He started to sit up. “Gah!” Vern gasped. “What the hell?” He lifted the covers to peer down at his stomach.
“Carmen put in a catheter,” Sidney stated. “She said it was better than you pissing all over the bed.”
“Good Lord! That woman’s seen me naked?”
“Relax, Vern. She’s a nurse,” Sidney said, crossing her arms across her chest. “You don’t have anything she hasn’t seen a thousand times. We’re just lucky that her little medical bag she’s been assembling for the last year or so had the supplies.”
“Yeah, well she ain’t seen mine before,” he protested. “Don’t you tell me to relax.”
Sidney winked at him. “I already have to change Lincoln’s diapers. I don’t want to start changing yours too.”
That seemed to shut him up about the catheter for the time being. “You know we need to move again, right?”
She nodded. “Katie, can you go fetch Carmen, tell her that Vern’s awake?” The girl nodded and darted off after a quick peck on her grandfather’s cheek.
“I can’t believe that I just used the word ‘fetch’ in a sentence,” Sidney groaned. “You’re rubbing off on me, Old Man.”
Vern snorted. “Well, maybe one day, you’ll stop running your filthy mouth too.”
“I doubt it. There are some situations that only a curse word can help with.”
He frowned but didn’t push the matter. “Okay, so you sent Katie off in a hurry once I asked about moving. What gives?”
“Well, the heart attack and fall didn’t dull your wits.”
He tapped the side of his head. “Sharp as a tack.”
“Carmen thinks you may have a dislocated hip.”
He grunted. “Dislocated, but not broken?”
Sidney shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s been about two hours, but she forced three aspirin down your throat, so—”
“That’s what that terrible taste in my mouth is.”
“Probably. You’ve got pain meds in you right now, but once those wear off, you’re gonna be in a lot of pain.”
His face remained impassive as he asked, “So, I fell from the ladder, huh?”
She nodded. “Yeah. You’re lucky that’s all that’s wrong with you.”
“Lucky? Girl, we have these crazies—the infected like those Army boys called ’em—running all over the place and a bunch of Iranians who’re really mad that we’ve been killin’ ’em. Now you’re telling me that I can’t walk, and I’m lucky?”
“Don’t you start getting all negative on me, Vern. You’re damned lucky to be alive. Hell, we didn’t even know if you were going to have brain damage or not from the heart attack. We can’t move you for a few weeks.”
“A few weeks?” he sputtered. “That’s a death sentence on all of y’all, and you know it.”
Sidney splayed her fingers on the blanket. “There’s nothing we can do, Vern. If we had another fallback location already set up, then maybe, but we’ve already moved almost twenty miles from your farm. We end up losing more supplies and more food each time we move to a new hideout. It’s only a matter of time before this running gets us all killed.”
His eyes narrowed. “Sounds like you’ve been thinking about doing something stupid.”
“Not stupid,” she countered. “A measured response—a preemptive strike to get them off our backs for a while.”
“You’re getting’ too big for your britches, girl. You’re letting that Redskins war axe stuff that you’ve been painting everywhere get into your head. You’re just a scared woman, alone against an army of evil foreigners. The only thing you can do is slow down the inevitable.”
“That’s all we need. You need time to heal. I’ll throw them off the scent for a while.”
“You mean a diversion, like somewhere to the east of town?”
She nodded noncommittally. “Yeah, something like that.”
He frowned, mimicking her earlier movements by crossing his arms. “I don’t like it.”
“You can’t stop me.”
“I can, and I will!”
“No, you can’t. I’ve already got my pack ready to go. Mark wanted to go with me, but he needs to stay here to help defend you guys.”
“Don’t take my granddaughters,” Vern pleaded, suddenly losing the fire he’d shown only a few moments ago.
Sidney shook her head, wisps of hair flying wildly. “I’m not. I’m going to go alone.”
“That’s not smart at all, and you know it, girl.”
“This attack just proves how precarious our situation is here, Vern. We’ve put a hurting on the invaders, I mean, we’ve probably killed over a hundred of them, but until we really stick it to them, they won’t leave us alone. We need to hurt them so bad that they can’t sustain operations here anymore so they give up and go away.”
“That’s a pipe dream. They’re here for a reason. I don’t know why, but there’s no way they just popped up in the middle of Kansas on accident. They aren’t going away.”
“Then maybe I can make them stop hunting us,” she retorted hotly.
“What about your baby? I can’t believe you’d want to leave him.”
“I don’t want to leave him, but what choice do I have? If I don’t do something, they’re just going to send more patrols this way and maybe we can’t stop them the next time. Maybe they come in here and kill everyone, take Katie and Sally. This is the only way I can buy time for you.”
“Hey!” Carmen said cheerily. “I see you’re awake.” She passed off Lincoln to Sidney as she walked into to room and picked up the blood pressure cuff and stethoscope from the bedside table.
Sidney hefted her son and rearranged the growing boy in her arms. He was big enough now that he could support the weight of his head for a few seconds at a time, but still too little to do much beyond soil himself and laugh. In a few months, maybe six or so, he’d be crawling and getting into everything.
If we survive that long, Sidney thought bitterly. She’d made up her mind. The only way to keep Lincoln alive was to get the Iranians off their trail. She would bring the pain to those fuckers in Liberal and make them wish they’d never come here.
11
* * *
BIGGS ARMY AIRFIELD, FORT BLISS, EL PASO, TEXAS
MARCH 5TH
“No, ma’am, I’m being serious,” Hannah said, sighing in frustration. She’d spent most of the day trying to get in to see the division intelligence officer. She’d been bounced around by the airfield medical personnel for several of those hours before being allowed to talk to a sergeant on the Aviation brigade staff. After another long discussion, he brought in the brigade’s intelligence officer, who, surprisingly, believed her story after a couple of retellings and made an appointment for her to see the commander.
“So what?” the colonel asked dryly. She’d been skeptical of Hannah’s story from the moment she walked in under guard. Apparently, the Army here had been dealing with the crazies for a long time, so the information she thought she had was of little use. “We’re spread thin here as it is, barely keeping afloat between distribution center raids and assisting the infantry when large hordes of the infected show up. What is it that you expect me to do with your information about the origination of the disease?”
“I… I don’t really know, ma’am. I’ve been on the road for so long, I just—”
“Why don’t you get some rest, dear?” Colonel King said, her tone softening and becoming almost motherly. “I’m sure you’ve been through quite a lot. That Blackhawk you flew in here with is registered to the Mexican Army. It must have been exhausting to fly that far on your own, especially with the illness inside of you taking so much of your energy.”
The illness, Hannah surmised, was from her encounter with the crazy in Central America that had bitten her hand. She’d been able to hide it from the PA’s initial examination, but had forgotten about it during her subsequent interviews. The sergeant said she was immune, but that the disease that turned normal p
eople into stark raving murderers coursed through her veins. She was a carrier.
“I’m fine, ma’am,” Hannah replied. “I just need a good night’s sleep and a proper meal, then we can go back. The answers have to be in that lab. I just know it.”
“Ms. Dunn, even if I believed your fantastical story about you being some sort of special operator, we simply don’t have the resources to investigate some mythical lab complex where you say this thing started,” the colonel stated, her tone hardening once more.
“I never said I was SF,” Hannah corrected her. “I was the pilot for a CIA-contracted SOF team. We tried to stop it in North Korea, but they’d already closed down the facility by the time we got there, and—”
“North Korea?” Colonel King scoffed, her thin features tightening over the bones in her cheek, giving her a scarecrow-like appearance. “I thought you said it was Brazil. You can’t even keep your story straight. I don’t know if that’s from your brain being scrambled from the infection or from you being on your own out there in the wild,” she pointed a bony finger toward the wall of her office, “but I don’t appreciate you wasting my time with made up fairy tales. Guards.”
Hannah gripped the arms of the chair tightly as hard fingers dug into her upper arms, attempting to pull her from it. “Colonel King, please!” Hannah pleaded. “I’m telling the truth! We went to North Korea, but the facility was shut down and sealed. We found evidence that the operation had moved to Brazil to be closer to the United States. There were log books written in both Korean and Iranian—I mean Persian—that told of what they were doing, what their end state was. I’m telling you the truth.”
“Stop!” the colonel demanded as Hannah struggled against the men trying to remove her. “No, I mean, you guys stop,” she said, gesturing at the two guards. “Miss Dunn, what did you just say?”
The guards released her and she struggled to remember what she’d said that got the colonel excited. “Um… We found log books written in both Korean and Persian?”
“Thank you, Sergeant Grant. Go get the S-2. Tell him that I want him here now.”
“Ma’am, she’s infected…”
“She’s immune, Sergeant. I don’t have anything to fear from her.” She leaned back slightly and pulled her 9mm from the shoulder holster she wore, then set it on the desk. “Besides, I’ve got my sidearm here if she tries anything.”
“I, uh… Ma’am?”
“Just go get the S-2, Sergeant.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Hannah turned slightly in her chair and watched one of the guards leave while the other one stayed where he was just a few steps behind her. As his partner left, he edged toward the side slightly to increase the angle of fire if things went south. She was impressed. They’d been trained well.
“So, Ms. Dunn,” the colonel said, drawing out her name to bring her attention back to the older woman sitting behind the desk. “I bet you’re wondering what that’s about.”
Hannah shrugged. “Since you didn’t believe me or care about what I said when I referenced the North Korean mission, I figure that you don’t know anything about them. But the fact that you stopped the guards from taking me out of here when I mentioned the Iranians means you guys have already gotten intel about them, so now you’re taking me seriously.”
Colonel King nodded, her eyes narrowing. “Very astute, Ms. Dunn. Where did you say you served?”
“I was in the 1st Air Cav at Fort Hood, then joined the 160th. Deployed to Iraq twice in support of 7th Group. Then I got out and became a contractor—which is how I ended up in the thick of things. Otherwise, I’d probably be dead.”
“Excuse me, ma’am. You wanted to see me?”
Hannah turned once again to see the brigade intelligence officer that she’d spent a few hours with while trying to convince them that she had legitimate information about where the virus came from.
“Yeah, come on in, Josh. And shut the door.”
“Ma’am?” the guard who’d left asked.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Sergeant Grant. Yes, you can come in here,” the colonel groaned. Hannah filed away the fact that as a carrier of the disease she was very much considered a threat by their security.
Once everyone was situated in the office, Colonel King asked the S-2 how much he knew of Hannah’s story. “I believe she told me everything, ma’am.”
“Did you know about the Iranians?”
“She mentioned a logbook with dual language entries, but that’s about it, ma’am.”
The woman’s gaze fell back on Hannah. “Okay, so you went to North Korea, somehow made it to a lab that was abandoned and found out the Iranians were involved. How does that translate to South America, where you say this all began?”
Hannah arranged her thoughts before she spoke. “While our team EXFIL’d by submarine into the Pacific, we got word that the pictures we took of the logbook pages had already been transcribed.”
“A submarine?” Colonel King asked quizzically.
Fuck it, Hannah thought, deciding to abandon any pretense at mission security. “Yes, ma’am. We stole a North Korean fishing boat and got picked up by a British sub that took us to Japan.”
“How many nations knew about the virus before the outbreak?” the colonel asked with obvious disgust at the massive international failure to contain it.
“Um… I don’t know, ma’am. At least us, the Brits, the Japanese, and the Brazilians.” She went back to her original train of thought. “So, originally, the Norks and the Iranians had been working together to create super soldiers immune to pain, but their experiments changed somehow—I don’t know how or why. The book noted that the patients with the immunity to pain had become mentally unstable and the disease passed from person-to-person. The Iranian passages seemed to take on a religious bent, whereas the Korean ones tended to stay more clinical and fearful of the disease getting out into the population. It said the operation was moved to Brazil to ease the release on the West.”
She took a sip of water before continuing. “When we got to Brazil, we got intel from the local military commander that a Middle Eastern company had built a big manufacturing plant in the middle of the jungle under the auspices of mining minerals, but that no actual mining had occurred yet. My team leader knew right away that the place they told us about was our target, so we headed there after a quick rest and planning session. By the time we got there, the facility had been alerted and they released several hundred of the crazies on us. My team got separated and my weapon jammed. I saw Chris—one of my teammates—get torn to shreds by three of them and I ran instead of clearing the jam. I just ran…” She faltered, then said quietly, “I— I left them.”
Her eyes focused on the aviation brigade commander and the woman smiled sadly. “There’s nothing you could have done, dear. You would be dead now too.”
Hannah thrust her hand up. “It turns out that I’m immune, so I could have—”
“Bled out from a hundred bites and injuries with no medical treatment. Being immune doesn’t mean you can’t be killed. Early on, we had a research facility here on Bliss to try to understand why some people were immune and whether the scientists could replicate that somehow, but an outbreak in the clinic wiped it out and all of the patients who were immune were killed by the infected as they raged through the building. Believe me when I say that there’s nothing you could have done.”
The colonel’s gaze shifted to the S-2. “I think it goes without saying that Ms. Dunn’s story corroborates what Division is saying about the Iranians showing up here in the States and that they’re the ones jamming our communications.” She looked at the two guards. “Not a word of this leaves this room, do you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” they answered in near-perfect unison.
“Good,” Colonel King said, nodding curtly. “Ms. Dunn, as little as two months ago, we had a lot of aerial support from Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico, but that stopped after we lost the ability to com
municate with them effectively. Luckily, the infected activity has been on a steady decline as time goes on and they starve to death, otherwise we’d have been overrun here at Bliss if the hordes we’d seen early in the war hit us without that close air support.”
She glanced at the guards again before continuing. “Last week, General Bhagat, the division’s commanding general, authorized several teams to leave the base to hunt down and destroy foreign military personnel actively jamming radio signals near us. We believe that they were successful as the communications have improved markedly in the last day or so.”
The colonel spread her fingers wide on her desk and looked Hannah in the eyes. “I don’t know what the CG will do with your information, or even what he can do to be honest, but now that we can communicate with the fast-movers I guarantee you that he’s going to want to hear what you have to say.”
12
* * *
MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
MARCH 5TH
“Ain’t this some shit?”
Jake glanced over his shoulder to try to see which one of the men had said it, but he couldn’t figure it out. He’d have to make sure that Sergeant Turner discussed the sensitivity of their situation later on so they didn’t offend these people.
The platoon walked in a staggered column, only about a meter apart. It went against everything Lieutenant Murphy had been taught about patrolling at West Point and in Ranger School, but he’d purposefully allowed the bunching up of his men. It was much easier to keep track of everyone in the close confines of the market. He wasn’t expecting much trouble, but they didn’t need someone getting snatched from the rear of the group.
A market had been erected in the shadows of Manhattan’s high rise buildings. Vendors sold fish, scrawny vegetables, malnourished live animals in cages, and random junk that might have been useful to someone living without power for over a year. Armed men brandished knives and blunt weapons openly at each of the stalls, watchful, but not overly menacing.
Five Roads To Texas | Book 11 | Reciprocity [Sidney's Way 3] Page 8
