by Greg Dragon
“Never said I was. Pa says it’s always better to have people underestimate you. One way to do that is to adopt the dialect of the simpler folk around you.” While his accent had not diminished, his diction had abruptly improved.
Jill’s jaw dropped. “Wow. What else don’t I know about you?”
“A fair bit, but that’s as may be. The next question you’ll ask is ‘why.’ Pa wanted to keep our upbringing and lifestyle simple, oriented around our family and hard work. He wanted us to use machines, not have them use us. So he kept the high-tech stuff up here. We got an antenna that gives us access to the internet through cell networks, we got a water-powered wheel and generator, also a gas generator and a battery bank, and some solar cells in a hard-to-see spot up top. We got television too. Makes workin’ the still less of a chore.”
“I’m flabbergasted.” Jill waved her arms helplessly. “You just upended my world, Jimmy.”
He stepped closer, looking into her brown eyes. “Enough to give me a chance? Now that you know I’m not just a dumb hillbilly?”
“What? Oh…no. I never thought that.” Did I? She reached out to place her hands on his shoulders, but more to keep him there than to draw him closer. “Look, Jimmy, it’s just terrible timing. I’m going to go soon, to try to see if my family is…is still even alive. That means leaving. If I make it back here…then I promise I’ll give you a chance. Give us a chance. Okay?”
Jimmy nodded slowly, pain and frustration in his blue eyes. “Okay…but you said you ain’t even seen them since you joined the Corps. All you did is email. How come you suddenly can’t stand not to travel across the whole country? And if you get caught, you’ll end up in some cell somewhere and…what’s the point? Why not just stay here? We’re your family now!”
Even though she wanted to take Jimmy in her arms, Jill shoved herself away from him with a flick of her wrists. “I can’t explain it any better than I already have. It’s just something I have to do. Now I told you I’d come back when I could, and you’ll just have to be patient. If this Eden Plague thing is really like the rumors say, we’ll live hundreds of years and not get old, so we both have time. Time for things to change. Time for people to come to their senses, and get used to us Sickos. Time to figure out that we’re still the same people, just a little bit kinder, a little bit smarter, and a lot more durable. Now let’s please quit talking about it, all right?”
He sighed and turned away. “All right.”
Crestfallen was a weak word for how Jimmy looked, but Jill told herself that it had to be said, and it had to be done. Giving in now to the way she felt, or might have felt, would just complicate things, and she would never be sure that it wasn’t just fear and stress and the supercharging Eden Plague underpinning everything, rather than love.
“Come on, Jimmy. I’m not saying ‘no,’ just ‘wait’.”
“Ha. That’s how Ma says God answers prayers when you ain’t ready for what you want.”
Jill laughed gently. “Your mother is a wise woman, I think.” She turned toward the computer. “Can you turn this on? I’d love to see what was going on in the outside world.”
“No, sorry. It’s too dangerous. It piggybacks on a cell phone tower signal, or somesuch. We have to only use it from time to time, and not too much, or the phone company might think it’s worth their time to track us down. Next time we fire it up, though, you can.”
“All right.” Jill looked wistfully one more time at the old machine, then said, “Come on, let’s get back…unless you have more amazing revelations.”
“No, no Revelations, unless it’s the Apocalypse already.”
“Was that a joke?” Jill slapped Jimmy on the shoulder.
“A lame one. Here, let’s go outside and eat.” He led her through the curtain, down the short tunnel past more screening bushes and onto a wooded mountainside. Finding a spot in the sun on some rocks, he took off the satchel he carried and handed her a chicken salad sandwich.
Homemade mayonnaise and chopped pickles on fresh-baked bread made it the best meal she’d ever had, except for every other meal since arriving at the McConleys. Real hunger, not the pale imitation the average office worker experienced, was truly the most amazing flavor enhancer. She washed it down with spring water from her canteen.
Jimmy pointed to the left and downward after he’d finished his first sandwich. “See? There’s the mining road. The trick is to make the cutover hard to see. You have to actually go above and past it a hunnerd yards, turn around at a wide spot, and come back. Then you can see it easier, but we allas brush out the tracks and spread some fallen branches. Nobody found it yet. But on foot, we go that way.” Jimmy then gestured to the right along the grade, at a faint trail.
Jill nodded, peering archly at the satchel. “What else you got in there?”
“Got ’nother sandwich, some apples, a half-dozen oatmeal cookies. That oughta hold us until we get back for lunch.”
“Oughta.” Jill chuckled again, reaching for more food. Once they had finished everything, they set off down the mountainside.
Eventually the trail rejoined the one they had originally come up. Jill turned to orient herself and thought she could see where the hidden ledge and dell must be, but even so, she couldn’t pinpoint it.
“Right there,” Jimmy said, pointing it out as he came back to stand beside her.
His arm brushed hers and she shivered with suppressed pleasure in the cool autumn breeze. Not yet, she scolded herself yet again, and patted his shoulder absently. “Come on, let’s go,” Jill said. “There’s work to be done, and then I want to take a swim.”
“Sounds good. Race ya down!” Abruptly Jimmy took off down the slope, satchel flapping, rifle in one big hand. Jill followed, whooping, and trying to figure out how she could beat him. The only thing she could think of to do was stay close so as not to lose the track, and then try to sprint past him to the finish.
Several miles of heart-pounding trail running later they crested the final hill and the farm came in sight. Jimmy slowed in front of Jill and put an arm out to prevent her from running past, and then he pulled her aside under the trees. “Wait. Something’s not right.” He jacked a round into the chamber of his lever-action .308 and glided forward to a position overlooking the homestead.
From almost four hundred yards, their perfected Eden vision allowed them to easily see a truck and an SUV parked next to the family’s two pickup trucks. At least a dozen figures in black uniforms were spread out, looking around. They appeared different from the Unionists, with helmets, standardized weapons, and no armbands.
Searching, perhaps.
Jimmy surged forward, jogging down the path, rifle at the ready. “Wait,” Jill said urgently. “We have to make a plan.”
“We gotta get close enough to see what’s going on,” he replied, slowing to a fast walk. “If they’re just looking for moonshine or doing a routine search, we’ll wait it out.”
“And if not?”
Jimmy stopped to turn and look at Jill. “We do what we gotta do. You okay with that?”
Jill nodded. “Yes. We can’t let your family be taken away. But Jimmy…I’ve been thinking about this for a while. First, the Eden Plague will heal us if we don’t get hit too bad. I’m tactically trained. You’re not. You’re a fine shot but you don’t have the honed instincts for close combat, so you are going to take up the best position you can a hundred yards out. You know this area, so you pick a good spot. Then I go in.”
“And then?”
“I’ll sneak into the barn and get my weapons, or I’ll take one of them down and use his. You watch me the whole way in. If they spot me and I make this hand signal,” she pointed her finger and thumb like a child pretending to have a gun, “then you shoot, center mass low, and you keep shooting as long as you have targets. Don’t get fancy and try to go for head or weapon shots.”
Jimmy angrily replied, “At a hundred yards I can put one through an eye!”
Jill grabbed his arm
and shook it. “Shooting human beings isn’t like plinking bottles, or even killing a deer. The first time your gut really knows that you just ended a human life, you’ll find it a whole hell of a lot harder to pull the trigger. So you try to think of them as targets, not people, and shoot center mass, low. They might have chest plates, and under stress you’ll tend to pull high, so it’s always better to put one into the dirt than to go over; at least it will scare the shit out of them. Got me?”
“I got you.” He jerked his arm resentfully away.
“Don’t go all testosterone on me, Jimmy. This is my job, and I’m damn good at it. Now you have to do yours like a pro. Be patient. Be cool, don’t panic, and when you shoot, shoot straight.”
“Okay!”
“Okay. Good luck.” Without further words, she turned to scurry forward, low through the light woods and brush that surrounded the farm. Up ahead she heard Klutz barking, an angry sound.
As she approached, she could see one man looking over the pigpen fence. He jerked back at something inside. If Jill knew the old sow, she’d lunged at him. She didn’t like strangers getting near her half-grown offspring.
Using the distraction, she crept forward with all her skill. She could now see the man’s uniform was jet black, with the American flag on both shoulders. His appearance seemed neat and military, unlike the local party thugs who had visited them before. Their trucks looked uniform as well, painted with unit numbers, a government crest of some sort, and the words “Security Service.”
She’d heard about this new paramilitary, formed by an expansion and reorganization of the Department of Homeland Security. How they could not see the irony of calling something that would inevitably be nicknamed SS was beyond her. Perhaps that just spoke to their fanaticism and ideological blindness. From what she could tell, the far left and the far right had both gone around the bend to the other side and met in the middle, and this was the result.
Four SS men stood near the trucks, between the barn and the house. Owen, Big Jim and Sarah sat on the front porch, two guards behind them. Another, apparently an officer by his dress and demeanor, seemed to be questioning them. Jane should be coming home from school soon, walking up the three miles from the main road where the bus picked her up. Jill hoped she spotted the men and would stay out of sight.
For now, she decided to watch and wait. Maybe, if they were lucky, the detachment would go away after asking their questions.
Or not. It didn’t take long for their methods to reveal themselves.
She watched the officer ostentatiously slip on a pair of black gloves, and then he struck. Not Big Jim, not Sarah even.
Owen.
He backhanded the boy across the face, flinging a spray of blood. Owen howled and held up ineffectual arms to cover his head. Big Jim surged out of his chair, only to be clubbed down by rifle butts. Sarah threw herself on her husband, and she was clubbed in turn, until the officer yelled for them to halt. Klutz sank his teeth into the officer’s leg, and one of the others reversed his assault rifle and shot the dog, who dropped onto the porch as if poleaxed.
So that’s the way it is, she thought, and clamped down on her sudden rage. I hope to hell Jimmy doesn’t start shooting. Unless they kill someone, they can always get the Plague and be healed. But I can’t just stand here. I have to acquire the tools I need, if we’re going to go up against ten to one odds.
Drawing her combat knife, the one she’d kept in her boot through all of her adventures, she did something she’d thought about, even tested. She ran the blade down her forearm, creating a shallow slash, and wiped the profuse bleeding all over the blade like spackle on a trowel.
She knew the arm would heal within moments, and now the weapon she might have to use on someone was coated with her fluids – filled with the Eden Plague. Everyone she stabbed would eventually heal, easing her conscience about the danger of killing – and would also produce more Plague carriers. In essence, it would force them to defect, or be interned as well, draining the resources of the fascists.
It was far better than killing them, really, no matter what her outrage told her.
With knife in hand, Jill eased forward in a combat crouch, freezing when the man turned toward her, moving when he turned away. It appeared as if he had been placed to watch this sector, but had made the cardinal error of getting out of sight of his fellows. There couldn’t be more than twenty SS here, not enough to really cover the whole perimeter.
When she got as close as she could, behind the last screen of bushes, she took a deep breath, waited until the man turned away, then rushed him silently.
As a cop, she’d never stabbed anyone before. All of her blade work had been theoretical, or defensive, aimed solely at disarming a knife-wielding attacker. She’d heard that a straight blade to the kidney was ideal to incapacitate. The pain and shock involved usually paralyzed the diaphragm for long enough to finish the man off, lethally or not.
At the last moment she realized that the man had a vest on beneath his shirt – a thin one, undoubtedly just enough to stop pistol rounds, but it would likely turn her blade. In a split second she changed tactics, bringing her hands together to grip the knife’s hilt with both. She lifted it and brought the pommel down on the back of the man’s neck, just to the right of the spine, beneath his helmet.
He staggered and fell, letting out a low grunt, and she leaped on him with both knees. Adrenaline surged through her and she swung double-handed at his neck and face, trying to knock him out. She couldn’t think of anything else to do.
It took her four blows, and he was bloody and breathing shallowly when she finished. Ugly and poorly done, she thought, and suppressed a wave of nausea. She’d killed before, with an assault rifle, fending off insurgent attacks on U.S. training and assistance forces, but it was never this close up and personal.
She found she really did not want him to die. He was a fellow American, misguided perhaps, but probably not evil. Just a grunt. So she did what she had intended before, and sliced him shallowly, on his forearm, twin to her own wounds. Hopefully that would transmit the Eden Plague.
Quickly she dragged the man inside the barn out of sight before running back out to retrieve his assault rifle. The odds just got a lot more even in Jill’s book. She made a big come in gesture toward where Jimmy should be, then went back to the fallen trooper and began to strip off his clothes.
By the time she had his black pants and tunic off, Jimmy slipped inside the barn. “I’m too big for those,” he whispered.
“Not for you. For me.” She pulled the trousers on over her own, bloused them in the boots with their strings, then donned the man’s armor vest and tunic. Everything was large, but by cinching up the belt she made it fit. Fortunately she had pinned her hair up for the hike so once she put the helmet and equipment harness on, she made a fair imitation of an SS trooper.
She hoped.
“Did you see what they did to Owen and Ma and Pa?” Jimmy asked, his voice anguished.
“Yes. So we take them down. That means keeping cool. We can give them all the Plague and they will heal up. Just keep that in mind.” Jill reached down to smear some dirt from the barn floor on her chin and face.
“Right.” He squeezed his Browning and looked around furtively, unsure.
Jill ordered, “Go up to the loft and toss me down the .45. Keep the shotgun up there with you. Take a sniper’s position back as far from the window as you can while still able to see your targets. Keep moving from position to position. That way they won’t be able to pinpoint you.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked in a hoarse whisper from the top of the ladder.
“Don’t whisper,” she said in a low tone. “It carries farther than a quiet voice. I’m going to walk out into the open and take down as many of them as I can, by surprise. As soon as I start shooting, you pick off any target you see, especially those behind me. Center mass low, remember? Right in the gut is the best thing, okay?”
“Okay.�
�� He turned away and retrieved her weapons hidden in the loft, tossing the .45 and two full magazines down. She thrust the pistol into the back of her waistband and dropped the ammo into her left front pants pocket. Then she cleaned off her knife, slipped it back into its sheath and eased over to look out across the farm.
Jill would never even have considered what she was planning if she hadn’t known the Eden Plague would give her an edge. Even if they ended up in a draw, with everyone shot and wounded, she and Jimmy would recover rapidly, while the SS men wouldn’t. She performed a slow scan, fixing everyone’s position in her mind, and then called softly up, “Here I go.”
Stepping out the back of the barn, she popped open the ammo pouches on her captured harness, tucking the covers out of the way and making sure the magazines were loose and handy. A standard load of six thirty-rounders, plus the one in the weapon, gave her two hundred ten rounds. More than enough.
She held her captured assault rifle casually pointed down, but with her hands in position on the grips, and strolled around the corner of the barn. Helmet tipped down, she looked out from beneath its rim, opening her mind and eyes to the positions of her targets, just like on the tactical range.
Targets. That’s all they are.
“Hey, Smitty, you look shitty,” someone called in her direction. That was the signal; in a moment they would recognize that Jill was not Smitty. She brought her weapon up, flipping the selector lever to Fire with her thumb, and shot the speaker just below his visible chest plate.
Before he hit the ground, she took down two more standing near him, pop – pop. Working outward and moving rightward in a tactical crouch, she circled the trucks and shot the fourth man in the leg as he tried to take cover, then drilled him in the back as he fell.
With the four at the vehicles out of the way she turned toward the house, scurrying forward, rifle locked to her shoulder, eyes open looking over her sights. A bullet flicked at her heel. Jill barely noted heavy .308 shots sound from the barn; she had to trust Jimmy to keep them off her back.
