"That was before the outbreak. Things are a little different now. I barely know a lot of these people; I’m not about to tell them we have fifty M4s and a half-dozen antitank guns."
So somebody needed to run the armory and cook its books; with Terrence already in charge of keeping the peace, he seemed a natural fit to manage the weapons as well.
Once they took care of that, somebody – Coy, most likely – would have to put anyone in camp who needed it through weapons handling and marksmanship training. The handling part would be easy enough but marksmanship presented problems. The only way to learn to shoot a gun well was to shoot it often. But a group all shooting off a bunch of rounds at once would act as a beacon and bring the dead down on their heads from miles around.
After wracking his brain for a few minutes and coming up with nothing he made the executive decision to throw the whole thing in Coy's lap and let him figure it out.
The next item on the agenda was Cyrus and his ethanol program. The fat man had been at it for a little over a month, crushing plant matter, running it through his still, and producing liquid gold. He claimed to be almost ready to try to run one of their trucks on the stuff. A good thing, because their gas and diesel supplies were fast heading toward bone dry.
Keeping their fleet of trucks and SUVs on the road was only part of the reason they needed fuel. Once they had a continuous source of the stuff, they could find generators and run electricity through the tunnels. The copper wire, transformers, conduits, and switch boxes were out there waiting for someone to pick them up. All it took was knowing what you were after- and the ability to fight off the dead.
A commotion out in the tunnel pushed Will's thoughts aside. It came from the entrance- a babble of concerned, questioning voices and louder cries of alarm. He was trying to decide whether to ignore it when Becky's voice rose above the din, her tone confused and alarmed. With a groan and a hiss of pain he sat up and put his feet on the floor. The bad ankle objected at once, throbbing with a pain so intense it made him wonder if he would puke. After a minute the pain subsided enough for him to pull on his jeans and limp to the door. He exited their little house wearing the jeans, a T-shirt, and a sock on the foot that wasn’t injured. Halfway to the entrance, he ran into a small group of people coming to find him. His wife led the charge, sporting a worry-lined face. Her words sent a spike of fear through him.
"Sally came back without Coy."
Will swallowed hard and cleared his throat; he opened his mouth twice without producing any words. He found his voice on the third try. "There could be a thousand reasons for that, Becks, and not all of them are bad news." He raised his eyes to glare at the smattering of team members behind her. "Someone should have told you that before you got so upset.”
Becky clutched a handful of his T-shirt in both fists and shook her head wildly. "There was a note."
"A…?" Confused, Will didn't finish the sentence.
Jiri stepped forward and handed Will a folded-over piece of paper. "It was zip- tied to the dog's collar."
Will wanted to ask questions but his mind was a jumble of disassociated thoughts and for the second time in less than a minute he found himself unable to formulate a sentence. He took the note in silence and opened it over Becky's shoulder.
We have Coy. Do not look for him. You won’t find him. Do as we say and he will return unharmed in three days. Do it not and you will never see him again.
Fifty-Nine
* * *
Danny sat hunched over on the edge of the bed, his forearms on his knees and his head slumped toward the ground. He desperately wanted to leave the bedroom but was unable to think of a way to do it without embarrassing Will, Becky, and himself.
Danny's father had been an alcoholic and busted up old bronc rider who expended more effort avoiding work than he’d put in if he took a legitimate job. He left for good when Danny was twelve and Danny hadn’t missed him one day since.
His mom had believed in fun at one point in her life- the pictures he found hidden away in the attic told him that. They were memories of better days. His mom cheering for his dad at the rodeo, the two of them in a boat on a lake somewhere; she wore a two-piece bikini and they both held bottles of Schlitz. His mom cradling baby Danny in the crook of her arm, her head thrown back in laughter.
But somewhere between when his dad stopped coming home every night and when the old sot disappeared for good, Mama found Jesus in a big way. She fell in with the crazies at The Apostolic of Fellowship, and you know what they say about the Apostolics- the reason they are against dancing is there's a chance that dancing might lead to fun. The one time she managed to drag Danny to church with her the preacher took to the pulpit at nine. He shouted himself horse a little before noon, so another man took over and shouted in his stead. When they finally left at three in the afternoon Danny was starving and convinced the entire world was bound for hell.
So to him, the Crandalls were a Godsend. He'd been around normal families; sleepovers and birthday parties when he was younger, girlfriends and drinking buddies as he grew older. So he wasn't unaware of the concept of a nuclear family where everyone sat together for the evening meal and talked about their day. But outside television and the movies he had never experienced the love, closeness, and devotion he found at the Crandall Ranch, first as a hired man and then as a member of the family.
It wasn't all fairytales; Will and Becky argued and fought from time to time. After all, Becky was a headstrong Irish lass and Will was impatient, hated to lose, and was as stubborn as a bloodhound on a scent. Once, Will put his fist through a wall in the horse stable after a long, drawn-out argument over his drunken flirting with a barmaid the night before.
But not even that fight had sounded like the one they were in now. Danny had never heard Becky use this kind of vitriol or Will sound so bewildered and angry.
"So that's it, then. You won’t even try to find your missing son?"
"Find for him where, Becky? You want me to just go out and wander around, hope I run into him?"
"Yes! Yes, dammit! What will it hurt?"
"It's fucking pointless. You are telling me to find a particular grain of sand on a beach, and I don't even know where the beach is. Does that sound anything like a useful way to spend the day?"
"I’m sorry if I’m blowing your day, Will. My son is missing and my husband won't look for him, won't send a team out for him, and doesn't appear to give a shit."
"That's bullshit and you know it. I care as much as you do. And he's my son too. Don't start that shit where you mystically get to care more because you're the mother."
"What's it going to hurt to go and search? What is there to lose?"
"My ability to lead, that's what. Every time someone has gone missing — every single time – we have always responded the same way. We don't send search crews out to wander through the countryside when we don't know where the person is. We don't risk lives searching for a needle in a haystack made of needles. And now I'm supposed to go against that because it’s my son out there this time? What do I say to a family in two weeks when we won't send people out after their son because we don't know where he disappeared from? How do I justify that if I send a team out after my own?"
"I don't give a hot shit what you tell them. All I care about is whether you're going to try to find my son."
"No, I'm not, because I'm not a fucking retard. I don't have the first God damn clue where to look. This community will not have one standard for my family and one for everybody else. I'm going to take whoever has him at their word that he'll be back in three days."
"Oh, that's just special. You'll take the word of a kidnapping stranger. That's the level of intelligence every woman dreams she'll see in her husband one day."
"Let me ask you something- in all of our time together, has your being a fucking bitch ever motivated me to do a god damn thing?"
And on it went, with no end in sight. And Danny couldn't do a damn thing to keep from hearing it. H
e came into Coy's room just to look around when Will and Becky were out in the tunnel- they had no idea he was in here. To leave now would be to make them aware he heard their fight, every word of it. That would be mortifying for all three of them. Leaving Danny with no choice but to sit on the bed in silence and hope the horrible argument ended soon.
Sixty
* * *
Will called it right in regards to his son; Coy was furious about not being on the team to go after the weapons. He understood it at a base level- the camp relied on him for several things, things he did better than anyone else. He was working with a couple of good, experienced, outdoorsmen and teaching them what he knew about tracking, hunting, and field craft. But they had a long way to go before calling themselves his peer.Still, he felt he had a higher calling- helping his Dad and Danny stay alive. So the two of them marching into danger without him rankled.
But he was eminently practical for a young man not yet twenty-one. He'd always seemed older than his years to others; that practicality and sense of self were two reasons why. He learned at a young age there was nothing to be gained from wasting time or energy on things he couldn't change. As a boy, he never threw temper tantrums when things didn't go his way; as a teen, he never sulked in those situations, either.
That’s why he treated the morning of the weapons run like any other morning, despite his keen disappointment. He rose before dawn, ate a small breakfast, and got dressed for his hunt. Out on the quarry bottom, he ran into Will as he made preparations for the trip. They exchanged a brief greeting, then he began the long slog up the road. As always, Sally accompanied him. The golden retriever never missed an opportunity to show off, and each morning as he trudged up the hill she ran by him several times as she raced the top, turned, and joyfully bounded back.
Ninety minutes later, he climbed a barbed wire fence in a pasture a little less than two miles from camp. The ground he covered had a slight incline to it; three different times, he'd seen turkey scat just over the ridge where the hill crested. Experience told him one day he'd climb the hill to find a flock of wild turkeys pecking bugs and seeds out of the ground on the other side.
He covered the ground in silence, his eyes always scanning his surroundings for threats and for signs of wildlife. In the way only a good dog can, Sally learned the way he walked while on the hunt. She recognized that right now they were at work and padded along behind him, staying close and quiet.
No turkeys cavorted on the other side of the hill, but a lone creeper meandered along with its back to him about a hundred yards away. He dropped into a squat and made himself as small as possible. He gave Sally a hand command and she laid in the alfalfa, her ears perked and her nose working non-stop.
When he felt certain it was alone he took to his feet and ordered the dog to do the same. There was no telling how the dead guy got in the pasture; clearly, it didn't know how to get out. It bumbled into the fence, backtracked, moved over a few feet, and tried again.
He crossed the distance between them, keeping an eye on the tree line across the fence. He had open grassland twenty yards before it gave way to a long stand of hardwoods. The trees grew close together, their branches filled with bursting buds. If something in the trees attracted the creeper it was well back in the woods- Coy couldn't see anything unusual in the tree line.
When they were thirty yards away Sally began growling at the creeper, behavior that irritated him. She did that from time to time and he had been unable to learn what difference she detected in the dead that set her off. He gave her the closed fist for quiet three times but she ignored him, keeping up a steady, low growl from deep in her throat.
After fifteen seconds of that, they were close enough for the creature to hear Sher. It tottered about in a slow, methodical half-circle and lurched forward when it saw Coy. He shuddered; the thing's face was a ghastly ruin. Its nose was gone, bitten clean off; a caved-in cheek caused its eye on that side to droop. Whatever relieved it of its nose also chewed off both ears and its bottom lip. The hilt of a butcher's knife grew from its right thigh.
Coy gave an appreciative whistle. "Look at this guy, Sally. He's been in the shit." He drew his knife and strolled to meet it, his arms loose, his step confident. It came for him as well, mewling that terrible sound they made and clacking its teeth like a methed-up crocodile. He held the knife at chest level and was seconds away from jabbing it through its eye when he detected a faint movement to his left. A split-second after he registered the movement, the creeper's head exploded as if a bomb had gone off inside it. One moment it was in front of him, moaning and clacking; a millisecond later, a shower of blood and gore erupted from its head. A fine mist washed over his face and upper body; chunks of flesh bounced off his skin. He wiped his eyes with his forearm, trying to smear the blood away. His mind whirled- every sense he had screamed DANGER! but he did not know where the danger lay. Behind him, Sally barked wildly.
He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them wide and wiped at them with his finger. He tried to focus on the trees and brush in the tree line. Just when he thought his vision had cleared, the trees directly in front of him blurred and shimmered, and then walked towards him.
What the fuck, he thought. He stood and stared, his mouth hanging open, as four men in Ghillie suits pointed rifles with camo barrels at him. The sight so dumbfounded him that he made no movement toward his own weapons; he was still trying to get his mind around what he saw. While he froze in confusion, one of the suited men spoke.
"We're not here to hurt you, Coy. Do exactly what we say and everything will be fine."
Sixty-One
* * *
"I'm going to take the top off this suit so we can communicate better. Don't get any wise ideas while I do- you still have three rifles pointed at your head." The speaker slipped out of the ghillie with practiced ease. He had a thick, bushy mop of hair, a hooked nose, and ice-blue eyes that never left Coy's face. His shirt pocket held a clip-on radio speaker like the kind the cops used before the outbreak. The man unclipped the radio, spoke into it briefly, and replaced it. He retrieved his rifle from the ground, pointed it at Coy and gave him a tight-lipped smile.
"I'll give you a series commands in a second that you will follow so you don't get shot. But first- can you quiet that dog?"
Coy didn't answer. Without breaking eye contact, he gave Sally the hand command for quiet. She moved closer to Coy and quit barking; still upset, she laid down on her stomach and whined softly.
"Thanks. I don't like loud, repetitive sounds. They get on my nerves. I want to remind you about the first thing I said- we're not here to hurt you. If you do what you're told, when you're told, you'll get out of this okay. Now- toss the knife into the grass to your left."
He worked methodically and in short order Coy had rid himself of all his weapons. While he followed orders to throw his guns and knives out of arms reach, take off and toss his vest, and turn out his pockets, several other things happened. One at a time the other three men stepped out of their ghillie suits. In addition, a black van with painted-over side windows bounced through the pasture from the south, on the other side of the fence.
"Do you have any other weapons hidden anywhere on your body?" The man asked.
Coy shook his head no.
"I need you to be sure. We’ll come over there and frisk you in a minute, and if you have a weapon- well, that's gonna be a big black check mark against you."
For the first time, Coy spoke. "What happens if I get a check mark?"
His smile grew wider, but the smile wasn't in his eyes; they were relentless, boring into Coy with their intensity. "A check mark? The first one's not a real big deal. I'll probably do something minor, like cut off the fingers on your shooting hand."
Coy felt a chill. Whoever these people were, they weren't messing around. He nodded.
Two more men got out of the van when it stopped. They ran around, retrieved items from inside, and slammed the doors shut. A newcomer approached the fence ca
rrying a pair of bolt cutters. He cut the strands like a pro, leaving a four-foot gap in the barbed wire.
"Okay, Coy," said the man in charge. "I need you to lie down on your stomach, place your hands behind your head and lace your fingers together. Is your dog going to give us any trouble when we go over?"
Sally got over her upset when her master laid down on the ground; she thought it meant playtime and bounded over next to him. She licked the back of his neck and pranced around, waiting for the games to begin. Despite the situation, Coy laughed at the absurdity of the question. "She's a golden retriever. They don’t have an aggressive bone in their bodies. She may try to lick you, but she won’t do anything threatening."
Three men cross to his side; the speaker and two others stayed put and kept their guns on him. Two of them frisked him, sat him up, and zip-tied his hands behind his back. When they had him bound, the boss guy turned to one of the others. "Go get the box."
Coy's apprehension turned to near-panic when he heard that. He didn't know what the box was, but he presumed it wasn't something enjoyable. He watched the errand runner disappear in the back of the van and pop back out carrying a large-breed dog crate by the handle.
"You guys didn't go through all this just to steal my dog, did you? Because there are other dogs out there. Undo my hands and I’ll help you find one."
The strangers didn’t reply. One of them got down on one knee and called to Sally. "Come here, Sally. Come here. Good girl, what a good dog." Sally slunk to him with her head bowed and her tail between her legs. She didn’t want to, but a MAN called her by name and her MAN was right there. With her training and instincts, she had no choice but to comply. The guy that called her stayed crouched down and stroked her, talking to her in a soft voice the whole time. Coy kept a suspicious eye on them, ready to give the go home command at the first sign of trouble. The guy caught Coy's eye for just a moment and then resumed talking to Sally, but in a raised voice- it was clear he meant the words for Coy. "I'm going to take this note from my pocket," he held the note up so Coy could see a piece of paper encased in Lucite. "And attach it to your collar." He pulled a zip tie from his back pocket. He moved fast, and the paper dangled from her collar in an instant.
Storm Horizon Page 21
