Authors: Arthur Bradley
Lenny was smart and charismatic, someone who could win most arguments with words. When that failed, however, he was not above sending someone over with a pair of pliers to ensure that his point of view was better appreciated. Lenny had held many stations in life, including city councilman, tent evangelist, and white supremacist.
He had managed to recruit nearly a thousand men, mostly convicts, but the community was quickly attracting families with nowhere else to turn. By all accounts, he was a true believer, a man who saw a brighter future now that the country’s government had all but disintegrated. For his vision to come to fruition, however, what remained of the corrupt establishment had to be put down. That was how he fit into Pike’s plans.
Lenny was not so different from the mercenaries that General Hood had contracted. He would fight against the establishment, embarrassing President Glass and making it clearer with each passing day that she was losing control of what little remained of the nation. When she was finally out of office, either by having stepped down or by being forced out, Pike would lead the country back to its former greatness.
The thing that bothered him about the Glynco attack was that he had not yet been briefed. The murders had surely been discovered by now, which could only mean that President Glass was intentionally keeping it from him. But why? The reality of it was that she was keeping him at arm’s length on a number of things. It occurred to him that isolation was her weapon of choice. She might be unwilling to confront him directly, but like every woman he had ever met, she was perfectly capable of giving him the cold shoulder.
Equally disturbing was that General Hood, the Head of Special Operations Warfare, had also been kept in the dark. Given his position and the use of chemical weapons in the attack, Hood should have been brought in from the very beginning. His exclusion meant that President Glass, or perhaps her Secretary of Defense, General Carr, was growing more suspicious, more careful.
But Pike was certain that suspicion was all it was. There was no connection between the attack and either himself or General Hood. The weapons had been hidden away for decades, a trail so cold that no one could uncover it. And any investigation of the attack would point to a shadowy group of mercenaries—yet another violent act of forces battling for control. In the unlikely event that the mercenaries were ever found, General Hood would make sure that they were obliterated and unable to implicate him.
All Pike needed to do was continue working behind the scenes to set the stage for his ascension to power. Just as Napoleon had been welcomed by turmoil-ridden France, so too would he be called upon to bring order to a post-apocalyptic America.
CHAPTER
10
Samantha was dreaming about being a rabbit chased by a hungry fox when a hand squeezed her shoulder. Startled, she abruptly sat up.
“Huh? What?”
“You thirsty?” asked Tanner.
She looked around. The sun hadn’t quite come up yet, but it would be light soon.
“Very,” she said, swallowing.
“Come on, then. I’ll show you how to get some water.” He handed her a couple of the empty beer cans with the tops cut off. “You’ll need to take off one of your socks.”
“My socks? Why?”
“Just do it,” he said, pulling off his own boot.
She did as he instructed, taking off one of her socks and then slipping her boot back onto her bare foot.
“Now, follow me,” he said.
When they got to the edge of the campsite, he squatted down and rubbed his sock across a large patch of green clover.
“Feel,” he said, holding out the sock.
She touched it. “It’s wet.”
“It’s dew.” He set one of the beer cans on the ground and squeezed the sock over it. A few drops of water dripped into the can.
“That’ll take forever,” she said.
“We’ll see.”
Without another word, they got busy mopping their socks across plants of every sort, collecting the moisture that had condensed as the temperatures cooled through the night. To Samantha’s surprise, by the time the sun started peeking over the trees, they had managed to fill all four cans.
She held up one and examined the water. It was mostly clear, but several small twigs and plants floated on the surface.
“Is it safe to drink?” she asked, sniffing it.
“Maybe. But let’s boil it to be safe.”
She looked pointedly at his sock.
“Good idea.”
They set the cans of water in the campfire’s hot embers, and their socks on a rock nearby to dry. Before long, the water began to bubble. Tanner used his sock like an oven mitt to pull the cans out of the fire pit and set them on the rock to cool.
“By the time the water cools, it’ll be safe to drink.”
“Where’d you learn all this stuff?” she asked, sitting down to put her sock back on.
“The question is what have you been learning?”
“What do you mean?”
“Somewhere along the way, people became too dependent on the comforts of the system. Hardly anyone knows how to find water, work the land, or catch their own food. Humans have forgotten what it takes to survive on good old Mother Earth.”
“And that’s important?”
“You tell me.”
She pondered on it for a moment, watching the steam rise off the water.
“I guess it is now.”
Tanner gave her the thumbs up.
A thought tickled her, and she giggled.
“What?” he asked.
“I always thought of you as my protector. But in a weird way, you’re sort of my teacher too.”
He smiled. She was finally getting it.
Tanner kicked dirt over the last of the smoldering embers.
“You ready?” he asked.
Samantha took one last look at their campsite and nodded.
“Yeah. Let’s go find breakfast.”
“Cheerios?”
She grinned. “Froot Loops.”
He looked up at the sky to get his bearings, and then spun slightly to the left and pointed at the forest.
“North would be that way.”
They walked steadily and with a sense of purpose for a good hour, up and down sloping hills covered in dense growth. Without anything larger than a pocketknife at their disposal, they were forced to push their way through thick brambles covered with thorns as sharp as fishing barbs. By the time they finally broke out into a wide clearing, they were bleeding from a dozen scratches on their hands, arms, and faces.
Ahead of them lay an open stretch of farmland nested in a shallow valley. The valley easily spanned a mile from north to south and many more than that from east to west. The interstate was visible a few hundred yards off to their left, and they could see the outline of a small town about a mile ahead.
Tanner pointed in the direction of the town.
“See?” he said. “I told you we find something.”
“Yeah, but you forgot to mention the part where we’d be spending the night in the forest.”
“It wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head, “I guess not. Besides, when I get back to school, I’m going show my class some of the cool tricks you taught me. Like you said, everyone should know that kind of stuff.”
“All right then,” he said, marching ahead. “Onward.”
They pressed across the open farmland that lay fallow and neglected. Rye grass and weeds were slowly taking over patches of fertile soil. After about twenty minutes, they came across a small two-lane highway that meandered its way into town. The road was surprisingly clear of abandoned cars. Even though it wasn’t a straight shot into town, they opted to walk the highway because they were tired of pouring dirt out of their boots.
A few hundred yards ahead, they came across two signs. The first welcomed them to Bland County, Virginia, and the second identified the road as Highway 656. The middle digit had been painted over with red paint, so that the sign now read “666.”
Samantha stopped and studied the highway marker.
“In church, they said 666 is a bad number. Have you ever heard that?”
Tanner dodged the question, saying, “It was probably just kids having fun with a can of spray paint.”
She paused to study the small buildings several hundred yards in the distance.
“Maybe we should skip this town.”
“You itching for another night in the woods?”
She shrugged.
He looked over at the interstate to their west.
“If we run into those motorcyclists again, I’m going to need a way to thank them for their hospitality. Unless you have a better idea, I think we’re going to have to chance it.”
She hesitated and then nodded reluctantly.
They walked for another ten minutes before arriving at the edge of the small county seat of Bland. There was a large elementary school to their left, with a matching gymnasium adjacent to it. Both buildings had been badly burned by a fire that looked to have originated from inside the school’s cafeteria. Like the highway, the parking lot was empty except for a couple of school vans, both of which had been destroyed by the fire.
The road ahead of them forked. Highway 656 veered right to intersect with the main thoroughfare, and Jackson Street went off to the left.
“Which way?” she asked.
“Let’s go right up to the main street. Better chance we’ll find something we can borrow.”
“Borrow? Is that convict code for steal?”
“The way I see it, anything not nailed down is up for grabs.”
She didn’t argue the point. Samantha had long since abandoned any notion that taking from those who had passed was morally wrong. The world had become a giant abandoned flea market, and rummaging through what had been left behind was the only way to survive.
They turned right and hiked for another long block. They passed a small house, easily a hundred years old, with a mobile home parked out back. The house looked like it had already been ransacked, its front windows and door both broken in. A beige pickup truck, with its hood propped up, sat in the front yard. Tanner took a quick look inside the vehicle. The floorboards had been eaten away by rust and chicken manure, and sharp springs poked up through the faded vinyl seats. He shook his head, and they continued on.
When they reached the main intersection, they turned left and headed deeper into Bland. Another half-block up, they found a pontoon boat sitting on a small trailer in the center of the road. Whoever had been pulling it was long gone.
“I don’t suppose that will get us very far,” she joked.
He chuckled. “Not unless God decides to bring down another flood.”
Samantha looked up at the cloudless blue skies and shook her head.
Tanner walked around the boat, giving it a quick once-over. It was in fine shape, not that that made any difference one way or the other. The only weapon he could find was a fiberglass-handled fishing gaff, about four feet in length. The hook felt sharp enough, and he figured that it could do some damage with enough force behind it. He lifted it out of the boat.
Samantha eyed the gaff warily.
“What’s that for?”
“You hook fish with it,” he explained.
“I know that. I meant what are you going to do with it?”
He flipped it hook side up and began using it as a walking stick.
“Anything to help an old man on his way.”
She made a face that said she wasn’t buying it but said nothing else.
Another fifty yards up, they came upon another old white house on the right. This one didn’t appear to have been broken into.
“Let’s check it,” he said.
As they walked up the front steps, Samantha pointed to a white “S” that had been painted on the glass storm door.
“What do you think that means?”
“Don’t know,” he said, trying the knob. It was locked. “Maybe the ‘S’ was used to mark homes that were safe from the virus.” He peered through the small window in the door but couldn’t make out much inside. “Let’s go on a bit further. I’d hate for them to return home and find us munching on their goodies.”
“Like what happened before,” she said, thinking back to Professor Callaway and his daughter, in the town of Hendersonville, North Carolina.
“Hey, that worked out okay.”
“Yeah, after you blew up the entire town.”
He shrugged. “It wasn’t the whole town.”
They continued on, checking other houses spread out along the street. A few of the homes were marked with the same “S” painted on their doors. Those that weren’t marked had been broken into and cleaned out of anything useful. The only logical explanation was that the townspeople had marked the homes still inhabited, and scavenged from people who had either passed or simply left their property behind.
A little further up, they came to small church. The same white “S” was painted in the middle of its bright red door. The sounds of people speaking in unison were coming from within.
“Should we go in?” she asked.
Tanner hesitated a moment, looking around. He shook his head. They had yet to see a single living person on the street or in any of the homes, and something felt off.