning away from the slaughter.

  “Twenty-five cops,” he said, “and seventy-nine dependents.” Mindy did some quick math. With the 26 survivors from her group, that made 130. She added the 11 that had already gone through the portal, giving her a total of 141. She remembered two were still missing from her original group as Jorge strode through the door.

  “Thank God,” he said. “We spotted the police, and when I realized your friend was in charge, we sent them to help.” She went over and gave Jorge a hug, though not as big as the one she’d accidentally given Billy.

  “Okay,” Billy said, “we’re here, what now?”

  Mindy explained what she needed.

  * * *

  Jorge organized the men he’d worked with in the project and, under guard from some of the police, they set about finding what trucks they could. Their vehicles, parked in the compound, were destroyed in the fighting. Meanwhile, Mindy went to her old bunkhouse with Billy, SGT Tall, and a squad of extra cops. Billy said no one was to go out in a group of less than 10, as there were far too many crazy people still about.

  The bunkhouse trailer hadn’t burned, but it was in bad shape. It looked like someone had kicked in both doors and broken the windows. More than a few bullet holes pockmarked its sides. Mindy climbed the rather shaky stairs and forced her way in. Billy followed closely behind, holding a huge police flashlight. She began searching, while her mind worked. She’d counted the men and women before coming to the trailer; there were 69 men and 61 women. Twelve were dependent children who’d arrived under guard just before they moved into the camp.

  The others had been right, someone had searched the bunkhouse quite thoroughly, looking for food, but little else. They ransacked her personal locker and took all her protein bars, but the FBI computer was still there amidst a pile of discarded clothing. She grabbed it, sat on one of the beds, and popped it open. The case had a crack in it, but the mil-spec laptop powered right up and accepted her login. The power meter said she had 40% power. She hoped the power meter was more accurate than the one on the police radio.

  “We’re in business,” she said. Searching the rest of the room, she found six 6-inch and 8-inch tablet computers. “Perfect,” she said, checking each one. They were all mostly charged. Grabbing a discarded back pack, she dumped the tablets, a handful of USB cables, and her computer inside before turning to Billy. “We need to get to the dome.”

  A dozen cops with assault rifles up on their shoulders, walking stooped over, fanned out ahead of Mindy as they approached the portal dome. She was certain they’d kill anyone who tried to hurt her, or anyone who surprised them. The closer to the portal they got, the more bodies they found. Most were in one uniform or another, and all smelled horrible. The moderate temperatures and rain had created a horrendous charnel house that made the butcher shop in her memory smell like her grandmother’s garden.

  Several large chunks were missing from the dome’s concrete roof, and the wall was pocked in a hundred places from small arms fire. The battle there had been ferocious. The police created a perime
ter around the door, and using cryptic hand signs, two officers rushed in with two more immediately behind them. Mindy held her breath and braced herself for more gunfire. Nothing happened. After a minute, they emerged.

  “It’s bad, ma’am,” one said.

  “Must be upwards of 80 or 90 bodies in there,” another agreed. “I’ve worked dozens of homicide scenes, some days old, but this is worse than all of them combined.” Mindy needed to go in if they were to proceed, but her stomach churned at the smell that followed them out. SGT Tall solved the problem. He and two officers left and returned a few minutes later carrying a dozen small camouflage bags. He opened one to show her the interior.

  “I thought those tanks had been to the sandbox,” he said, revealing the gas mask inside. “Carrying these is standard operating procedure over there; you never know when you’re going to run into poison gas…or worse.”

  What followed was a quick and dirty instruction session for those not familiar with the use of the M40 ‘field protective mask,’ as SGT Tall described it. The viewing windows were a lot bigger than Mindy thought they would be, and though the air had a metallic odor to it, none of the smell of the corruption came through. Once everyone put on a mask, a dozen people entered the dome. A short distance away, the police officers’ families and unequipped officers gathered to wait. All the adults carried weapons.

  Mindy didn’t know what she expected to find, but the horrors of the dome went well beyond any of her worst nightmares. Bodies were everywhere. The portal dais sat in the same place, timeless and unaffected. She knew it would be. If any of the gunfire had breached it, most of New England would be a glowing crater.

  “What the hell is that?” she heard one of the officers ask, his voice distant and tinny sounding.

  “The way out,” Billy said. Mindy looked surprised. “A lot of images made it onto the internet,” he explained, “I’m observant. Comes with the job.” She nodded; that made sense. She suspected you didn’t get to be a detective if you couldn’t spot patterns. Mindy walked to the dais while the others moved about, checking for survivors. She put a foot on the bottom step, but nothing happened. Her heart raced as she considered the possibilities. There were at least a dozen bodies on the dais, and gore was dripping from it onto the expanded metal floor.