Steve looked to where his group was standing nearby. He could see that they were exhausted from fear and the exertion of their flight from the insane asylum, and he knew they needed to rest in a safe place where they weren’t under constant threat of being eaten. On top of that, they needed Rick Styles’ radio to call Fort Polk. They might be able to reach them on the CB radio that they had brought along, but it also might be a day or two before they got into range. Considering the people that they had already lost, he made a decision. Calling out to Linda, he asked her to bring Cindy over. Igor came, too, and a small circle formed around the little girl.
Feeling like a curiosity in a freak show, Cindy lowered her head in embarrassment
as she rolled up the sleeve of her shirt. Looking down at the scars, she could see that they were fading. Linda had assured her that one day they would disappear completely, but for now you could still see the individual tooth marks. She had avoided looking at the scars because they brought back memories that were hard to bear. Especially the two gaps in the tissue caused by her little brother’s missing teeth.
Rick let out a low whistle before saying, “I guess that proves it. Challenge is negated
by the truth.”
Nodding to where Wilkes stood with a scowl on his face, Tick-Tock asked, “Does that mean he gets exiled?”
Rick laughed and said, “It doesn’t quite work that way. We have to try to be as fair as possible to maintain the integrity of our group.” Looking down to where Cindy was rolling her shirt back down her arm, he asked, “Where did you find her?”
Steve relayed the story of how they had found her hiding in the building they had t
aken shelter in when the dead rose up and how they were trying to get her to a military base so she could be studied and a cure found for the HWNW virus.
When he was finished, Rick said, “It sounds like you found yourself a noble cause in the middle of all this death and destruction.
My people and I will help you in any way we can. First of all, I think getting something to eat is in order.”
It was then that Steve became aware of an enticing aroma coming from inside the walls of Fort Redoubt. When they had first pulled up, he noticed that the area was slightly hazy and smelled of wood smoke, and now he realized that these must
be cooking fires being stoked. His stomach rumbled at the scent of cooked meat as he thought back to when he’d had his last hot meal. Realizing that it had been right before they left the insane asylum, he was shocked that it had only been the day before yesterday. It felt like they had been running and hiding for weeks.
“You said that you had an infirmary?” Tick-Tock asked
, interrupting Steve’s thoughts of hot food and making him feel slightly guilty that he had completely forgotten about the wounded.
Rick turned and called out to two of his people to get stretcher
s for Denise and another woman in the group that had been badly hurt in the crossfire the night before. When they had been carried off, with Tick-Tock and one of his people helping carry them, Rick mentioned food again.
Accepting Rick’s offer of dinn
er, Steve and his people followed him toward the gate and into Fort Redoubt, glancing about as they took in the sights and sounds around them while Rick Styles kept up a running commentary about how they had set up the place.
“When we first got here,” Rick told
them, “there was less than one hundred of us. We scouted the area real good and realized that this was the perfect spot, with the exception of one problem. Everything we needed was too spread out. At first we wanted to set up to the water treatment plant, but the smell was so bad that it drove us off. Without power, it was pretty useless to us. We needed water, so we cleared out a few of the houses along the shore of the lake and settled in. We weren’t as organized back then, but we set up a pretty good defensive position by cutting down trees and using them as a barricade.”
“
What about the people who lived here?” Steve asked.
“When we got here, the whole place was deserted,” Rick told him. “Most of the buildings in this area are rentals, and with the dead coming back to life all around the world, I can say it was definitely off-season for tourists and vacationers. There were still a few of the locals around
living at the golf course, but there were only a handful of year-round residents and they didn’t show themselves right away. They were probably waiting to see if we were friendly or not.”
Putting his hand on Steve’s arm to stop him, Rick asked, “Did you get to see how people acted when things started falling apart? I don’t know about where you were, but in the cities they were raping, looting and killing each other off in droves. Even out here in the sticks
, it got pretty bad for a while. We had a lot of people come through here that were fleeing from someplace or running to another, and they were willing to do anything they needed to survive. There were also a couple halfway organized groups that stayed to the secondary roads and looted anything they came across that they thought they might need to survive.”
“I saw some of it
when everything fell apart,” Steve told him as his thoughts wandered to his late night run through Pinellas County to safety. “We locked down right when things started to go bad, so we missed the worst of it.”
“Then you were lucky,” Rick said. “We had barely
gotten settled in when a gang of about thirty came through. They saw the barricade we’d put up and must have thought we had a stash of food and supplies we were trying to protect. In fact, it was just the opposite. We were well-armed, but we all were living off fish we took from the lake and some canned goods we scrounged from the houses around us. No matter what it was, though, they wanted what we had.”
Looking him in the eye, Steve said, “I take it by the fact that you’re standing here that you won.”
Starting to walk again, Rick said, “Like I said, we were well-armed.”
As the group moved
through the gate and into the fort, Steve was startled by the lack of structures. From where he stood, he could see the far wall.
“You said you had two
thousand people. Where are they all?” he asked.
“Living in the houses all around the fort,” Rick explained.
“There was no way we could build a wall like this to cover the whole peninsula, so we set up the two outer rings with barbed wire and mines and built Fort Redoubt as our fallback position in case everything went to hell. We used the roads and cleared what we had to for the outer fences.”
Looking at
four separate barracks-like buildings surrounding a large, open drill field, Steve caught on that the fort was only used for the military arm of Rick Styles’ organization.
“Everyone from the age of thirteen on up is required to serve in the militia,” Rick explained. “We have about one
thousand people living in the area surrounding Fort Redoubt, and they rotate every four weeks for one week of service. At any given time, we have about two hundred men and women on active duty patrolling the wire or going out on ambush. When they are not on duty, they are fishermen, farmers, hunters and scroungers.”
“What about the ones that are too old or can’t serve
?” Heather asked.
“Did you see the group
s of younger kids and old people outside the gate?” Rick asked.
Heather
nodded. She had noticed a group of about a dozen sitting in front of large, stone spinning wheels, but their backs were to her, so she couldn’t see what they were doing. She remembered one of them was missing a leg, his stump propped out to the side as he bent to whatever task he was performing. There were similar small groups sitting in circles, but their work was obvious as they mended clothes and cleaned weapons.
“Everyone finds a way to serve,” Rick told her. “The ones in front of the grinding wheels are making darts and arrows. For the very old, we have a nursing home, but even there the residents are always volunteering to help in some small way. They are fed and taken care of until they die.”
Steve was impressed with the setup. Seeing a long, low building with smoke coming out of chimneys at each end, he asked, “Is that the chow hall?”
Rick laughed and said, “That’s our destination. We live on a diet of mostly fish and vegetables, but every once in a while on
e of our hunters comes across something that the Ds haven’t torn apart and stuffed down their throats. This morning, one of the teams to the north shot a deer, so we have venison for dinner.”
Rick turned and walked toward the door of the chow hall with Steve and his people in tow. When they entered, they found
people eating at dozens of picnic tables, with more lined up to pass in front of a stainless steel serving line across the back wall.
“We took that from the local high school
, along with all the trays and silverware,” Rick explained as he stepped behind the last man in line waiting to get fed. For a moment, Steve wondered at this behavior since Rick claimed to be their leader. Considering the man for a moment, he realized that he had enough humility that he wouldn’t cut in line or abuse his power. This was indeed a rare find in any individual, much less a leader.
Waiting to move through the line, Steve felt his body relax for what felt like the first time in years. They were alive, safe, and about to settle in for a much needed break.
Feeling a hand laid gently on his back as he picked up a tray, at first he thought it was Heather.
This was until it started patting him as a low voice said, “Oh my
God. Are you real?”
Recognizing the voice, but not sure if he was dreaming, Steve
turned to find Ginny standing in front of him.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Washington, D.C.:
General Eastridge walked the entire length of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial without being contacted by Admiral Sedlak. When the Admiral had asked in a hushed voice for the clandestine meeting after their daily gathering for the briefing by the Chairman Joint Chiefs, Eastridge had seen the dour look on Sedlak’s face and knew it wouldn’t be good news. He ran through the possibilities of what Sedlak would tell him, but with so many atrocities happening in the world, and the new ones that the Joint Chief proposed only moments earlier at his briefing, it was a toss-up.
Facing the Washington Monument, Eastridge knew that the first president of the United States had to be rolling over in his grave at what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs had passed into law that afternoon.
First on his agenda was the order for the conscription of all able bodied men and women from the ages of eight to seventy-five. This was met with acceptance from the rest of the Joint Chiefs, as the reality of the situation was that they had no other choice. Even though everyone in the military had been pulled back into base, the losses that they had sustained up until this point had been high. The last surge by the dead, which had caused the order to retreat to be given, had decimated just under ten percent of their available field personnel.
What followed next, though, was less than acceptable.
Those under the age of eight and over the age of seventy-five were to be disarmed. Unless you were serving in the military, you were now banned from carrying anything more dangerous than a slingshot. The Chairman explained that this was a necessary order since lately there had been too many instances of civilians attacking patrols and raiding smaller camps for their supplies.
When asked if the relief camps were to be opened again so that the newly unarmed people could live in safety, The Chairman replied that they would remain closed. This sent a stir around the table that was silenced as the Chairman’s brow furrowed and his face turned red. Knowing he was about to erupt, the men fell silent and seemed to find things of interest in the paperwork in front of them and on the far walls, where digital readouts scrolled out the latest news from around the world.
The two still working that is.
When the Chairman finally got his temper under control, he explained that the decision to keep the camps closed may seem cold-hearted, but it needed to be done. Nothing had changed in the nation’s supply issues, so there was no way they could support the masses that would be left unprotected after they were disarmed. These people were essentially useless in the fight against the dead and would only use up food and water that could be better used taking care of Americas fighting men and women. The older people would naturally be weeded out, and the younger would be strengthened by the trials of survival. When they turned of age, they would be perfect soldiers.
Or feral wolf-children, Eastridge thought.
The next edict handed down from the Chairman was the immediate disbanding of the Supreme Court. Of the original nine justices, only three had survived, so on the outside it didn’t appear to be that large of a usurpation of powers. But if you had been in on the dealings of government from the beginning of the crisis, you knew that no new ones had been appointed for a reason. What was not widely known was that the remaining three had served to make sure that the government didn’t overstep its bounds after martial law was declared. In the chaos of the dead coming back to life, they were figureheads at best, but they had managed to stop the Chairman from taking complete control of the country after the President was found incompetent to serve.