The day after: An apocalyptic morning

by Jessy Cruise

  "It's hard to believe that they managed to slip out of town," Barnes said, taking a puff from his cigar. He was referring to Anna and Jean, the search for whom had finally been abandoned at sunset that very day. "Who would've thought?"

  "I know how you feel," Bracken said, shaking his head a little. "But I'm quite certain at this point that they are nowhere in town, living or dead. We've searched every building, every nook, every cranny within the guarded area and we have found no trace of them. We guarded the areas that we've already searched just to make sure that they didn't slip from one area to another. Unfortunately, as much as I hate to admit it, they had to have slipped out of town somehow, either on the night they killed the other bitch or sometime after."

  "They must've been incredibly lucky not to have been picked up," Barnes said, shaking his head at the travesty of it all.

  "Luckier than they'll ever know," Bracken agreed. He took a sip of his latest drink and then helped himself to one of Barnes' cigars.

  "Now for the important question," Barnes said, flicking a gold-plated Zippo lighter to life and igniting his companion's stogy for him. "Will this escape have any bearing on the upcoming attack on Garden Hill? What do you think the odds are that they will be heading for that town?"

  Bracken puffed his cigar alight and then leaned back in his chair, looking thoughtfully at his leader. "I'm quite certain that their plan from the start was to head to Garden Hill," he said. "Ever since we brought that bitch Jessica back from the last mission, rumors have been flying about the town. We've had reports from many of the men that they've overheard their bitches talking about the place and how much better it would be if they were there."

  "I hope those bitches were beaten severely for that," Barnes said.

  "Oh, I'm sure they were. But my point is that I'm surprised that my two bitches were the only ones who tried to get away. The bitches see that place as some sort of Utopia."

  "So do you think that a change of plans is in order?" Barnes wanted to know. "Will the possibility of those two bitches making it to Garden Hill destroy the element of surprise in the attack?"

  Bracken shook his head. "I don't think we need to worry about that," he said confidently. "In the first place, I can't see them actually making it to Garden Hill. They left carrying nothing but a few blankets. There's no way that they'll survive a ten-day hike through the rain without any food. My guess is that we'll come across their bodies somewhere between here and there as we march. They're probably out there collapsed and starving even as we speak."

  "That sounds logical to me," Barnes said.

  "And even if, by some miracle, they manage to get to Garden Hill, what of that? What can they really tell those people that would compromise our attack plans? They're bitches after all. Sure, they've probably managed to overhear the fact that we plan to make an attack, but they won't be able to tell them when, or how, or with how many men. At worst, the Garden Hill people will just have confirmation of what they probably already expect anyway. After all, they did probe us with their helicopter. That tells us they know we're here. And they haven't been back since then. That tells us that they have decided we're something to fear."

  Barnes thought these words over carefully for a moment and decided that they made a lot of sense. "You sound like you've thought this out very well," he said. "I concur with your reasoning. Do you still plan to leave on the 7th of January?"

  "We've been delayed a bit in the training schedule because of the search for the bitches," Bracken said. "I would like a few more days to exercise the new platoons and the new lieutenants."

  "Fair enough," Barnes told him, finishing off the last of his drink. "After all, time is on our side, isn't it?"

  "Exactly."

  Part 14

  Guard position 1 sat atop Hill 1514 outside the northwest perimeter of Garden Hill. The hill itself was sparsely populated with pine and redwood trees and rose five hundred feet above the rooftops of the town. The guard bunker was a four-foot trench that stretched thirty feet north to south at the summit of the hill. Sandbags lined the front and back of the trench and a camouflaged cover had been placed over the top of it and covered with tree branches and mud. Openings in the sandbag walls allowed for visualization of the post's area of responsibility - the Interstate stretching off to the west and the low hills to the north and immediate south of it - and served as firing ports if a battle ever became necessary.

  Skip had designed the bunker so that a complete ten-person squad could occupy it during a battle and pour fire down upon any invaders approaching from the Interstate. Now, however, at 2:30 on the afternoon of January 5 (or March 26 under Mick's calendar), it was staffed only by Maria Sanchez and Leanette Benton who were two and a half hours into a standard six-hour guard shift. They were armed with one of the automatic M-16 rifles and a long-range, scoped hunting rifle in addition to their sidearms. They also had a fully charged portable radio and a set of expensive binoculars.

  The inside of the trench was damp and muddy on the floor of it but relatively free of dripping water or direct rainfall. The two women were dressed warmly in jeans and flannel shirts covered by black rain jackets and hoods. They sat side by side upon small stools near one of the sandbag openings playing a game of cribbage that was set up on a small end table between them. Every few minutes one of them would stand up and make a complete scan of the area with the binoculars and then, after seeing nothing, they would go back to their game.

  Maria and Leanette had once been bitter enemies. It had been they that Christine had had to actually separate at post because of physical fighting not too long before. Those days were tentatively over, replaced by a cautious friendship born out of their recent polygamous marriage to Hector. After Paul's legitimization of the concept by participation in it, Hector had been one of the first to jump on the bandwagon by suggesting that his semi-permanent mistress Leanette officially join the union. Maria had not been too terribly wild about the idea but she had accepted it, knowing, as most of the other women were learning, that her husband was going to sleep with Leanette with or without official sanction anyway. Since then the two had become cautious friends with each other, well on their way to developing the camaraderie with each other that marked most of the other triples. Together they were attempting to keep their man in line and so far their combined efforts seemed to be doing the trick.

  "Fifteen-two, fifteen-four," Maria counted, laying down her latest hand, "fifteen-six, a pair is eight, and a three-card run is eleven." She picked up her peg and advanced it well past the last hole on the board. "And that," she said with a small smile, "puts me out. That's two in a row I've whipped your ass."

  "Yeah yeah," Leanette said with a good-natured grunt as she threw down her uncounted cards. "This is a stupid game."

  "It sure is," Maria agreed. "You wanna play again?"

  "Screw that. What else we got in here?"

  "We have Monopoly," Maria, the veteran of this particular post told her. " Christine actually replaced the Monopoly money inside of it with real money from the grocery store."

  "You mean there's real hundreds and fifties and twenties in there?" Leanette asked.

  "Everything except the five hundreds," she answered. "It's kind of fun to play that way until you remember that the real money is just as worthless as the Monopoly money was."

  "Okay," Leanette said, "let's do it."

  "I'll kick your ass at that too," Maria warned. "I'm the Monopoly master."

  "Bring it on, girl," Leanette told her with a smile. "Why don't you start setting it up and I'll make another check outside?"

  "It's a plan," she said, reaching under the end table and into a plastic garbage bag where the entertainment items were kept.

  Leanette picked up the binoculars and stood up, taking two steps through the mud to the opening. Sometimes she wondered why they even bothered looking out every five minutes. Nothing was ever out there anymore, not even isolated stragglers. The last of them had apparently died out more
than six weeks ago, or at least they never showed themselves anymore. But then, when her boredom at guard duty would reach a peak, she would remind herself of that terrifying day when armed invaders had come right in the wall, bent on capturing the community center and kidnapping the women. She had been one of Skip's hastily assembled squad on that day and she always remembered the horror she had felt when bullets had started whizzing in over her head, when Dale and then Rick and then Sherrie had been felled right in front of her. Those thoughts always compelled her to perform as she was told on guard duty and make her checks religiously. Never again did she want to feel the way she had at that moment.

  She put the binoculars to her face and began her slow scan of the area, starting from the far south of the zone of responsibility. She looked at a magnified view of the rolling hills, of the mud flats, of the trees and shrubs. She looked over the abandoned grocery store and the abandoned gas station. At the gas station a work crew of two women was using a siphon hose to draw gasoline from the underground tank and fill up the Dodge truck that served as the town's wood gathering and general hauling vehicle. She held her gaze on them for a moment, not because she thought they were invaders - she and Maria had been informed by radio a few minutes before that a work-crew would be leaving the town - but only because they were actual people in an otherwise sterile environment. When she got her fill of looking at them, she turned her head slowly to the right, spinning her view to the north. Soon she was looking at the abandoned lanes of Interstate 80, the most likely avenue of any outsider advance. She started at the signpost that marked the official border of Garden Hill and then worked her way west, towards the small rise some three miles distant where the lanes disappeared from view. So accustomed to seeing nothing was she that she actually looked right over the two figures coming over this rise and kept scanning before her brain finally gave her a little kick in the ass and told her to pan back.

  She did this quickly, the view jumping and bouncing for a moment before she was able to steady it on the two people she had seen. They were still several miles out and therefore very difficult to catch any fine details of, but they were unmistakably human beings. They were walking sedately right down the middle of the eastbound lanes, shoulder to shoulder, occasionally leaning on each other for a moment.

  "Maria," Leanette said, her voice excited. "I've got two people out there on the Interstate!"

  "What?" Maria said, looking at her co-wife to see if she was joking or not. She did not seem to be.

  "Two people," she repeated. "They just came over the rise to the west. They're walking right down the freeway!"

  Maria stood up quickly, pushing her face through the nearest opening. Her eyes were sharp and even without artificial magnification she was able to spot two tiny specks making their way forward. "Let me see those glasses," she said, holding out her hands for them.

  Leanette handed them over to her and she put them to her face, getting the close-in view. "They don't look like they're carrying rifles," she said doubtfully. "They might be over their shoulders though. Who do you think they are? Where are they coming from?"

  "I don't know," Leanette said, picking up the scoped rifle. She aimed it out through the opening and peered through the scope. The magnification wasn't as much as the binoculars but it was considerably more than the naked eye. "They don't look like they're very heavily loaded. You see anyone else behind them or to the sides?"

  "No one," Maria said, shaking her head. "Goddammit, and Skip and Jack are gone with the helicopter right now too. They could've used the infra-red to check behind them."

  Leanette nodded as she remembered this. Skip, Jack, Mick, and Paul had flown off about an hour before to continue their recon mission of the abandoned trucks on the Interstate. They also planned to do some recon to the north of the Interstate, on the secondary roads, as well. "We'd better tell Christine about this," she said, backing away from the rifle a little and picking up the radio. "Position one to base," she said into it. "Are you there, Christine?"

  Christine was upstairs in the community center's main office, going over the schedule for the 6:00 PM crew change when the call came in. She was currently the only one in the office since Skip and Paul were both away on the recon mission. She wheeled her chair over to the shelf where the main radio set rested and picked up the microphone.

  "This is Christine," she said, already sensing - based on the tone of Leanette's voice - that something out of the ordinary was in the works. "What's happening, Leanette?"

  " Christine," Leanette said, "we have two people walking up the Interstate towards us. They're approximately two miles to the west at this time walking in the eastbound lanes."

  She felt a jolt of adrenaline surge through her as she heard this. People approaching the town? Who were they? What could they want? Where had they come from? And Skip was out of radio range in the helicopter! What if they were hostile?

  " Christine?" Leanette's voice said from the radio. She sounded a little worried. "Did you copy my transmission?"

  "I copy," Christine said slowly, her mind spinning up to overdrive. "Where uh... I mean, can you tell if they're armed or not?"

  "Unsure at this point," Leanette replied. "They're still too far away for us to make anything out. They're not trying to hide from us or anything, they're just walking down the roadway."

  "No sign of others?" she asked next.

  "Not so far," was the answer. "We're keeping our eyes peeled."

  She took a few breaths, trying to think through what she should do next. Was this an emergency? Well, not really, not at this point anyway. But it was unusual and there were certain things that should probably be done. "Leanette," she said into the microphone, "keep watching them for the moment. Don't do anything until they get up to our sign. At that point, if they cross over, treat them like any other straggler."

  "I copy that," Leanette replied.

  "Positions 2, 3, and 4," Christine said next, "answer up in order please."

  One by one the other guard posts all checked in with her. None of them reported anything unusual outside of their posts. She told all of them to increase their alertness until told to stand-down. This meant that they all dropped their games and conversations and picked up their guns and binoculars.

  "Are they still advancing?" she asked Leanette and Maria once that was taking care of.

  "That's affirmative," Leanette told her. "We have a better view of them now. It looks like two women. Still no weapons visible on them. They have packs on their backs that look like they're made out of garbage bags."

  "How close to the border are they?"

  "Still over a mile and a half out, but moving at a good pace."

  "Copy, keep me updated."

  The minutes dragged onward maddeningly. Christine chewed her fingernails nervously while she waited for updates, all sorts of evil possibilities running through her head. She envisioned the two women on the freeway as some sort of diversionary tactic for a main group of invaders. Maybe they were even now creeping in on one of the other guard posts. She wondered if she should activate the fast action teams. A quick blast of the fire engine siren outside would bring them running from all directions to assemble in the parking lot. Should she call them up just so they were available? Or should she wait and see for a few more minutes first? Finally, after agonizing over this, she elected not to call them up unless she had some concrete reason to think there were more than two people out there.

  "They're still heading in," Leanette said after about fifteen minutes. "Under a mile away now. We can say for certain that they are two females now. They have no weapons that we can see on them."

  "How do they look health-wise?" Christine asked.

  "Not great," Leanette said, "but not bad either. They don't seem to be starving."

  Another fifteen minutes crawled by, again with no new developments. None of the other guard posts reported seeing anyone or anything. Nor did post 1 report seeing anything but the rapidly approaching women.
>
  "They're coming up on the border sign now," Leanette said. "They should be able to read it at any time."

  "Copy," Christine said. "Let's see if they obey the sign." The sign in question read: THIS IS A SECURED AREA. APPROACH NO CLOSER TO GARDEN HILL OR YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON. IF YOU ARE PASSING THROUGH, GO TO THE WESTBOUND LANES AND WALK QUICKLY ALONG THE NORTH SHOULDER. DO NOT STOP OR DEVIATE UNTIL YOU HAVE PASSED THE CLIFFS 3 MILES TO THE EAST. WE WILL HAVE YOU IN SIGHT THE ENTIRE TIME. IF YOU ATTEMPT TO LEAVE THE INTERSTATE AFTER CROSSING OUR BORDER, YOU WILL BE FIRED UPON.

  "They're slowing down," Leanette reported a minute later. "It looks like they've spotted the sign. They're approaching it now." A pause. "Okay, they're reading the sign now."

  "I copy," Christine said. "Remember, if they do what the sign says, let them go peacefully."

  "Understood," Leanette answered. "They're still reading the sign. Now they seem to be talking to each other about something." Another long pause. " Christine, they're uh..." A click of the transmission closing.

  "They're what Leanette?" she demanded. "What are they doing?"

  "They're waving at us," Leanette said slowly.

  "Waving at you?"

  "Affirm. They're standing just on the other side of the border and both of them are waving their hands back and forth at us. It looks like they're yelling something too but we can't hear them."

  Waving? Christine thought. What the hell was going on? "I copy that, Leanette," she said.

  "What should we do now?"

  "Nothing," she said. "Don't do anything for the moment unless they step over the line."

  Leanette and Maria watched the women wave at them for almost five minutes. Leanette reported every minute or so that they were still there and Christine told them just to follow protocol for the time being.