She took a deep breath and then rushed from the car. As soon as she opened the door, the volume rose dramatically. Amid enraged shouts from seemingly everywhere, the din was punctuated by loud bangs. At first, she thought those were gunshots, and ducked down as she ran toward the defenders, but a moment later, she realized it was the sound of all the rocks bouncing off the blockade truck and the corrugated aluminum roof over the sandbagged fortification behind it.
“What the hell is going on, here?” she shouted to the first person she encountered, a man kneeling behind the sandbags. “Where’s David?”
The man stood just long enough to grab her and drag her down behind the little fort’s wall, atop which rested his own rifle. “More shooting, out there. David took a party out to flank and scout. We’ve got to hold on, but so far, we haven’t had to—”
She couldn’t hear the rest as five people appeared at once, scrambling up to the trailer’s roof, screaming an ear-piercing cry. This was accompanied by a single concerted volley of rocks, arcing over their heads from the mob behind them.
The defenders were forced to duck. A rock bounced off the sandbags right in front of her. The man beside her groaned and flopped over backward. She looked down, confused, then smelled gunpowder at the same time she realized the blood oozing from under his head wasn’t coming from the dime-sized cut in his head. It wasn’t a cut, that was why. It was a gunshot wound.
Without thinking, she brought up her rifle and pulled the trigger. So did someone else. One of the men rushing across the trailer roof fell, clutching his belly. She had a stray thought, relieved she might not have been the one to shoot him.
The thought was drowned out by a dozen rifles going off to her right, all along the sandbag wall, but the echoes were drowned out by screams as the line of four remaining breachers fell over, gunned down.
More people appeared over the edge, climbing atop the roof, firing pistols and rifles as they did so. Christine ducked, but her last glimpse told her this was it, this was their big assault.
The next few seconds, or perhaps hours, were a hazy blur. She found herself fascinated by the rhythm her body moved in of its own accord, rising up, firing, ducking down.
There were screams to her right, but far more from up ahead.
As though from a great distance, she heard a faint voice crying, “Cease fire, cease fire,” over and over.
She blinked, and looked around. The other defenders were also looking all around. A couple people fired again, but then they, too, stopped shooting.
The voice, now louder in the absence of weapons firing, cried, “Look, they’re running!”
Wow. He was right, whoever he was. There was no longer any return fire, only screams both to the left and ahead. Then, she spotted around the edge of the trailer, across the bridge, the backs of a couple people running south, away from the bridge.
The next thing she was aware of was a woman crying, “Medic! Someone help, he’s shot!”
Christine set down her rifle and joined others in trying to staunch the bleeding on those wounded who could be saved. In the end, that turned out to be all but three of them—one of which was the man who’d grabbed her behind cover, only two feet from where she’d been. At least that one hadn’t had to suffer before dying. Several more were iffy, at best, without a working hospital around.
It was only a small comfort. Her kids had been within two feet of losing their mother.
As she trudged, numb, back to Fran’s car, that thought echoed over and over in her head.
62
David scanned the crowd, outside the town hall. Too many people were present to bother trying to fit them inside, so he’d carried the podium out to the parking lot. To his left, the slightly smaller side, were all the farmers and maybe a fourth of the townies. To his right, he saw only townies. They’d arranged themselves into sides, those who supported the HOA president and mayor, Cobi, and those who did not. He frowned, looking out at them. Divisions that deep were the opposite of what that town needed…
A number of people in the crowd wore bandages. There were a few clusters of people, crying—Weldona had lost three people in repelling the raid, and could yet lose a few more. David had written down the names, and swore to himself that he’d visit those families individually, when he got the time.
“Where’s Cobi?” Someone shouted it, but others took up the call as well.
David motioned them to quiet down. “We don’t know. He was last seen before the attack got intense. My partner is out looking for him now, and will radio me when he finds the mayor.” He took care to say when, not if, Orien found the mayor…
There were some murmurs on the farmers’ side. Then one said, “Why did this catch us by surprise? Y’all were so busy defending the town, you didn’t even know that was a diversion. Why did it take so damn long to get out to help us?”
David gripped the podium, his knuckles turning white. Why, indeed. “We had no way of knowing. Fortunately, I’d left one working walkie-talkie with one of the farmers, or we wouldn’t have known until it was too late. But this is not a town-versus-farm thing. The counter-attack I led were all townies, I remind you.”
In fact, the widow of the man David had once helped with his water supply problem had called it in. At the sound of gunfire, she’d had the courage to go look, instead of hunkering down in her farmhouse.
Tough old bird, and thank goodness for that.
The farmer replied, “Well, we’re all in this together. That’s what we’ve been saying this whole time.”
A townie said, “Bullcrap. If you’d all moved into town for safety, we wouldn’t have lost three people rescuing you. Maybe you farmers wouldn’t have lost two of yours, either.”
The resulting shouts on both sides drowned out any coherent responses in a sea of noise.
David let out a frustrated breath. This was not going to be easy to fix. He banged the mayor’s gavel on the podium until they’d quieted a bit. Fortunately, he had lots of practice projecting his voice in chaotic situations, and he used that talent now. “If they had been safe in the town, we wouldn’t have been able to hit the bandits from two sides, and we’d have lost more people. Hell, we wouldn’t have even known, and half the food could be gone, now.”
The silence that followed was eerie. David grimaced, then plunged ahead. “We’re gathering up all the radios we can find that still work. We’re going to a militia model, with minutemen on call at any given moment. Out there, we’ll have small recon teams scouting twenty-four-seven, with radios, too. We will not get caught with our pants down again.”
One of the townies said, “So, our people get to wander around out there, like bait, just so some farmer can sleep out there with the wolves? Make them come into town.”
A farmer replied, “Why, so all the food we’re almost ready to harvest can get gotten by some damn bandits? Maybe you think food just magically appears in the warehouse allotment piles? That stuff grows out there, and we need to protect it until it gets harvested, idiot.”
“Silence,” David roared. It was hard to keep his irritation from his voice, but he did his best. “We aren’t going to make anyone safer by turning on each other. We are not ‘farmers’ or ‘townies.’ You’re all Weldona, and if you want your kids to see Christmas, you’d better remember that.”
Crap. This wasn’t going the way he’d hoped. Maybe he could shift the conversation, though.
A murmur ran through the town hall audience, and Christine looked around at the gathered people. They were people she’d known growing up, people she’d worked beside since the CME and knew them well—or, she had thought she knew them, until the fight with the raiders at the bridge. The two dozen refugees who had attacked the bridge had only been a probe, testing the town’s defenses. Big mistake—of the two dozen, maybe half a dozen escaped with their lives.
The raiders had been savage with desperation, and that was frightening. The people they were up against were hardly human beings, anymore.
>
But were “her people” any better? The angry looks the townies and farmers exchanged now brought vivid flashbacks of the many faces in that blurry, chaotic battle—rage, agony, terror, they had all been on full display just an hour ago, along with a bloodlust that had been hard to comprehend. Those images in her head juxtaposed themselves over the faces she saw now…
Her stomach flip-flopped at that thought, and then, it was too late to stop it. She bent over and unleashed the contents of her stomach, and for a few blessed moments, all she thought of was the pain shooting through her belly from the force of her heaving.
Then, she felt gentle hands pulling back her hair. She twisted her neck to look up through teared-up eyes, and saw David beside her, holding her hair back. Mary was there, too, and reached out to dab vomit off her lips with a washcloth.
“There we go, sweetie,” she said.
“Take deep breaths,” David added.
Something about their concerned expressions and the gentleness of their touch quieted her stomach. She gagged once again, but kept it down. Her two friends took her by her arms and helped her slowly to rise back up to her shaky feet.
David tucked her hair back over her shoulder, almost tenderly, a wistful expression on his face. “Slowly, Chrissy. Take your time. Are you okay?”
Christine nodded, still fighting the urge to retch, but the feeling was fading again. She looked around, and those faces that had been so angry and ugly moments before now looked at her with concern, not rage. They looked like the people she knew, again, not aliens wearing their skins.
Her stomach settled down, and her knees stopped quaking. “Yes…I’ll be okay. Something I ate, I think. Thank you, and I’m so sorry for…”
“Don’t worry about it,” David said softly. He looked to the front of the crowd and said, “Help her over there to sit down, okay? Give her some room to breathe.”
One of the townies and Mary guided her to the front, near the podium, and someone in a lawn chair got up and motioned them to sit her in it. Gratefully, Christine plopped down in the chair, and focused on evening out her breathing, nodding thanks to the people around her.
Their eyes shifted, in unison, from her to the podium, and Christine followed their gaze. She found David had returned to the podium, where he smiled wanly at the crowd. He leaned one elbow on the podium, and nodded to her and to a couple others.
Christine found herself smiling back at him. He just looked so natural, up there, in front of everyone. It was hard not to smile back. She had to admit, he looked good up there, and confident, surprisingly. The ease with which he stood before them all was totally at odds with her own awkward feelings. It was also odd that he was still in town. He’d gotten his promise of gas, which had been the only thing holding him back, as he’d said so often over the past few weeks. And yet, there he stood.
Looking out over the audience, David’s eyes swept them all, and though he only made eye contact with her for a split second, she felt like he was speaking directly to her when he said, “We’ve been through a wringer, folks. But what’s important here isn’t where we fought, or how we’ll prevent this from happening again. Right now, I want you to look around. Not just at the people next to you, but at everyone.”
He paused, making it clear it wasn’t a rhetorical request, and Christine found herself doing just that. Over her shoulder, she saw the others, all doing the same, as he continued, “Those are your neighbors. And whether you live in a house in town or a farmhouse, you’re all Weldona. You all fought together, today, because we’re all in the same boat, together. The sharks are out there.” He waved off into the distance. “Today, we fought those sharks off together. Some of you died to keep the rest safe. Farmers died. Townies died. And farmers and townies are still alive because of their sacrifice to a common goal: Weldona’s safety.”
A ripple of murmurs swept the crowd, people nodding.
Then, a man somewhere in the back shouted, “It’s about time you stepped up to lead us, David.”
Two different murmurs ran through the crowd. Farmers nodded, but townies grumbled. One said, just loud enough for Christine to hear, “We already got a leader, though.”
The woman next to him craned her neck, looking around. “Where is our fearless leader, though?”
The crowd went silent, and Christine imagined she could have heard a pin drop. But the woman was right. Where was Cobi?
Mary surprised her by speaking up into that silence. “Did anyone see him during the battle? Was he there fighting with you? I hope nothing happened.”
The answering silence was as eerie as the first had been.
David coughed into his hand, then said, “I’m sure the mayor is fine. That fight started quick, and ended quick, and most of us were at other posts or doing other duties. But what is important is this: I’ve decided to stay in Weldona—”
The crowd’s volume rose abruptly, all good, and one guy even cheered.
David raised both hands, quieting them. “Now, now. It’s not forever. But until I know this town is safe, I can’t in good conscience leave you in this situation. And to resolve that situation, I’d like to share with you my plans for keeping us all safer…”
Christine hardly heard what he said next, and only paid half attention as he went on to detail the changes he was making—without Cobi’s approval, she noted, stunned—because she kept hearing over and over in her head his voice saying, “I’ve decided to stay in Weldona.” The relief that swept her up in its warm embrace was no less surprising.
“In closing,” David said, “these changes will keep us all safer, and allow us to respond with decisive action against even a much larger force, chewing them up a bit at a time so long as they don’t throw everything they have at us all at once. And in that case, we will all head to the fallback line, where we can hold them off indefinitely as a last-ditch effort.”
Though Christine hadn’t heard much of what David said, she’d heard enough. His calm and confident tone made her really want to believe in them. They could do this. They could survive the horde, and he’d shown them how. She found herself nodding along with the rest of them, townie and farmer alike.
Movement to her right drew her attention, and she gasped at the same time as a couple others when she spotted who was approaching. It was Cobi—and his arm was lightly bandaged. Had he been in the fighting, after all?
Cobi rushed up to the podium, both hands up in the air, a grin on his face as he clapped David on the shoulder, then wormed his way in behind the podium. “Well done, Weldona,” he said, loud enough for all to hear. “And isn’t this plan I came up with just about perfect? I’d like to thank Officer Kelley for sharing it with you, and I hope you’re as excited about it as I am.”
Someone to Christine’s left coughed into the answering silence.
Cobi seemed not to notice, however. He absentmindedly scratched at the bandage over his left forearm, standing behind the podium, grinning. “Even better, my plan for the work chits is going to work. Isn’t that grand? And I vow to you all, I’ll keep leading you from one victory to the next, until we can all reap the rewards of my work-chit program, replacing the stop-gap plan Christine and I came up with. Here, let me share the details with you for the work chits, and just imagine the benefits, when—”
A woman in the crowd shouted back at him, “There won’t be no food left by the time you pull your head out of your ass, Cobi, and fix the money problem.”
Christine looked back to find the source, and saw the woman, red-faced. She almost gasped when she realized the woman stood among the townies. Those were Cobi’s supporters, and they were all nodding in agreement with the woman.
She fought the urge to grin. His supporters didn’t seem very supportive, at the moment. Karma was biting that weasel in the arse, at last.
Another townie said, over the murmuring, “Where were you when we were fighting? Do you even know the names of the ones who died, while you were off wherever, doing whatever? Thinking a
bout damned work chits? What the hell, Cobi?”
“I—” Cobi stood, blinking rapidly, his mouth opening and closing, but nothing else came out.
David cut him off at the podium, leaning forward over it with both hands on the top. “Okay, folks, the enemy is out there, not in here. You’ve all heard the plan, but we can’t do it if we’re fighting ourselves. Let’s focus on what’s important: keeping our families and our stockpiles safe. If we can’t do that, the rest of this doesn’t matter too much, does it? Now, organize yourselves into groups of four. Anyone without a full group, gather by the podium, and we’ll work it out. We’re going to spread the word, and make this work; you have my word. We’ll talk about the next steps to take, in five minutes.”
Though there were more than a couple angry glares at Cobi, first one and then another started making their way toward others, and soon, there was a soft buzz of conversations as people got busy.
Christine almost felt bad for taking so much pleasure in Cobi’s slumped-shoulders posture as he stood, impotent, staring out at the crowd that was so pointedly ignoring him.
David made his way over to her and put one hand on her shoulder. “Stomach feeling steadier?”
She nodded.
“Good. Now, if you look around, you’ll see that all the hot-heads are the first to clique up. I got the crowd calmer, but what we really need to do is to give those folks something productive to do. Are you going to be okay? While I handle that, I mean.”
Christine looked into his eyes. He was shifting his weight back and forth, one foot to the other—toward her, and away from her. Was he conflicted about leaving her? Worried she was sick? The only thing she was certain of was that he looked torn. She suspected she was the cause.
“Smart idea,” she said, and forced a smile. “Handle the town like you handled this crowd, and we’ll all be safer for it. Thank you, David. My kids are here… We all appreciate you.”
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