Surviving the Dead (Book 7): The Killing Line (3 page)

“That’d be fine. Three rounds should do it.”

Sabrina stood aghast. “
Three
? You’re telling me a 30.06 can feed me for days, but you want
three
nine-mils for a goddamn
sandwich
?”

Kari held up her hands defensively. “Look, now, that’s the going rate around here. Okay? Nine-mil is pretty common.”

Sabrina went still. “Common? Nine-mil?”

“Yes.”

“How’s that?”

Kari pointed northward. “There’s an Army FOB not far from here. Fort McCray. They trade ammo all the time. Lots of nine-mil.”

An Army base? Way out here? Interesting
. Sabrina dug around in her pack again and produced two shotgun shells. “Twelve gauge,” she said. “Double-ought buck.”

“Just one will be fine.”

Sabrina handed over the shell. She was amazed it was worth anything at all; road people preferred small caliber guns, but townies seemed to enjoy heavier ordnance. “Thanks for the sandwich.”

“You’re welcome. Come back and see us anytime.”

“I’ll be sure to do that.” Sabrina started to walk away, then stopped and looked over her shoulder. “Hey, any place I can get a bath around here? Laundry?”

“Go two blocks that way and take your first right. Three houses down you’ll see a sign for Elena’s Inn. She’ll take care of you.”

“Thanks.”

*****

Elena’s Inn was exactly where Kari said it would be.

The house was a large two story colonial, wide front porch, fluted columns soaring to the upstairs balcony, wrought-iron fences, flowers along the verge, and a few large-leafed plants rounding out the garden setting. The exterior was well maintained, the grass cut low, the paint fresh. Sabrina wondered where people in this town acquired something as rare as paint. Maybe they made their own.

She ascended the stairs and tried the doorbell. To her surprise, it actually rang. For a few seconds, no one answered. Then there was a swish of motion near one of the windows, the thump of footsteps approaching, and the front door opened.

“Hello,” a small, redheaded woman of middle years said, standing inside the foyer. “What can I do for you?”

“I need a bath and a room for the night. Got any vacancies?”

A gentle smile. “As a matter of fact, I do. Come on in, we’ll get you fixed up.”

Sabrina took three steps inside, glanced at the room to her left, and stopped. The room was one of those chintzy spaces where people display China cabinets full of antique dishes, figurines, and furniture not meant to be sat upon. But the décor was not what grabbed her attention. What stopped her was a set of LED light fixtures in the ceiling and the illumination pouring out of them.

“You have electricity,” Sabrina said.

Elena stopped and turned around. “Oh, yes. This whole part of town is connected to set of biomass generators. The Phoenix Initiative representative here in town, fella named Ishimura, real smart young man, he set it up. Wired all the houses to run on twelve-volt. I can operate the control panel he installed, but other than that, I’m not quite sure how it all works. It’s certainly not the most reliable system in the world, but it’s better than nothing.”

Sabrina grunted. She had been to places with electricity since the Outbreak, mostly solar, wind turbine, or hydro-electric setups, but never a functioning grid.

“Impressive.”

“Would you like to look around?”

“Not now. Maybe later.”

“Well then, if you’ll follow me, I’ll show you to your room.”

They went up a flight of stairs, richly stained hardwoods creaking beneath ornately woven carpets and runners, past landscape paintings of fox hunts and rolling green hills, LED bulbs mutedly lighting the way in stained-glass lampshades, and stopped in front of a door on the second floor hallway. While Elena flipped through keys on a large ring, Sabrina looked around and decided she liked the feel of the place. It reminded her of the historical homes she used to tour during her childhood in Maryland. It was clear someone wealthy had lived here once, and had spared no expense to project a sense of opulence.

“Here you go.” Elena opened the door and stepped back. Sabrina walked in and looked around. It was a medium-sized room with a bed, small writing desk, wardrobe, washbowl on a high table, and a dark wooden trunk at the foot of the bed.

“Nice,” Sabrina said. “How much?”

“What do you have for trade?”

She produced the same 30.06 round she had offered Kari. “How much will this get me?”

Elena asked to hold it and looked at it closely. “One night’s stay and a bath.” 

Sabrina almost laughed. Here she was in the nicest inn she had seen since the Outbreak, and this lady wanted trade no Traveler would have given a second glance. She took out four more rounds. “And this?”

Elena’s eyes locked to the cartridges in Sabrina’s hand. Sabrina had seen that look before, and knew she was in a good bargaining position. “Well, five bullets will get you five nights.”

“How about seven, a bath each night, and laundry service. Which would include the bedsheets, if needed.”

Elena narrowed her eyes. “Besides the sheets, how much laundry are we talking about?”

Sabrina indicated her pack and the small bundle wrapped in her blanket. “Not much.”

“Deal.” Elena held out a hand. Sabrina closed her fingers around the bullets.

“On deposit,” she said. “I get the balance back if I leave early.”

“If you leave early, I’ll have to charge you one round per night.”

Sabrina thought it over. They were trading in bullets, so it was not as if the old woman could give her change. Nevertheless, Sabrina was alone, and in her experience, taking someone at their word was asking to be fleeced. And being alone meant she would have very little leverage if Elena decided not to honor the trade. Then again, one of the gate guards had said he knew Sabrina’s father, and that he was a big deal in this town. So she decided to take a gamble.

“Fair enough. But if you try to stiff me, my father might have something to say about it.”

Elena looked offended. “I run an honest business, young lady.”

“I’m sure you do, but look at it from my side. The road is not a kind place. Just about everyone you meet will smile to your face and stab you in the back. I’m not accusing you of anything, but when I trade with someone, I like to make sure they know where we stand.”

Sabrina handed over the cartridges. Elena took them and said, “I understand.”

No you don’t, you weak little townie.

The innkeeper turned to leave, and Sabrina began sorting her belongings on the bed. Behind her, she heard the old woman stop and turn around.

“Just out of curiosity, does your father live around here?”

“Yes.”

“Anyone I might know?”

Sabrina looked at the innkeeper. “His name is Gabriel Garrett.”

By Elena’s open-mouthed surprise, Sabrina could tell her gamble had paid off. “Oh. Well then.” The old woman recovered her dignity and gave a polite little bow. “I’ll just go warm up the water for your bath.”

The door closed gently. Sabrina walked over to the window, looked out over the well-maintained houses and gardens along the street, and wondered where to begin looking for the father she had never met.

Eric

Across the street from the Hollow Rock Church of Christ is a rather nice piece of acreage that was once a trailer park. It consists of a wide, rolling field surrounded by a verdant forest of pine, maple, cedar, and elm. The trailers are gone now, replaced by a cluster of thirty-six homes, all built by my good friend Tom Glover and his construction company. Tom’s crew is a small outfit, boasting only eight employees, not counting Tom himself, but most of the new construction in Hollow Rock has his stamp on it.

The houses now occupying the former trailer park are all made of hand-cut lumber, asphalt shingles on tarpapered roofs, scavenged Tyvek cladding, scorched cedar siding, and foam insulation I found on a salvage run. This by itself would have made Tom’s homes popular, but he went the extra mile by putting them up on twelve foot pilings, installing retractable ladders to keep the occupants safe from infected, building hand-filled water towers for each unit, installing rain cisterns, and crafting a brick wood-fired stove in each kitchen.

Each house was built with three bedrooms, a fireplace that extends all the way to ground level, including a standard pit for indoor use, and a larger, more open pit for outdoor cooking. The outdoor cooking pits were built away from the homes, not underneath them, to prevent fires. Tom made the house’s screened windows wide to allow air in during the summer, and fitted them with shutters to keep out the cold in the winter. The glass in the windows was salvaged from old office buildings in nearby Bruceton, and how Tom had managed to cut the glass precisely to size with simple hand tools without shattering them was a secret he would not divulge despite many askings on my part.

The development was a joint venture between the two of us. I bought the land, and Tom’s company provided the labor. We took everything that was useful from the existing buildings and sold the scrap to the federal government. They were paying top trade for scrap metal at the time, which by itself made the land grab a profitable venture.

Tom built the first model home on my dime, which I planned to keep for myself, and I used some of my paper reserve and Mayor Stone’s office printer to print some brochures. The mayor thought it was a waste of resources, so I reminded her the toner I was using to print the brochures had been donated by G&R Transport and Salvage. At this, she relented.

The brochures went into a box in the town square beneath a hand-drawn billboard announcing:

PROPERTIES FOR SALE:

High-quality new construction in the perimeter expansion zone, built by Glover Builders. Model home available for viewing. Lots will be marked and auctioned, with reserve. All sales are final upon contract signing and receipt of down payment. Terms of trade negotiable. Open house August 1st.

I had expected a small crowd, maybe twenty or thirty people. The development was outside the wall, after all, so I expected to sell maybe one or two properties on the day of the open house, and hoped to offload the remainder over the next year as construction progressed on the extension to the wall. Which, I might add, was the reason I decided to invest in the land in the first place. Property values have a way of skyrocketing once someone erects a sturdy barrier to keep out the infected. Ergo, I was not worried how long it might take. It was, after all, already a profitable venture.

So imagine my surprise when more than half the lots sold on the first day.

The crowd had been huge, over two hundred people. Some were Hollow Rock’s more affluent residents, while others were well-to-do farmers who wanted a place in town. The rest were real-estate speculators from other communities along the trade routes that connected Hollow Rock with the rest of the country.

Most buyers seemed skeptical at first, but when they got a look at the quality of Tom Glover’s work, skepticism quickly turned to excitement. Very soon, the madding crowd was howling for the auction to begin.

Interspersed amongst the well-heeled were a number of hard, sun-browned faces in simple clothes, many with wives and/or children in tow, staring around at the obviousness of wealth and influence. These hardscrabble folk were looking at the people they worked for, paid rent and owed debts to, people who held sway, in one form or another, over their lives. The properties were being sold at auction, after all, so the hopeful souls who had come here looking for something more than a shack to live in knew immediately they could never scrounge enough trade to outbid the contemptuous faces and sneering eyes looking down on them.

Nevertheless, most of the poorer folks stuck around for the open house. When it was over, they filed out and began walking dejectedly back toward the south gate. I told my assistants, Johnny Green and Miranda Grove, to start writing up letters of interest and getting signatures and set out on an intercept course.

The deal I offered was simple. I would set aside six of the units for the families to share as a co-op, and in exchange, they would mortgage off the value of the homes by clearing and farming a large tract of land I owned behind the development. Part of the land would be set aside for subsistence gardens and raising livestock, while the rest would be used to grow cash crops such as wheat, barley, potatoes, beans, cotton, and hemp. I figured three or four years’ harvests would be sufficient to pay off the mortgage, and afterward, I would take thirty percent off the top of whatever the land produced and split the rest among the families in even shares. The interested parties conferred briefly, then accepted the deal. We shook on it.

So, putting it all together, I now owned a housing development that produced monthly income of various trade—hand-made bows and arrows, crossbows and bolts, hand-forged weapons and tools, greenhouse vegetables, chickens, goats, lumber, grain liquor, hemp, a vast array of pre-Outbreak salvage, and so on—a farming co-op, and a fifty-percent interest in G&R Transport and Salvage, a portion of which I was thinking very seriously about selling to Lincoln Great Hawk.

In short, I was a very, very wealthy man, and likely to grow wealthier in the not-too-distant future. Hard to believe, considering I had started out with a single weapons cache the Army missed after dealing with an insurgent militant group. The yields of hard work and sound investments never cease to amaze me.

And now, on a cold late November morning, I sat on the roof of the model home I still owned and had no intention of selling, the pounding axes and roar of heavy equipment from the people building the perimeter expansion echoing across the fields, helicopter rotors thumping in the distance toward Fort McCray, and stared across the crumbling street at the Hollow Rock Church of Christ. I could hear voices raised in song.
Amazing Grace
, unless I missed my guess.

The congregation had grown in recent months. Most people had lost interest in religion after the Outbreak, but here in Hollow Rock, safety and prosperity had led to a resurgence of the faithful. The town had weathered many storms and come out of them better than most. Our greatest threat, the Midwest Alliance, no longer existed. Hordes of infected were growing markedly less numerous. Food was abundant. We had plentiful access to clean water. The drought that had plagued the region when I first arrived seemed to have broken. The nuclear winter that had, until recently, made life so difficult was slowly but noticeably abating. Crime within the city limits was almost non-existent. Trade caravans passed through regularly. Raiders and marauders knew better than to try our defenses, especially with Fort McCray nearby. Life was not exactly easy, but it was, in most respects, good.

I did not like it. I looked at the people around me and saw once-hardened survivors growing soft. I saw a lack of vigilance and discipline. I saw guardsmen dozing in their towers during the long watches of the night and no one kicking them in the ass about it. I saw kids not being properly trained to survive if Hollow Rock suddenly became uninhabitable. I saw people who did not have to engage in regular physical labor growing fat, something unheard of in the first three years after the Outbreak. I saw people concerned too much with petty societal squabbles and not nearly enough with making sure this town was not only safe, but a going concern. In other words, I saw a whole population of Outbreak survivors beginning to forget just how dangerous the world still was, and how vulnerable our place in it.

My inner grumblings were interrupted when a multi-fuel generator, donated by the Phoenix Initiative, coughed to life across the street behind the church. It spent most of its time at the towns’ only schoolhouse, but on Sundays, it was used to power the church’s lights and the preacher’s PA system. The singing of many voices stopped, and the unnaturally loud tones of Reverend Griffin began to reverberate through the walls. Why the good reverend needed a microphone, amplifier, and two large speakers in such a small church was beyond me. If a mouse squeaked under the altar, you could hear it in the back pews. My only assumption was he believed his sermon would have more impact, and thus better assure the ultimate destination of the souls of his flock, if it reached the intended recipients with enough volume to rattle their teeth.

I shuffled my feet for better purchase on the roof shingles, put a different part of my butt on the crown of the house, and turned my head to stare back toward the south side of town. My other house lay in that direction, the one I shared with my wife and son.

Allison Laroux Riordan was not home that morning, but Miranda Grove was there with little Gabriel while my wife was busy tending the sick and injured at the clinic. I’d told Miranda I needed to run some errands and left her with the baby. She had offered no argument, as she was too busy cooing over the little guy. She did that a lot.

I thought about the mission I had participated in over the summer, the one that had eliminated one threat to the Union and galvanized another. I thought about my part in it, and how hard it was to listen to people talk about how much better things were now that the Alliance was no longer the Sword of Damocles dangling over our heads. I thought about the people who argued with me when I worked at the store, how they moaned at the slightest sense of disadvantage in a trade, and how I often wished I could show them the demons in my head, shake them by their ears, and scream at them to look at what they made me give.

But I couldn’t. Officially, the mission in Illinois never happened. I did not travel to Alliance territory with Gabriel Garrett, Caleb Hicks, and Lincoln Great Hawk, and we did not meet up with a special ops group codenamed Task Force Falcon. We did not slaughter a group of marauders, capture their leader, and discover a secret initiative by the Alliance to secure their supply routes while they launched an offensive against the Union. We never travelled to the Alliance’s capital city, never met with an intelligence asset who happened to be enemy nation’s vice president, and never carried out an assassination mission against said nation’s highest officials. I was not in a helicopter crash, I did not spend days alternating between running from and ambushing fanatical Alliance troops led by a murdering psychopath named General Randolph Samson, and I most certainly had not watched through a rifle scope while Gabriel Garret put a bullet through the general’s head.

Nope. Didn’t happen.

Officially.

Unofficially, I’d just about had my fill of warfare for one year. Maybe next year I might take a mission or two, but not now. I had businesses to run, a son to raise, a wife to love, and 3000 watts of solar panels, associated control equipment, and sealed, deep-cycle batteries to install on my house. More than enough to power my eight-cubic-foot refrigerator, a 10-gallon water heater, furnace, and other household appliances.

The panels had not come cheap. In fact, it would not be inaccurate to say I spent a small fortune on them. The caravan leader I traded for them had been hauling the system around for months, unable to find a buyer who could pay what it was worth. I gave him the asking price, no haggling. The man told me I should be canonized by whatever was left of the Catholic Church. I told him if he found any more solar equipment to swing by Hollow Rock and look me up.

Allison had balked at the expense, initially, but calmed when I told her how much power the system could generate.

“So … we could have a refrigerator again?” she said.

“Yes. And an icemaker, and hot water, and working fans, and a lot of other conveniences we’ve been doing without.”

“And you haven’t installed it yet … why?”

“It’s on my list.”

“Move it to the top.”

“Aye, aye, captain.”

That was a week ago. Time to stop procrastinating. I climbed down through the roof hatch, closed it, locked up the house, and headed toward home.

*****

At the North Gate, Caleb Hicks was just getting off watch. He spotted me, waved, yelled at me to hold up, and when he had finished speaking with the oncoming guards, jogged over to where I waited.

“Man, you’re never going to believe what happened this morning,” he said.

I went immediately on alert. Anything momentous enough to stir Caleb Hicks from his usual silence into a state of excitement was cause for worry. “What happened?”

“I might be wrong, but I think Gabriel has a daughter. And I think she just came into town this morning.”

I blinked. Twice. Then I asked him to repeat himself to make sure I had heard him right. He did, and it was the same as before. I said, “But Gabe doesn’t have any kids.”