Directive 51 (39 page)

“But I figure we eat a third and take the rest with us,” Jason said. “Even if I have to do it in a cardboard box on my shoulder. And if we don’t open the packets till we’re ready to eat them, they should keep pretty good.”

When Jason fished the packets out with a stick, and used the work gloves from the emergency kit to open two of them, they discovered how hungry they were; of the ten aluminum-foil-wrapped balls of food, they ate five there and then, gobbling down the impromptu gullion with their fingers as soon as it was cool enough to touch, washing it down with plenty of Mountain Dew and Coors. A bottle of Windex and a roll of toilet paper got their faces and hands tolerably clean afterward.

Though it was warm enough at the moment, the big, heavy sweaters from the back seat seemed like something they shouldn’t leave behind, so Jason tied them into fanny packs. Each sweater held two liters of Mountain Dew, plus snack chips, packages of cooked gullion, and a couple of lunchmeat sandwiches, enough to make it to Antonito, they hoped, which a sign said was seventeen miles away.

For a long time they just walked, and now and then Beth would reach out and take his hand with her good right hand. They stopped only once, when the Mountain Dew bottle in Jason’s sweater pack abruptly exploded, giving him a little bit of a bruise on the ass, soaking his back, drenching the sweater, and crushing some of the food. The bottle smelled like spoiling milk; so did the bottle from Beth’s pack, so they opened that and drank as much as they could; the liquid would do more good inside them than in the spoiling bottle. The warm fall sun dried his back fairly quickly, but the sweater still hung wet and cold against his ass, and the food in it was probably a soggy mess.
Maybe, if we don’t make Antonito by dusk, I’ll build a fire and recook my packets to dry them out. Don’t know what I can do for the sandwiches; maybe wrap them in the used foil and bake them too?

They topped a long rise and looked down to where the road bent between two rock outcrops; there was a group of people down there, and a horse and wagon. Beth’s breath caught for a moment, and she asked, “Should we run?”

“They’ve already seen us and—hah. I think we’re fine.”

The little figure running lickety-split toward them was a girl of about ten, grinning and waving at them like a maniac.

Beth laughed with relief. “Yeah. Hostile people don’t send their children out to meet strangers.”

“Betcha they thought of that too.”

The girl rushed up and said, “Hi, I’m Gretchen Bashore, and I’m here to welcome you to Antonito, Colorado. Do you have any other people in your party or were you forced to leave any injured or disabled people behind?”

“There’s just us,” Jason said, smiling, “and we’re glad to see you.”

“Okay, are there any injuries in your party?”

“My left wrist is broken but I can walk,” Beth said.

“No other members in party, lady—uh—”

“Beth.”

“Lady named Beth has a broken wrist but can walk. Okay. Okay. Uh, material you are bringing in?”

“Just our clothes and a little food.”

“Okay, and the last one is skills you have?”

“We’re hard workers, good cooks, we can both do some fix-it stuff, and we can do organic gardening and raise chickens. Wilderness survival for me, and my name is Jason, and Beth can quilt, crochet, and sew, at least once her wrist heals.”

Gretchen repeated it back twice, and then said, “ ’Kay, back soon!” and rushed away. They were still more than a mile from the little cluster of people. “Might as well keep walking toward them,” Beth said. “We don’t want them to think we’re lazy.”

Shortly, the wagon, pulled by a big brown horse, came clopping up the road to them. Gretchen sat shotgun; the driver was a little, bearded gnome of a man who looked like he had been born to play a Western sidekick.

“Jason, Beth,” Gretchen said, carefully formal, “this is my dad, Dr. Jerry Bashore. He teaches art at Adams State College in Alamosa.”

“Or I did till four days ago,” Bashore said, tipping his straw cowboy hat to them as if he’d walked right out of the movies. His accent was much more Staten Island than Gabby Hayes, Jason thought. “Decided I’d better come out and pick you up; I know you can walk, but if your wrist is hurting, that’ll make you tired. I was just about to take a fresh batch of folks into town, anyway. Gretchen, give Beth a hand getting into the wagon bed.”

In the wagon, they discovered bales of straw, and Jason laughed. “You usually give hayrides in this thing!”

“Yep. Students loved ’em, extra money in tourist season, and it helped my two oat-burning buddies earn their keep. I’d already gotten the straw in for Halloween.”

There were four others waiting for their rides into town, which Bashore—“call me Doc, everyone does”—told them would be about four miles, an hour’s drive, “but you don’t have to work, the horses do. And they know the way better than I do.”

“So this thing is all made out of metal and wood?” Jason asked.

“Yeah, but I nearly had it seize up earlier today. The silicone grease turned to watery, sticky stuff, more like Elmer’s Glue than anything else. We had to take the hubs apart and re-grease ’em with fat from the Dinner Bell Café’s grease can. Also, I had a prairie schooner top for this, which would come in handy, except it was made of nylon with plastic tube ribs, and it turned into brown snot overnight. But there’s nothing electric, and no plastic fittings, on any of the parts that make it go. And I guess we can make another cover for it. Giddup, there, fellas, we have people to deliver.”

As far as Jason could tell, the horses moved no differently;
probably that’s just for effect,
he thought.
That’s okay. Right now I’d take a masked man on a white horse followed by a whole troop of cavalry.

Something was shaking beside him; he turned and saw Beth crying, big wracking sobs, her whole body trembling. He put his arm around her and she buried her face in his shoulder, resting her injured wrist on his thigh. He stroked her, made soothing noises, and looked up at the blue sky, just now being invaded by high cirrus in the late afternoon—a sign that the warm chinook was about to be over and the first big storm of the winter was on its way.

“That’s the story,” Cam said, “a big, cold wet storm, crossing the northern US or possibly veering south, within a few days. Bad enough to cause death from exposure. What should we prepare for? Anyone got something to say about the impact of that?”

Steve from Deep Black nodded and pushed his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose. “We’re still getting pretty decent data from reconnaissance drones flying off carriers—not as detailed as we would like because they have to stay high up to avoid catching nanoswarm and taking it back to the carriers. But what we see looks semi-okay. The impromptu evacuation of the cities in the Northeast is going faster than we hoped—lots of people are just walking out, with whatever they can carry in shopping carts and wheelbarrows. Private motor traffic seems to have stopped completely; we think there are probably almost no tires left, and so many biotes around that the few tires there are don’t last long.

“We see high densities of people walking out of the big cities on highways. The flow started early this morning, right after the regular trucks didn’t come in and the grocery stores ran out of a lot of staples. Still a lot of people staying put and hoping it will get better right now, of course, but as they see people streaming out, they’ll probably start to move, themselves.

“That’s the good news. The bad news is, we’re not seeing any evidence that they’re turning off the road and getting indoors much of anywhere; it’s warm enough today for them to keep walking. Most of them have been moving for less than twenty-four hours, so to some extent they may still have scruples, and to some extent the people they’re meeting are in the same situation they are—there’s big parts of the Northeast Corridor where you can’t really walk to a real evacuation area in less than a week—”

“Just for my information,” Graham Weisbrod said, “by ‘
real
evacuation area’ you mean . . . ?”

“A place it makes sense to evacuate them to, rather than just the same bad situation farther up the road. If there’s no food, no heat, hardly any shelter, then traveling there isn’t really evacuation—at best it just gets them closer to the real evacuation point later. From well north of Boston to down past Richmond, we’ve got a band of highly populated areas that are about a week’s walk from real evacuation areas.”

“So to live they’ll have to walk for a week without food or a warm place to sleep?”

Cam said, “That’s right. They’ll start to improvise tonight and tomorrow night, when it gets cold and they’re hungry. They’ll start knocking on doors, and then knocking
down
doors; there’s going to be some violence, and a lot of people will be building fires out of whatever they can find, and wherever there’s something to loot, there’ll be looting.

“Then each successive wave coming out of the deep population centers is going to be worse; by the time the last ones make it out, they’re going to be really dangerous and not especially sane, and that’s what people will be out there as the storm hits. Which means a lot of them will die and solve the problem of themselves for us, but while they’re doing it they’ll tear up the areas they manage to reach pretty badly.”

Steve fidgeted. “I saw some of the pictures a couple hours ago. Take I- 80 across New Jersey and into eastern Pennsylvania—we got some photos from there—pictures from the air show literally hundreds of miles of highways covered with people walking. The highways run through huge suburban areas of single-family housing; once it gets dark, and especially when the cold and the rain hit the refugees, those little suburban houses will be obvious targets, and basically you’ll have a . . . I mean, I don’t want to sound . . . but that crowd on the highways, hungry, cold, nobody there to tell them what to do—”

“They’re going to hit that suburban tract housing like a ravening barbarian horde,” Graham Weisbrod said. “Which they’ll be.” His face was drawn and tight as if he were watching it happen already. “Not because they’re bad or even because they’re angry, but because . . . well, hell, I think about my kids when they were little and helpless, I imagine them hungry, crying, and cold, and yeah, I’d break down a man’s door and maybe kill him just for a can of beans for the kids, especially if I’d had all day to stew and think about the fact that no one was coming to help and how I needed it more than the guy who still had a house, until I rationalized it all. It might be hard to talk myself into that the first time, but by the second time on the third day, it would be business as usual.”

Heather was the last drop-off for the biohazard Hummer, and he invited her to move up to the front seat “for two more eyes and one more gun.” He left the scanner running; no signal on any emergency bands. KP-1 was holding on, broadcasting government announcements from Pittsburgh. The midshipmen at Annapolis had hand-built a radio station they were calling Radio Blue and Gold; a young-sounding kid was reading the morning’s
Advertiser Gazette
over the air. A faint, sputtering station that claimed to be coming from RPI’s physics lab came in for a second, then faded.

The driver said, “I don’t want to try to go all the way to this address in Chevy Chase. Last reports, an hour ago, there was a lot of bad stuff going down. The minute I drop you off, I’m swinging over west, picking up my family, and heading out, as far and fast as I can. Listening to all the nice people I’ve been driving, I’ve heard about the two-hundred-mile dying zones around the cities, there ain’t gonna be any United States in another week, it seems to me, and I’ve got one of the few vehicles that can keep running, at least for a while, and if I take it right now to haul my family, maybe they can live.”

Heather thought about her sidearm in its shoulder holster; this was a deserter who was stealing a vital piece of government property. Lenny was alone and his apartment block was an obvious target; they could set the building on fire, or just break in from too many sides at once, or maybe just plug an exhaust pipe on his generator. Getting to him was the first priority.

“Look,” she said, “I probably can’t stop you anyway, and I guess in your place I’d be thinking of the same thing, but how far up Connecticut Avenue can you take me? I’ve got a friend who might be trying to hold his place against god knows what; that’s the Chevy Chase address you have. It’s more than twenty miles to his place, so I’d never make it before dark. Take me as close as you feel okay with, please? A few hours, and being there before dark, might be life and death.”

“You got it, lady. But the first time I hear a shot or see a mob, you’re out, and I’m running, clear?”

“Clear,” she said.

They had turned off Connecticut, less than a mile from Lenny’s place, when a big crowd spilled onto the street three blocks ahead. The driver whipped a U-turn and stopped for an instant. “Here’s where you get out, ma’am. Thanks for understanding.”

Heather jumped out, her bag already on her back, and slammed the Hummer door. She zagged left and put a mailbox between her and the crowd in the street.

She’d only really seen looting in training films; it just wasn’t something that likely for her to encounter in her areas of law enforcement, security, or intel.
They always told us to go around (how far off a main street? How much delay?) or go past (what’s all the running and yelling about there, anyway? But I don’t see any guns).
As she cautiously approached, she saw that the people running in and out were teenagers and younger, and the crowd in the street was overwhelmingly mothers and grandmothers. By the front door, a stack of empty coolers with a HELP YOURSELF sign showed how the manager had gotten rid of the frozen foods the day before.