“Not many, at most a few hundred. Now, over here,” he continued, “you’ve got the hospital, which can fit, oh, maybe another hundred. Another, smaller box is underneath this building, the old bank vault. Full of files and other junk, but basically in good shape.”
“What about basements?”
“There aren’t a lot. A few beneath commercial buildings, some of the old apartment complexes, and we can safely assume there are a few in private hands. But the way the city was built, almost everything is on slab or pier. The soil by the river is mostly clay, so no basements at all. That extends from H-town all the way to the southern wall.”
Not good, Peter thought. So far, they had accounted for fewer than a thousand people.
“Now, here’s the granddaddy.” Chase directed everyone’s attention to the orphanage, which was marked “HB1.” “When they moved the government from Austin, one of the reasons they chose Kerrville is because of this. While the walls were being constructed, they needed a safe place to overnight the workers and the rest of the government. This end of the city sits on top of a large formation of limestone, and it’s full of pockets. The largest one is underneath the orphanage, and it’s deep, at least thirty feet below the surface. According to the old records, it was originally used by the sisters as part of the Underground Railroad, a place to hide runaway slaves before the Civil War.”
“How do we get down there?” Apgar asked.
“I went and looked this morning. The hatch is under the floorboards in the dining area. There’s a flight of wooden stairs, pretty rickety but usable, that leads down to the cave. Dank as a tomb, but it’s big. If we pack folks in, it can hold another five hundred at least.” Chase looked up. “Now, before anybody asks, I went through the census data last night. It’s just an estimate, but here’s how things break down. Inside the walls, we have about eleven hundred children under the age of thirteen. Not counting military, the remainder divvies up about pretty evenly in terms of gender, but the population skews old. We’ve got a lot of people over sixty. Some of them will want to fight, but I don’t see that they’ll be much help, frankly.”
“So what about the rest?” Peter asked.
“Of the remainder, we’re looking at roughly thirteen hundred men of fighting age. About the same number of women, maybe slightly less. It’s safe to assume some of the women will choose to defend the wall, and there’s no reason they shouldn’t. The problem is armament. We have weapons for only about five hundred civilians. There are probably plenty of guns floating around out there, but there’s no way to know how many. We’ll just have to wait and see what appears when the time comes.”
Peter looked at Apgar. “What about ammunition?”
From the general, a frown. “Not too good. Last night cost us badly. We’ve got maybe twenty thousand rounds on hand in a mix of calibers, mostly nine-millimeter, forty-five, and five fifty-six. Plenty of shot shells, but they’re only good for close quarters. For the big guns, we’re down to about ten thousand rounds in fifty-cal. If the dracs charge that gate, our ammo won’t last long.”
The situation boiled down disconcertingly: maybe a thousand defenders on the wall, enough ammunition to last a few minutes at most, hardboxes for a thousand, and two thousand unarmed civilians with nowhere to hide.
“There’s got to be someplace we can put people,” Peter said. “Somebody, give me something.”
“As a matter of fact,” Chase said, “I’ve got an idea about that.” He rolled out another map: a schematic of the dam. “We use the drainage tubes. There are six, each a hundred feet long, so maybe a hundred and fifty people apiece. The downstream openings are barred; no viral has ever gotten through. The only access on the upstream side is through the waterworks, and there are three heavy doors between the tubes and the outside. The beauty of it is, even if the dracs breach the walls, there’s no reason they’d think to look here. The people inside would be completely hidden.”
It made sense. “Ford, I think you just earned your pay for the month. Gunnar?”
Apgar, lips pursed, nodded. “It’s a hell of an idea, actually.”
“Everybody else?”
From the room, a murmur of agreement.
“Good, it’s settled. Chase, you’re in control of the civilian side. We need to start moving people to shelter as soon as possible, no last-minute rushes. Children under thirteen to the orphanage, starting with the youngest. Sara, how many patients do you have in the hospital?”
“Not many. Twenty or so.”
“We can use the basement hardbox for some of the overflow, plus the hardboxes on the west side of town. Gunnar, I’ll need a security detachment on all of these. Children only, plus mothers with young kids. But no men. If they can walk, they can fight.”
“And if they won’t?”
“Martial law is martial law. If they don’t take your advice, I’ll back your decision, but we don’t want to stir things up.”
Apgar received his meaning with a tight nod.
“The rest who don’t want to fight go in the tubes. I want all sheltered civilians in place by eighteen hundred hours, but let’s make this orderly to keep panic to a minimum. Colonel, you oversee assembling the civilian force. Send out a couple of squads to go house to house and put out a call for any additional weaponry. People can keep one rifle or pistol of their own, but any extras go into the armory for redistribution. As of this moment, any working firearm is property of the Texas military.”
“I’ll get it done,” Henneman said.
Peter addressed the group: “We don’t know how long we’ll have to hold them off, people. It might be minutes, it might be hours, it might be all night. They might not attack at all, just wait us out. But if the dracs get in, the orphanage is our fallback position. We protect the children. Is that clear?”
Silent nods passed around the table.
“Then we’re adjourned. I’ll want everybody back here at fifteen hundred. Gunnar, stay behind a minute. I need a word.”
They waited as the room emptied. Apgar, elbows resting on the table, eyed Peter over his meshed fingers. “So?”
Peter rose and stepped to the window. The square was quiet, with no one about, everything becalmed in the summer heat. Where was everybody? Probably hiding in their houses, Peter thought, afraid to come out.
“Fanning will have to be dealt with,” he said. “This will never end otherwise.”
“This would be the part of the conversation when you tell me you’re going to New York.”
Peter turned around. “I’ll need a small contingent—say, two dozen men. We can use the portables as far north as Texarkana, maybe a little farther before we run out of fuel. On foot, we should reach New York by winter.”
“That’s suicide.”
“I’ve done it before.”
Apgar looked at him pointedly. “And you were fucking lucky, if you’ll excuse my saying so. Never mind that you’re thirty years older and New York is two thousand miles away. According to Donadio, it’s crawling with dracs.”
“I’ll take Alicia with me. She knows the territory, and the virals won’t attack her.”
“After last night’s performance? Be serious.”
“The city won’t stand unless we kill him. Sooner or later, that gate will fail.”
“I don’t disagree. But taking on Fanning with two dozen soldiers doesn’t seem like much of a plan to me.”
“What do you suggest? That we hand Amy over?”
“You should know me better than that. On top of which, once we give her to Donadio, we’ve got nothing. No cards to play.”
“So what, then?”
“Well, have you given any more thought to Fisher’s boat?”
Peter was speechless.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Apgar continued. “I don’t trust the man any farther than I can throw him, and I’m glad you tossed his ass out of here. I don’t tolerate division in the ranks, and he was way out of line. Also, I have no idea if that thing will even float.”
“I don’t believe what I’m hearing.”
Apgar let a moment pass. “Mr. President. Peter. I’m your military adviser. I’m also your friend. I know you, how you think. It’s served you well, but the situation is different. If it were up to me I’d say sure, go down swinging. The gesture might be symbolic, but symbolism matters to old warhorses like us. I hate these things, and I always have. But by any measure, this isn’t going to end well. Like it or not, you’re the last president of the Texas Republic. That pretty much leaves you in charge of the fate of the human race. Maybe Fisher’s full of shit. You know the man, so that’s your call. But seven hundred is better than nothing.”
“This place will come apart. There’s no way we’ll be able to mount a coherent defense.”
“No, probably we won’t.”
Peter turned back to the window. It really was awfully damn quiet out there. He had the unsettled sense of observing the city from some distant future time: buildings empty and abandoned, dead leaves rolling in the streets, every surface being slowly reclaimed by wind and dust and years—the permanent silence of lives stopped, all the voices gone.
“Not that I’m objecting,” he said, “but is this first-name thing going to be a habit?”
“When I need it, yeah.”
Below him in the square, a group of boys appeared. The oldest of them couldn’t have been more than ten. What were they doing out there? Then Peter grasped the situation: one of the boys had a ball. At the center of the square, he dropped it on the ground and kicked it, sending the rest scurrying after it. A pair of five-tons pulled into the square; soldiers disembarked and began to set up a line of tables. More were hauling out crates of weaponry and ammunition to be distributed among the civilian inductees. The boys took only cursory notice, lost in their game, which appeared to have nothing in the way of formal structure: no rules or boundaries, no objectives or way to keep score. Whoever possessed the ball tried to keep it away from the others, until he was bested by one of his companions, thus starting the mad chase all over again. Peter’s thoughts took him back many years, first to the formless contests that had diverted Caleb and his friends for hours and their contagious youthful energy—
just five more minutes, Dad, there’s still plenty of light, please just one more game
—and then to his own boyhood: that brief, innocent span in which he had existed in total obliviousness, outside the flow of history and the accumulated weight of life.
He turned from the window. “Do you remember the day Vicky summoned me to her office to offer me a job?”
“Not really, no.”
“As I was leaving, she called me back. Asked about Caleb, how old he was. She said—and I think I have this right—‘It’s the children we’re doing this for. We’ll be long gone, but our decisions will determine the kind of world they’re going to live in.’ ”
Apgar gave a slow nod. “Come to think of it, maybe I do remember. She was a cunning old broad, I’ll give her that. It was a masterpiece of manipulation.”
“No chance I could turn her down. It was just a matter of time before I surrendered.”
“So what’s your point?”
“The point is, this patch of ground doesn’t just belong to us, Gunnar. It belongs to
them
. First Colony was dying. Everyone had given up. But not here. That’s why Kerrville has survived as long as it has. Because the people here have refused to go quietly.”
“We’re talking about the survival of our species.”
“I know we are. But we need to earn the right, and abandoning three thousand people to save seven hundred isn’t an equation I can sit with. So maybe it all ends here. Tonight, even. But this city is ours. This
continent
is ours. We run, Fanning wins, no matter what. And Vicky would say the same thing.”
A moment of stalemate passed, the two men looking at each other. Then:
“That’s a nice speech,” Apgar said.
“Yeah, I bet you didn’t know I was such a deep thinker.”
“So that’s it?”
“That’s it,” said Peter. “That’s my final word. We stay and fight.”
64
Sara descended the stairs to the basement. Grace was at the end of the second row of cots, sitting up, her baby resting in her lap. The woman looked tired but also relieved. She offered a small smile as Sara approached.
“He’s fussing a little,” she said.
Sara took the baby from her, laid him on the adjacent cot, and unwound the blanket to examine him. A big, healthy boy with curly black hair. His heart was loud and strong.
“We’re calling him Carlos, after my father,” Grace said.
During the night, Grace had told Sara the story. Fifteen years ago, her parents had moved out to the townships, settling in Boerne. But her father had had little luck as a farmer and had been forced to take a job with the telegraph crews, leaving the family alone for months at a time. After he’d been killed in a fall from a pole, Grace and her mother—her two older brothers had long since moved on—had returned to Kerrville to live with relatives. But it had been a hard life, and her mother, too, had passed, though Grace shared no details. At seventeen, Grace had gone to work in an illegal saloon—she was vague about her duties, which Sara didn’t want to know—and this was how she’d met Jock. Not an auspicious beginning, although the two were, Grace asserted, very much in love, and when she’d turned up pregnant, Jock had done the honorable thing.
Sara rewrapped the baby and returned him to his mother, assuring her that everything was fine. “He’ll complain a bit until your milk comes in. Don’t worry—it doesn’t mean anything.”
“What’s going to happen to us, Dr. Wilson?”
The question seemed too large. “You’re going to take care of your son, that’s what.”
“I heard about that woman. They say she’s some kind of viral. How could that be?”
Sara was caught off guard—but of course people would be talking. “Maybe she is—I don’t know.” She put a hand on Grace’s shoulder. “Try to rest. The Army knows what it’s doing.”
She found Jenny in the storage room, taking inventory of their supplies: bandages, candles, blankets, water. More boxes had been brought down from the first floor and stacked against the wall. Her daughter, Hannah, was helping her—a freckled, disarmingly green-eyed girl of thirteen, with long, coltish legs.