Sidney took a towel and wiped the counter and tabletop to ensure all morsels of food and evidence of recent occupation were gone. Vern looked over his shoulder at the young woman, a real fighter if he’d ever seen one before, and let his eyebrows ask the question.
She glanced around the area and nodded. Everything was as ready as it would get. He stepped away from the window and moved to the trap door. “Let’s go, girl,” he grumbled, bending down against the protest in his knees. He passed the rifle down to Katie and swung his legs onto the ladder.
It took him much longer to get down into the cellar than it would have just a couple of years ago. His body was mostly healed from the damage that those two Cullen brothers had done when they shot him in the stomach, but sudden movements and certain twisting motions still sent a shock of pain through his gut that just about took his breath away. As he went down the ladder, he heard Sidney and Mark adjusting the chairs, and then the girl’s head appeared. “Good luck, guys. We’ll be back when the patrol is gone.” The little bit of light from above disappeared as they closed the trapdoor and pushed the final chair into position over the rug. He heard two pairs of boots scraping across the floorboards above as they rushed out the back door to their hiding spot in the shed out back.
Vern posted himself at the bottom of the ladder, accepting one of the suppressed M-4 rifles that someone handed to him in the darkness. He wrapped his palm around the pistol grip, then stretched his thumb upward, feeling for the selector switch. The weapon was currently on safe, and that’s how he’d keep it unless the patrol searching the house discovered the trapdoor.
His mind raced. Had they thought of everything? Was all evidence of recent habitation gone? Would the smell of the grilled chicken be gone by the time the patrol finally made it down the road to the house? Was the snow melted away enough out back that they wouldn’t see Sidney’s footprints? What if—
Vern’s blood chilled when he heard the hinges squeal in protest as someone opened the front door. He knew it wasn’t those poor, wretched infected. They couldn’t manipulate the round door handle on this old farmhouse. Humans were in the house above. He focused every bit of energy he could muster into his thumb on the selector switch and his finger alongside the trigger. If the chairs moved and the trapdoor opened, he’d begin firing right away.
A harsh, foreign voice drifted down from above. Vern had no idea what they said, but the intentions were clear, for as soon as the voice stopped, the sound of boots stomping along the wooden floorboard reverberated through the cellar. They were in the kitchen above and what sounded like the family room.
A whimper escaped the lips of one of Carmen’s children and Vern cursed the foreigners who’d invaded their space. He was a man of God. The Good Lord had seen fit to bless him with a new, extended family in this world and he’d protect them all until his dying breath. He didn’t know if them Army fellers were right, that the foreigners had caused the disease, but he did know that they were hunting his family, so that was all the justification he needed to despise their presence.
The sound of the boots took on a different rhythm as the invaders went up the stairs to search. Did they get everything? He’d been so careful to keep their stash of weapons hidden safely away from where they slept, but everyone had a few personal effects that they brought out at night. Was it enough?
Doors opened and shut as the searchers looked in closets and under cabinets. Time passed oddly in the darkness. Vern felt like the invaders had been there for hours, but in truth it was probably less than ten minutes. The harsh voice yelled out again, almost startling old Vern since the search had been conducted without any further instructions that he could hear.
The boots began to retreat toward the door and Vern allowed himself a moment of hope.
Then the baby started crying.
Shouts of dismay from above reached them. The boots pounded wildly on the floorboards until the same man barked an order. Almost instantly, everyone above stopped moving and then there was a soft thump. Vern knew that to be the sound of the man’s knees hitting the floorboards as he knelt to listen.
There was another rapid burst of a language that Vern would never understand, and then the table and chairs were shoved roughly away.
Time slowed as Vern took a step back to adjust his angle on the trapdoor’s opening. The M-4’s selector switch rotated from safe to semi-automatic. Baby Lincoln continued to cry, regardless of Carmen’s attempts to quiet him. This was it. The cellar was a good hiding place, but a terrible defensive position. One grenade through the hole and they were all done for.
Small lines of light appeared as the rug coving the trapdoor was thrown away. Vern adjusted his weapon’s aim and felt one of the girls shift beside him to do the same thing. They would all die beside him, trapped like rats in a hole.
“Don’t shoot!” he yelled. “We’ll come out.”
“Grandpa, no!” one of his granddaughters shouted.
“It’s—”
Glass shattered and the sound of bullets impacting into the floorboards above them sent Vern scurrying away from the opening. Men screamed above as heavy bodies fell to the floor. The heavy, punching sounds of the soldiers’ AK-47 rifles rang through the air as they returned fire at…Sidney.
She was in the hidden loft of the shed with Mark, providing overwatch to the house. The girl must have seen what was happening and decided to stop the foreigners from discovering the family hiding below.
The baby wailed in response to the sounds of battle raging all around them. The other two little ’uns joined in. They were scared out of their minds.
Again, the voice bellowed orders in a foreign tongue, trying to be heard above the gunfire. Vern fired directly upward into the floorboards above. Whichever one of his granddaughters had stood beside him began firing as well.
More thumps of men diving to the floor reached him through the ringing in his ears and there was a curious scraping sound that Vern couldn’t quite place. Was it fingernails on the floorboard? Or the scrape of a machine gun bipod as the foreigners repositioned, ready to fire at Sidney when she came through the back door?
What was happening above? He couldn’t let them lay in wait and ambush that girl. Vern grasped the rungs of the ladder and began the slow, tortuous climb up. The wooden dowels were slick with a wetness that he knew had to be blood.
When he got to the top, he used his shoulder to try to lift the trapdoor up. It was blocked by a heavy weight. He pushed with all the strength he could muster from his precarious perch on the ladder, but it was no use. The weight was too great for him in his current position.
“Here, girls,” he whispered into the darkness below. “Take this rifle. The door’s blocked.”
A hand slapped at the side of the ladder until it found his foot. He double-checked that he’d put the safety on and slid the weapon along his leg until the stock reached the grasping fingers. “Got it,” Katie said as the rifle was pulled from his grasp.
With the awkward rifle gone, he was able to hold on to the ladder with one hand and help push with the other. It still wasn’t enough, so he took another step up the ladder and was nearly bent over double. His knees screamed in protest as he crouched down and then used his legs to push his upper back into the trapdoor.
Slowly, light began to show and he saw that it was a body blocking the door. He eased the pressure and the door began to fall back into place. If he dropped the door, the dead weight would still be there and they’d be trapped again. He had to keep going, to make the body roll off the door. He took a deep breath and pushed with everything he had.
The edges of his vision went dark and pain exploded in his chest, but he continued to push, straining against the weight on the door. The pressure against his back relented suddenly as the foreigner’s body fell away and the door flung open. Vern fell out onto the floor and clutched at his chest, staring at the ceiling above. The pain was immense and he couldn’t catch his breath.
The darkness at the
edges spread, covering everything. He couldn’t see and he felt like he couldn’t breathe. The pain stopped abruptly. He wasn’t scared, he just felt exhausted. Then, all at once, his body stopped responding to his commands and his labored breathing stopped.
Vern Campbell’s final act on this earth was to save his family from being trapped in the cellar of a farmhouse. He’d saved them from a slow, agonizing death of starvation. With that accomplished, he closed his eyes and went home to his God.
8
* * *
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
MARCH 4TH
“I really don’t give a shit what this guy says,” Jake Murphy said more harshly than he’d meant to. “This is still America. He doesn’t control what I can or can’t do.”
“I get it, sir. But these guys were bad news before the infected showed up. They regularly went up against the cops when there was a functioning government. Now that everything is gone…” Specialist Feliciano left the statement hanging in the air between them.
Jake looked from the small assembled group of men around him to the barricade at the end of the bridge. They’d traveled so far, just to be stopped by some local thug who thought he ruled the place. “Options?”
“There’s the Manhattan Bridge,” Feliciano stated, pointing to the east where another bridge was clearly visible. “Or the other one—I can’t remember its name—further east and a little north. It connects Brooklyn with Manhattan, but it was a pretty shitty area before all of this went down. Probably a lot worse now.”
“And that’s it?” Jake hated being dependent on one guy to tell them how to get around the city, but Feliciano was a good kid. He hadn’t failed them yet.
“No, sir. There are a few more bridges up north, going from the Bronx over to Long Island. No guarantees that any of them will be any better, though.”
“What does this cocksucker want?” Harper asked, butting into the platoon huddle. He had an annoying way of doing that.
Jake frowned and looked at the operator. “They want food and some ammo for passage off the bridge.”
“No way. We keep getting hounded for food. That shit’s like gold. We might need it to bargain with the scientists—if we can find any.”
“Don’t fucking start that shit again,” Jake grumbled. Grady Harper had become increasingly skeptical that they’d find any surviving scientists after seeing the worsening conditions in the city. “But, I agree with you. Keeping our food secure is one of our biggest priorities.”
“And we sure as fuck ain’t giving him any ammunition,” Harper stated, making it seem like he was in charge.
“Stay in your lane, Harper,” Sergeant Turner cautioned, probably sensing another argument between the lieutenant and the CIA man—or whatever the fuck agency Harper had worked for before all of this. He’d been incredibly sketchy about those details.
“Fuck this, man,” the operator laughed. “There are only, like, three of them. Why are we even entertaining their demands?”
“Because that’s what leaders do, Harper,” Jake sighed. “We don’t risk the lives of our men unnecessarily. We explore all the options to see if there’s a potential solution that will end things peacefully.”
“Okay, boss man,” Grady said, waving a hand dismissively as he turned away. “I’ve only got like twenty years of dealing with small-time fuckwads like this. You do your Army planning bullshit.”
Jake waited until he’d ambled away and glanced back at Sergeant Turner and Feliciano. “I am really not liking that guy,” he chuckled. If he could, he’d toss Grady Harper, but the operator was the entire purpose of their mission.
“Don’t let him get under your skin, sir,” Sergeant Turner advised. “In Iraq and Afghanistan, we had those SF and Delta guys always swooping into our AOR with guns blazing. They’d do their John Wayne bullshit, kill some bad guys, and leave. Never mind the mess that the guys who patrolled the streets every day had to deal with after the operators left. That’s just how Harper was raised. He probably doesn’t even realize that he’s making potential—”
Several gunshots rang out in quick succession. Jake dove to the bridge’s rough surface. He was completely exposed in the middle of the road, but his first priority was to establish fire superiority over whoever was shooting at them. Then he’d reposition his men out of harm’s way.
Another two shots shattered the morning air.
“What do you see?” he yelled out, guiding his rifle awkwardly to his shoulder.
“A goddamn cowboy. That’s what, sir,” Turner said, grunting as he pushed himself to his feet.
“What?”
He used the butt of his rifle to give him leverage enough to stand. When he did so, he saw Harper holstering his pistol. The operator waved a hand in a friendly gesture and called out, “The bridge is open, LT.”
All around him, the men in the platoon cheered. Once again, Grady Harper had taken the initiative and simply eliminated the threat before Jake could do anything about it. Worse, the men loved the guy. It was becoming more and more of a problem.
“What the hell are we supposed to do with him?” Jake asked Sergeant Turner furtively.
“The only thing we can do, sir. Try to keep him reeled in enough that he doesn’t get us all killed. Other than that—fuck, I don’t know. For now, the bridge is open and we don’t gotta walk several miles to the next one and find the same damn thing over there.”
“Motherfucking cowboy bullshit,” Jake muttered as he stepped off toward the barricade.
As he walked through the homemade checkpoint of corrugated steel, construction barriers, and chain link fencing, Jake counted four bodies. Three of them with bullet wounds to the chest and the fourth a little further back.
The last body had two bullet holes in his back.
They were finally in Manhattan. The trip had already been full of backtracking and wasted time. From what Grady could remember, Manhattan was a very big place and Columbia University was eight or nine miles from where they sat now. Then, if his suspicions were confirmed and the internet rumors about the CDC were correct, there wouldn’t be any help at the university. The biochemistry and molecular biophysics labs at Columbia’s Irving Medical Center would be where the real work had been done. That was another three miles north of the main campus.
He needed to get his hands on a map, but it appeared as if everything made of paper had disappeared into fires to keep the residents of the dying city warm over the long winter months. For the time being, they were stuck listening to Specialist Feliciano for details about the city. His knowledge of Brooklyn had been spot on, but he’d admitted to not traveling over to Manhattan very often, so besides telling the platoon to go north toward Harlem, he wasn’t going to be much help on this phase of the mission.
The platoon was a mixed bag of individuals, all with their own strengths and weaknesses. Grady glanced at the kid, David, whom Taavi had adopted. He was alright as far as kids went. He was much better than most of the soldiers at keeping quiet while they walked and he didn’t bitch about the conditions, so there was that. The lieutenant, though. That guy was too timid. There’d been several times where his aversion to confrontation could have gotten them all killed if Grady hadn’t gone against his decision and did the right thing. The LT didn’t agree with the way he did things, Grady accepted that. He was still young, but he was in charge of this little ragtag group and needed to grow the fuck up.
It was a precarious situation that Grady found himself in. On the one hand, he didn’t want the LT to fail, he actually liked that the kid could take criticism and at least asked for suggestions when problems arose. On the other hand, he almost always sided with the regular Army guys’ counsel, seemingly dismissing what Grady recommended without giving any thought to it. That’s the part that rubbed him the wrong fucking way and he needed to have a Come to Jesus with Lieutenant Murphy at their next stopping point.
“Ah, fuck it,” Grady mumbled.
“Hmm? What’s that, yo
u say?” Taavi asked from beside him as they walked.
“I’m just trying to figure out the LT,” he replied. “He’s been out in this world for a long time. He should know that there’s no place for indecision or second-guessing. Doing that makes you dead. So does giving a couple of two-bit thugs the opportunity to fleece us for our supplies and ammo.”
“Well, it looks like you took that final decision away from him, my friend.”
“Damn right,” Grady muttered. “You’re a senior leader in your army. What’s a good way to reach this guy, to tell him to unfuck himself and get his head on straight?”
Taavi chuckled softly. “We don’t have problems with our soldiers, Grady. If they are a…ah, a screwy?”
“Screw up,” he corrected.
“Yes. If they are a screw up, then they are removed from the ranks quickly.”
“So, are you suggesting that I take charge?”
“No, no, nothing like that. I’m just saying that from the military perspective, the Iranian Army does not tolerate incompetence.” He cleared his throat and softened his voice. “However, from a father’s perspective, maybe the lieutenant needs positive encouragement. Instead of butting heads with him, go with the flow, see where that takes you.” He raised a hand and gestured toward the skyscrapers on Manhattan as they descended the slow arc down the bridge. “Look, his leadership has brought us all the way to New York City, the greatest city in all the world.”
Grady looked at the buildings ahead and sighed. To him, it looked like they were walking into a nightmare ambush. The platoon had no choice but to walk down the middle of the street and an enemy force could be anywhere. He’d actually done an urban defense terrain walk in Manhattan a few years ago—was it ten years ago already? The exercise had focused on how to defend against an attack there, but the lessons learned could be applied to an offensive as well.
Five Roads To Texas | Book 11 | Reciprocity [Sidney's Way 3] Page 6
