“We got some planning to do,” he said. “Frank, see if you can get ahold of Night at the farm. Tell her to come in and bring the maps of the area she has on the wall with her. Diesel, find Ninja if you can. He's probably running one of the new squads over at the school gym. While you're at it, see if you can round up Miss Edna and the pastor. Then bring 'em all back here.”
That left me and Max, with Frank on his headset. “Let's go walk some streets, G,” Max said. “Frank, we'll be back in thirty minutes.”
“You bet, Boss,” Frank answered.
I mimicked him once we were out the door.
“Yeah, I know,” Max said. “He is great at kissing ass and only so-so at doing the work.” A few snowflakes floated past. I remembered chasing them as a kid, trying to catch them on my tongue. I'd always expected them to taste like sugar.
We walked across the road and past the diner. From there we walked half a block, cut across a parking lot, and were able to see the tollbooth on this end of town. Three cars were waiting to clear the booth. As we watched, it became five cars. That was about three more than we usually had, and that was unusual. We looked at each other.
“Yeah,” was all I said. It was enough.
The snow picked up a little. We walked over to the booth and greeted the woman working it. She was listening to the driver who was saying “âyeah, they tell us
everything is going to be alright, but we've been hearing that line since that idiot Bush.” He saw us and decided to stop talking and drive.
“Hey, guys!” The tollbooth guard was chipper. “I just love snow!” She was a young, not bad-looking black girl, someone I hadn't seen except at a distance.
Max said, “So tell us what you're hearing, Shayla.”
“Sure, Max. Hi, Officer Gardener. Some weird stuff happening in D.C. Got some peeps freaking out. Most of themâ” She had to stop to collect the toll from the next car.
I took a look into the car through the windows. A white family, two kids in their early teens, and a packed car, including a small, yappy dog.
“Dang, I hate yappy dogs,” Shayla said as they rolled away.
“Sorry, guys, I'm a little busy. But, yeah, folks are bailing because they think the Feds aren't going to be able to feed them. A whole lot of people out there are going to find family at their doors that they haven't seen in years.” She turned back to take the next toll.
The driver yelled out the window. “Hey, fellas. You got anyplace to get gas around here?”
Max answered him. “We haven't had a delivery in a week.”
The driver thanked him with a curse and drove off. I laughed.
“Come on, G. Walk with me while I think.”
We walked down Main Street. The snow was starting to stick. Four more cars passed us. “Max, this is the busiest I have ever seen Main Street except when I was back here healing up.”
Max stopped. He looked at the tollbooth we had just left and at the tollbooth ahead of us. Then he looked up and down Main Street. “Tell me what you think of this scenario, G. We get a couple hundred cars at the tollbooth, maybe more, all filled with hungry, scared people. How would you handle them?”
I surveyed the road, thought for a bit, and said, “Let them flow through. No toll. We would need to block every side street. Run them through a chute. Make sure no one turns back. We'd probably have to organize street patrols for a while. Perimeter patrols also. We are going to need to add some people at the farm.” I looked at him. “Yeah, that might work.”
“Why the âmight work,' G?”
“You know as well as I do, Max, what
can
go wrong, will.”
Â
The snow trailed off and the sun came out around noon. I watched it because I managed to evade the big “How can the town avoid being overrun by hungry tourists and riffraff” meeting. Someone had to muster the militia and set up security; I volunteeredâsomething I generally avoided doing at all costs. The problem, as always, was a lack of qualified people that I could trust not to do something stupid. Then again, I found that my idea of stupid was vastly different from how others defined it.
I assigned the militia the job of pushing cars into the side streets. They would know far better than I would who was local and who wasn't. I told them to set up some fire barrels to keep warm around, and I would try to get them relief and something hot to eat.
I also spent a lot of timeâfor me at leastâdelivering words of inspiration and hope. The average conversation went something like this:
“Hey, Gardener, what the hell is going on?”
“There is no electrical power in America. The grid has gone down, and it may stay down, maybe for weeks.”
“So that means no one has power?”
“Yep.”
Then the self-appointed expert in the group would tell them all what that meant. They were not stupid; it was just too big for them to wrap their brains around. Hell, it was too big for me, even though I thought I had. I was still going into rooms and flipping light switches on and then going, “Oh yeah.”
The conversation continued with my telling them, “People are going to be looking for food and a place to stay. Our job is to move them on.” It spoke well for the folks in town that the idea of “moving people on” bothered them. But then I explained the potential numbers involvedânumbers I had made up, of course, but hey, who really knew what was coming? I told them that too, just not in those words.
“It's like this. We will probably run out of food or be on reduced rations by March or April. That's our best-case scenario. We may have fifty . . . seventy thousand people or more come through here in the next month. If we feed them all just one meal and send them on their way, what happens to us?”
They would start seeing the light about then. Some had already gotten it. They just didn't want to say anything. But I would see their heads start nodding.
“Yeah, exactly.”
For the really dense I had to make it clear. “We will all starve to death or we will end up on the road right behind the others. Nobody is going to make you do anything you don't want to do, but the odds are pretty good that it is going to get ugly. Really ugly.” I left them with that and went to the next group.
Ninja found me, and I told him to split the two squads. I asked him for a penâhe was always preparedâand used a wall that had been painted white for paper. I drew a rough diagram of the town and divided it in half.
“Draw the same map for your people,” I told him. “I want everyone clear on what and where they are supposed to be. I want the first squad here. I don't care how you do it, but I want a three-man patrol working this area. I want reports on who they find and what they see. They can eat at the diner before or after they go out. I want them using those damn night-vision goggles after dark. Everyone gets turned away.”
“G, what if they don't want to turn away? What do we do then?”
I remembered how during the farm raid Ninja had let one deputy get past him because he didn't want to shoot the guy in the back. “Ninj, we don't have food for them. Tell them if they don't move along, you will cuff them and drop them outside of town limits without their shoes. Damn, tell them whatever you think will work.”
“But what if they have little kids?” He would have to ask that.
“Same thing. Tell them somebody will take care of them further down the line.” We both knew that was a lie, but if it made him feel better, so be it. “Figure out the duty roster with Diesel. I'm pulling Hawk and sending
him to the farm.” Those berms were going to pay off now. “Damn, I almost forgot. I need a three-person team at each tollbooth starting now.”
“You forgot something else, G.”
“What's that?”
“When are we going to sleep?”
I grinned. “Whenever you get a minute. Drive or push a car down to each tollbooth. Let one person sleep in the backseat while the others watch.” I sent him on his way.
My radio had been amazingly quiet so far. Someone didn't want to pay for a meal at the diner. The patrol officers had handled that. I was going to use them as street patrol and a mobile reserve.
We were going to need some kind of logistics support and medic teams if this got too weird. And I'd have to get some ammo to each of the militia points and tollbooths for reserves.
Logistics made my head hurt. What I didn't like was how thin we were at the farm. I understood why we couldn't pull people from the town to guard our home. I didn't like it, though.
I also wondered where the hell Freya was. Probably mooching apple pie from Shelli.
I went back to the station the long way. I walked Main Street by zigzagging from side street to side street. Twothirds of them were already blocked, and the rest were in the process of being blocked.
One of the militia suffered a minor heart attack, which slowed things down. I often forgot that most of these guys were old and not in the best of shape. He'd been taken home to rest and I made a note of his name. Max or I would need to find time to check on him.
The rest were in pretty good spirits. Some of the wives had shown up and were transforming the empty houses and storefronts into homey break rooms for their men. In the background I could hear a steady increase in the traffic.
While I talked to a group of militia, Max got me on the radio. “You got that road sealed up yet?”
“No.” I looked over at Lenny, the de facto militia leader. “Probably in about an hour, Max.” Lenny nodded to let me know that would work.
“Okay. As soon as you do, close both tollbooths. We are already getting a traffic jam here. Out.”
“Got it. Out.” I looked at Lenny. “We can do this?”
“Yeah.” We both looked at the passing cars. He spit some Copenhagen in the street. “A freaking shame is what it is.” I nodded in agreement, and I hoped I would never have to do CPR on Lenny.
A little later, I went back to the station. Shelli had sent some sandwiches over, and Night had saved two for me. I told her about getting food to the people, and I updated Max on what I'd done so far. After eating and talking a bit I went outside, carrying boxes of ammo and extra magazines for the M-16s.
When I dropped them at the tollbooth, I grabbed a militia member to help. We found some grocery carts to use for running ammo to the checkpoints. We passed Shelli and a couple of kids bringing food to the checkpoints. The next time we saw her, she had a cart, too. Carts got tougher to find after that, especially ones with wheels that all moved in the same direction.
Max had left word that he wanted to see me, so I returned to the station. He was still out with the patrols that were going to cover open areas. In theory, those patrols
could monitor vehicles, but they'd more likely encounter people who had abandoned overheated or out-of-gas cars. Ninja and Diesel were working opposite sides of the streets. They stopped and talked to the group at each checkpoint.
Night had gone to sleep in a corner; she still wasn't 100 percent back. Freya was sitting in a corner sorting BDUs. I could hear the occasional horn honking, and decided to go outside to watch.
“Hey, kid. Want to take a walk?”
“Sure.”
We headed out. “So what have you been up to?”
“Nothing.”
“Yeah. Okay, this here is good.” There was a pickup parked where it gave us a good sight line. I climbed into the bed and gave Freya a hand up. Then we got onto the roof of the cab.
The headlights of cars came and went. It wasn't a steady stream but it was unusually heavy for the town. A week ago you could have slept in the same street.
“What do you think, kid?” I was genuinely curious.
She looked at me, her face calm. “It is going to be uglier than you ever imagined.”
“Yeah, kid? Well, I have seen ugly. I have lived ugly. Ugly isn't nothing to me but just another day.”
“I know.”
“Let's head back. It's getting cold.” My radio, which I had turned down, still carried Max's voice to my ear. It wasn't music either.
“G, come on back. Over.”
I squelched twice to let him know I was on my way.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Everyone who mattered to me was inside the station. There were no townspeople. I said, “Hi, sleepyhead,” to Night and greeted the rest of the crew.
“You might as well pull up a chair,” Max said. “This might take a bit.”
I had been set up. It had to be a meeting.
Max addressed all of us: “Night is going to give us her estimate of what we can expect soon. I am not going to ask you for any decisions tonight. I have a good idea what she's going to say, and I want you all to think it over.” He paused. “Okay, it's all yours.”
Night stood up and faced us. The table behind her was covered with maps. We were arranged in a semicircle in front of her, draped in chairs in various positions of fatigue. Freya sat in the back, her hands folded in her lap.
“Think of it like this,” she began. “Imagine a rock thrown into a pond, the ripples spreading out. Now picture those ripples being followed by more ripples. Do you all see that?”
We all nodded our heads or replied with some variation of yes.
“The BaltimoreâWashington, D.C., megalopolis had around eight million people in 2009. Subtract Zone movement and all the other crap we have lived through, and my guess is we have six million people within a tank of gas of here. Go north to the Philadelphia area, and there are at least another three million people. Keep going north and we hit metropolitan New York. That area still has at least ten million people now.