It would take a while, but eventually, almost all sense of government became local, because communications did break down. Phones failed, radio waves became useless, and at a rate of about 2% a day, the internet began to decay. Almost with precision, it lost 2% yesterday, then today it lost 2% of what remained, then again tomorrow, etc. Soon, the DNS systems (Domain Name Servers) failed, meaning that all web address names meant nothing, until after a while it had become an unsearchable collection of information. The only way to find anything was to look it up, dark web style, using IP addresses alone.
Today, in Sabine, there are two rows of traffic queued up to enter the south city gate. Some scarred, shabby rubber cones separate the lanes for sentries to look at each vehicle before it gets in. The sentries use hand signals to let the more formidable men at the actual gates know how the visitors are to be regarded somehow.
The bus is on the left, with a couple of cars and a pair of trucks in front of it, and him on the right, behind a string of sedans. The windows on the bus are open, using what looks like of like pool cues downstairs, and pneumatic push rods upstairs, allowing what breeze there is to pass through. Today, there is just a little breeze, and they are grateful for it. They have learned to set the windows open when the bus is running on battery power. One of the young women is leaning out of a window, more than a little bit, and she is happy to be talking to him.
Her name is Rita, and he thinks she’s more than pretty, with her blonde hair, blue eyes, and friendly smile. Even in her homemade shirt that covers from near neck to navel, when she stands to look at the front of the bus, to speak to a compatriot, he can see that she is soft in the middle – leanness doesn’t come from bus life. She has what he thinks is a very attractive shape; zaftig, buxom, and cuddly are the adjectives that come to mind. He’s guessing that she’s about eighteen, maybe twenty-one, but those old rules about age don’t really apply much anymore. The rows of vehicles crawl steadily toward the gate.
They talk about anything, nothing even, and they begin an acquaintance that they both seem to like. He says, “What do you think about this weather?”
“Yeah, sweaty and dusty is my favorite time of year.”
“Where ya headed?”
“Got no plans really,” she says. “Wherever the road leads. You?”
“I got a plan, more or less. Meeting up with a friend of mine, I hope.”
They talk on for several minutes, as the procession crawls and grinds its way forward. The dust and exhaust are almost unbearable, but good company makes the passage of time a little easier. At every stop along the way, these two meet someone they try to talk to, for a minute, but few wish to converse these days, not wanting to make expendable friends. There are lines for almost everything, everywhere these days, and most people keep to themselves and their own, not saying a word, but not these two . . . at least, not today.
The bus gets the wave through as the guard looks up to the gate, nods his head, dragging his right thumb down his cheek. He holds his fist out with the thumb up, shakes it in a slow twisting motion, and then looks back to the bus, giving a horizontal wave for them to pass. The convertible ahead of him by two cars goes in, and the couple in the Volvo before him gets a cursory glance and a nod, followed by waving that they should pull through and turn to the right.
Right before the bus begins to move, he hears, “How long are you gonna be here?” from the man with a clipboard in his hand, and a gun on his hip. He looks to be about sixteen, but the gun makes a difference.
“Planning to be on my way tomorrow,” is Mark’s reply. The bus engages the drive.
“Why don’t you put up in one of the barns outside?”
“Well, I been driving for three weeks on this bike, foraging about, and eatin’ all the road dirt I care to.”
“Ain’t nothin’ free here, ye know.” The bus lurches slightly and rolls forward.
“I can trade,” he says, opening his messenger bag, showing him small boxes of .22 LR ammo, lots of lose .45 and .380 ACP, a few others, as well as about thirty rounds of 7.62x39 – SKS ammo. It is the most popular long gun ammo around.
“Got any thirty-eight special?” asks the kid, hoping to reload his favorite gun.
Mark pulls his bag onto the tank, rummages through for a half a minute, and pulls out six rounds for the kid. Clipboard boy holds out his hand, curling his fingers in a “gimme” sort of way, cycle guy, I mean Mark puts the bullets into clipboard boy’s palm, and he waves him through with a single finger.
From the rear right, Mark sees too much movement. Something’s not right with the bus! Men have boarded with guns drawn. Mark pulls up on the left side of the bus, just as some toughs begin coming out with women by the hair. They have been punching every boy or man on the bus into submission, some guys keeping them down on the floors between the seats, as some of the others begin dragging the girls out the front door. Realizing what is happening, biker guy sprints to the bus door, and as Rita is coming out by her hair, he presses his Sig Sauer P226 to the young man’s head who is dragging her, and says simply, “This bus is mine, and everything in it is mine!”
Leaning over against the pressure of the gun barrel, the youth says, “You don’t even know her, damn it! I saw her first.”
Pushing harder with the barrel of the gun, cocking the hammer back, he says, “Her name’s Rita,” tapping the tip of the barrel against the young man’s skull, “Mine is Mark! Ask her. We go back a ways.” The young woman smiles, nodding in assent, just a bit.
He lets her go, raising his hands in surrender, saying, “Sorry, dude! Thought she was free fuzz, ya know?”
“Don’t care what you thought! Let ‘em go and give ‘em back their shit.” Mark says, lifting the boy’s pistol from his gun belt.
“Give it all back,” shouts the potential victim, with his hands still high in the air. He sweeps his arms around, trying to dislodge the gun from Mark’s hand, with a loud “hiyah!” but he misses his mark, and finds the gun barrel now pressed against his nose, and Mark smiles, asking if they are done. Until just a few moments go, the town boy fancied himself something of a karateka. Rita shuffles quickly behind Mark, gladly finding her new position within his protection. A couple of other girls extricate themselves from the grasp of their captors, moving back to the relative safety of the bus.
Another of the toughs approaches from his left saying, “We can probably take you before you get that gun on the rest of us.” The boy at the end of the barrel is alarmed, and frightened that his friend would say such a thing.
“I don’t doubt that may be true,” says Mark, raising his left hand holding what looks like an old style game controller, with one button and a blinking light. “But can you get past this?” Everyone looks a little bit closer, seeing the button depressed, the light blinking, and the smile on Mark’s face. Mark puts his Sig back in its holster, holding the blinking device in front of him. “Go ahead.” He signals Rita’s friends back onto the bus, “But if anything happens to me . . . if this dead-man switch is released . . .” He doesn’t have to fill in the blanks. “So, how’s ‘bout you guys unass those guns and hand them to the ladies through the bus windows?”
The small gaggle of hooligans, eyes fixed on the switch in Mark’s hand, shuffles up to the bus, one by one, handing over their hardware. The guys have to be encouraged to relinquish all of their arms, shot-guns, rifles, pistols – a couple of AK’s and an AR-10 which had been on someone’s backs – and even a grenade that one of the guys had hanging on his belt.
Mark pulls the grenade off the youth’s belt and tosses it to Rita and the boy says, “Aw, shit! I could have used that against you!” Mark grins a little as the explosive lands in Rita’s grasp and she sets it carefully on a seat inside the bus.
As each junior thug approaches, handing over their guns, one of the boys from the bus pats them down for hidden guns, magazines, and ammo. No one knows where such a cache of weapons and wares come from; after all, these are neighborhood ne’er-do
-wells, not the local SWAT coppers, nor big-time gun thugs. When they finish depositing their guns, each of them ambles off in a different direction, not wanting to show the shame of their faces to the others. The only one remaining is the one that had Mark’s gun to his head.
“Now, where can we fill up and resupply?”
Sabine is a small refinery town, somewhere near the Texas/Ok border, with a couple dozen small wells on the far north side; bobbing iron chickens. The wells and the refinery are on a long slope, inside a ten-foot-tall perimeter fence, fifteen feet deep in concertina and razor wire, with bells scattered all along the way. Someone recalled their granddad’s tales of the compounds in Vietnam.
Mark recalls having passed by a refinery in Baytown, Texas some years ago, with its collection of eight systems, all virtually identical, designed by elves it seemed, layered with filigree in every collection. It had pipes and pipettes from four feet thick to one-quarter inch, flowing and fitted, perfectly vertical to horizontal, with gently turning corners and curves; it was a beautiful thing to behold. The symmetry and majesty of the complex was amazing, working 24/7, until one day . . . he didn’t recall seeing it anymore. But the overall productivity and function of the place had been astounding. The refinery in Sabine didn’t remind him, to any degree whatsoever, of that glorious conjugation of order and ingenuity.
The structure of this refinery is a bit rag-tag, even a bit noir, assembled from seeming random parts and pieces, with no corporate money or high-dollar engineers to give it that civilized, technically smooth appearance. It was, instead, a calliope of Gotham pipes, mismatched in size, shape, and material, moving at odd angles, with what looked like five or ten different colours, textures, and flatness to the collection of black paint that protected it from the elements. The pumps bring up the crude, pumping into holding tanks on a hill, then gravity feeds it into the refinery, where it is cleaned, separated, and distilled, or whatever it is they call it, and it is deposited into a series of tanks for each product as needed. Theirs is a simpler process to make it into two grades of gasoline, a few grades of oil and grease, as well as the ever-popular low sulfur diesel.
That’s not all they know how to do, but that’s all they need for this little hole in the wall town to be necessary. The whole process is a downhill flow from the holding tanks of crude, through the refinery, to the holding tanks of the various grades of fuel. The fence extends along a ridgeline on the high side, and around the whole operation. The bulldozed area around the town creates an almost impenetrable wall around everything, with the gate coming in from the south, out the wall to the east and west. It is a fortress of sorts, creating a little kingdom of prosperity because of their ability to export. They import other supplies by trading with whoever brings in something to bargain. Today, Mark and the bus people are trading guns for fuel and much more.
The boy under the gun, points across the way to an old Exxon sign, a third of which is busted out, and all the price indicators have long since blown away, leaving the frame and sun encrusted, crunchy, and busted backing behind. Prices have been an obsolete concept here for a while, just because everything is bought or sold on a per deal basis; trading what you’ve got for what you want, as best you can. Mark wants to be certain he isn’t going to be jumped so he hangs on to the switch, waving the bus along with the other hand, followed by a smile.
Mark tosses the keys to his bike to the would-be Rita-napper and says, in an amiable tone, “Why don’t you take my bike over to the station for a fill up? And don’t forget to have them top-off all three tanks.” The guy catches the keys and heads for the bike without a hassle. The bus whirs to a start to lead the way, and in short order, both vehicles are being fueled to the max, and the attendant is waiting for payment. The bus takes 350 gallons of gas and the bike has three tanks for a total capacity of over twenty gallons. The Rita-napper has wandered off, seeming in humiliation. Mark reaches his right hand inside his jacket and presses a button that turns off the light in the dead-man switch, which he releases as he boards the bus. He hands one of the AK’s to one of the girls, for protection, takes another up, removing the clip, clearing the weapon, handing the mag off to her as well, he drops the loose bullet into his pocket. He tosses a shotgun to one of the boys of the bus, shares a few pistols around, and grabs the second AK, two hunting rifles and a couple of six shooters. Assisted by Rita, and another of the girls, he takes them to see the attendant for negotiation. Rita has a list of wants and needs, which Mark will augment, as he sees fit inside.
Two AK’s and a 9mm pay for the fuel, but they also want a butt load of food stock, fabric for clothes, and they have a refrigerator, so they’d like some milk and condiments. “Ain’t got no milk, dude,” says Harold. “We made the hard choice between milk or meat last week – t’was the last of the herd. Should be more next week, cuz we trade fuel for livestock, three-four times a year, with someone in a town about a hundred miles away. Used to be called Lawton. Wanna wait for it?” Mark shakes his head and hands the written list to Harold who, after checking to see if it meets the terms of the deal, as he understands it, nods, passing it to the handyman, who begins finding and bagging it up. Another local boy, not from the group before, is carrying the bags to the bus.
Harold tends the store, looking like an old Wal-Mart employee that Mark remembers seeing long ago. He has a large shock of wild, white hair that has been free-range for so long that no one bothers to mention anymore that it needs a comb. His steps are short – each barely more than the length of the other foot – and very deliberate, tottering a little with every few steps. The Wal-Mart employee that Mark recalls was shuffling from kiosk to kiosk, checking the depth of DVDs in a bin, and counting the batteries on an endcap. Seemingly useless to Mark, but apparently Wal-Mart needed someone to do exactly that, because there were two of them.
Even though Harold uses words, most of them come out with a bit of a grunt to them.
“Jerky?” asks Mark, with Rita at his side.
“Yeah,” he replies, “got that.”
“Five pounds?” asks Mark, and the man nods. They get a twenty-five-pound bag of flower, two pounds of sugar, several large bags of various beans, some canned fruit, and canned veggies that looked old as dirt, but Mark feels it worth the risk. Mark also finds a 55-gallon drum, with a bung, and a fifty-foot garden hose. He talks a trade with the attendant for those, and a fill up on the barrel, in trade for one more of his personal handguns (a P226, not quite like his elite Tac-Ops; more basement grade), with no ammo at all, and only one magazine in the trade.
Earl, the shop handyman, loads the barrel into the back of the luggage compartment of the bus. He lays it down on a pair of four by eights, bung up, and installs a hose bib in the smaller hole, and fills it with gasoline. When he is done, he wipes the top down with an oily rag to dissipate any fuel left behind – a couple drips – and sets the bung in place with a twist of his spanner. One of the boys has lashed it in place using ratchetting ties, snagged onto the cargo hooks welded into the frame of the rear platform. “And we’ll take some double A batteries, if you got ‘em.” The attendant pulls a pack of ten down from a shelf, blows the dust off, and tosses them into the top of the burlap gunny he has been filling with small things.
“You got a little more wiggle room in our deal if you like,” says the man, just as a gunshot rings out. Mark grabs the gunny, running for the door, followed by Harold and Earl, all of whom stop as they see the show down.
Mark sprinted over next to the bus, tossing the bag into a window, spilling some cans on the floor. Then he reaches under his jacket – ‘click’ – grabbing the switch, he walks slowly to the back end of the bus, and around the side . . . by the pumps. The light is lit, his hand is high, and the crowd is building as the curious approach. There stands the young man who had earlier felt Mark’s gun barrel to his head, standing with a Winchester lever action in his hands, and a hole in the dirt at the very edge of his boot.
“I was aiming for his belly,”
says Clara, one of the girls, and apparently, shooting is not her skill, but that doesn’t mean she’s unwilling to try again.
“Do you really want to do this now?” asks Mark. “After all, I’m standing next to a couple hundred gallons of fuel – you’re standing on the tanks for the station. Even if she can’t hit you, I can’t miss. They’ll name the hole left in this town after you, with a sign that reads, ‘This is where Stupid died!’ Is that what you want?”
The young man stands there with dirt on his shoes, his Winchester clinched so tightly in fear it is impossible for him to use it, and the flush rushing from his face. He suddenly remembers why he hadn’t killed Mark before. “Come on,” Mark says to him. “Come over to the bus.” The young man is frozen, but eventually, he does move, slowly. “Hand Rita that rifle, you hold the barrel, nice like, eh?” which he does – and Mark tosses him the keys once more. “I’m gonna ride bitch, and you’re gonna follow the bus with my bike so I don’t have to let go of this button none too soon, eh? Your friends can come get you in half an hour or so, but not right away. We’re heading west, okay?” The guy agrees and a couple of guys from the crowd nod as well. There is a familiar and comforting whir of the gas engine starting as they crank up the bus, and the youth fires up the bike. Earl brings out two bags of goods, followed by Harold carrying two more, handing them to Rita and Clara. The windows all close, the upper ones on command, the lower ones as the sticks disappear, and the AC comes on. Pizzjumpt is the noise the windows make, as the magnetic locks engage, and the seals inflate. The bus proceeds out the gate unimpeded and the bike follows. About ten miles down the road, the bus pulls over, and the bike pulls behind. Mark and Rita ride the bike and the tiny caravan leaves the local boy in the dust. A few hundred yards down the road they turn left down another road. They don’t care if his friends actually come get the boy. They just wanna get a little farther down the road.
The Warriors' Ends- Soldiers of the Apocalypse Page 2
