Cruze folded the map and handed it to me. “As I see it we’re in the shit whether we head north and try to flank Eden’s territory or whether we trespass on it. I say we cut the wire and push on. We’ll just have to be extra stealthy and try like hell to avoid whoever these assholes are.”
I stuffed the map into my pants pocket. “That’s what I’m thinking, too, Cruze. We still have to do some scrounging. If we run out of fuel we’re going to be hooped, though.”
She nodded and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Dave, we’ve been hooped since day freaking zero, if you hadn’t noticed. But from where I stand, we’re still armed to the teeth. If these jerks take a shot at us, we’ll blow them off the freaking map.”
It was going to be a huge risk, but every day since the siege had been a game of managing the risks and hoping you’d pull through. And who was to say we’d encounter anyone at all? For all we know, the Eden tribe might just be a small band of survivors like us. Still, there was a predatory quality to the way in which they’d painted those words of warning.
I decided that in the end, it didn’t matter. I crawled back into my hatch and pursed my lips tightly as I fixed my eyes on the fuel gauge. We had slightly less than a quarter of a tank of diesel left, and that meant we had about a day’s worth of fuel in the jerry cans. Cruze and I ordered that we top up our vehicles – there was no way of conserving it. We’d cross over and we’d do some scrounging. We’d find some diesel, today.
And probably wind up in a fire fight.
Everyone recognized that the risks of veering north into the vicinity of Red Deer outweighed the risk of running into whoever the hell had murdered those two people. Sid was spoiling for a fight. Maybe that was his own ingrained sense of justice, or it might have been the fact that he was getting restless, sitting in a turret with twin machine guns and nobody to shoot at.
We fuelled up both carriers with the remaining diesel and cut through the wire on both sides of the highway. All hands were hatches up and keeping a watchful eye for signs of life as the carriers bounced across empty farmland. The drizzle had ended, but the temperature was dropping and I could see my breath every time I exhaled. It was probably going to snow; not an uncommon occurrence in November when you live on the Canadian prairie.
I slipped off my combat jacket and pulled a sweater over my head. I really hoped it wouldn’t snow. Whoever these Eden survivalists might be, they could easily follow our tracks and come up on us from behind. Then again, there’s only so much stealth you can use when you’re bombing up the back forty in an armored personnel carrier. The constant rumble from our engines could be heard from miles away, so I decided that whoever was out there, they had to know we were coming.
They just didn’t know
what
was coming.
It’s one thing to whack a pair of survivors who might have made the tragic mistake of trespassing on your land claim. It’s another thing entirely when the trespassers are carrying automatic weapons, mortars, high explosive charges and light anti-tank weapons on board. From a purely tactical perspective, the Eden tribe would be out-gunned. Save for an RCMP station, the closest establishment carrying a stockpile of conventional military armaments was in Camp Wainwright, a good six hundred kilometers to the north-east.
Surely their land claim didn’t stretch that far. I popped back up in the hatch and glanced at my watch. It was just past four in the afternoon and we’d been driving for more than an hour since we crossed highway two. The first place we came to where people might once have lived wasn’t even a village. On the map it was called Neapolis, but it was nothing more than a few barns, a tourist information shack and a couple of rundown bungalows. We skirted along the sides of grid road 3-12 so we wouldn’t kick up any gravel dust that could be seen for miles by anyone in a sentry post. It was the best I could come up with in the way of stealth. I glanced down at my map. Dinsmore wasn’t more than a few kilometers to the east, so I hailed Ark Two on the radio.
“We’ve still got a ways to go before we hit Dinsmore. Bring your carrier up alongside mine.”
“On it,” Cruze replied, as we edged up to an enormous red barn.
“We’ll stop here, Doug,” I said through the intercom. Our carrier came to a gentle stop. Within seconds, Ark Two had pulled up beside us and I looked around for any signs of life.
The radio hissed. “One road into town and one road out,” said Cruze. “If they’ve got it blocked off we could be in trouble.”
“Agreed. Get on my tail once I cross onto the main drag. We’ll creep forward until we see anything that might offer some decent scrounging.”
“Well, there’s a barn, Dave,” she replied. “Maybe there’s some stuff inside?”
“Maybe. Give us some cover while we go inside and investigate. How’s Jo doing?”
Cruze answered in a haze of static. “Jo’s good. She’s having a big nap in the back. Mel’s doing her level best to let her sleep.”
“Cool … let her sleep some more.” I answered back.
I hit the intercom. “Listen up! Cruze is going to provide cover for us. Dawson, toss down a couple of Jerry cans and Sid, grab the siphoning tube from the tool kit. Grab your personal weapons and we’ll check out that barn.”
I slipped off my headset and grabbed a pair of fully-loaded magazines for my carbine. I climbed up out of my crew commander’s hatch and hopped down off the nose of the carrier. Dawson rushed up beside me with a pair of Jerry cans in hand, her carbine slung over her shoulder while Sid tripped off the front of the APC, nearly doing a face-plant in the process.
“You’re one graceful SOB,” I said, as I watched him get back to his feet and brush himself off.
He shrugged and said, “Whavevs … I want a small extended line with Dawson in the middle. Keep your weapons at the ready – we don’t have a clue what we might be walking into.”
I stood up and scurried over to Dawson’s left, keeping my left finger along the trigger guard of my carbine and flipping off the safety with my thumb. Dawson tossed an empty can to Sid and pointed the barrel of her weapon toward the barn.
“I’m ready,” she said firmly. “Let’s get in and get out.”
“You good, Sid?” I asked.
He nodded. “Dude, I’m always good. Let’s go steal us some diesel.”
We crept up to the barn, listening carefully. The chill breeze blew through the waist-high crab grass and I kept an eye for trip wires and booby traps as we approached the barn door. The wind whistled as it blew through the gaps in the wood. The main door opened and closed, making a clunking sound every few seconds as a length of hemp rope waved back and forth like a pendulum. We got our backs up against the exterior wall and slunk up to the entrance as Sid pulled out his flashlight.
“You guys cover my ass,” he whispered, readying himself to shine the light inside. Dawson and I nodded as he aimed his barrel through the gap and flashed the light into the darkness. After quickly scanning the barn, he slowly opened the door with the toe of his boot and stepped inside. Dawson and I followed with our weapons at the ready.
I scanned the drive bay and saw an old Massey Ferguson tractor that was literally buried in bird droppings, at least a few inches thick. If there was any diesel in its tanks it would have long ago lost whatever octane it once possessed – the tractor looked as if it been parked in the barn for decades. I stepped through the entry, my weapon at the ready, and shone my flashlight across the hay-covered floor. A pair of field mice skirted underneath the tractor’s small front tires and I was startled by a pigeon that took off through a hole in the roof.
“It freaking stinks in here,” said Sid, as he eyed a ladder leading up to a hay loft.
“That’s the natural smell of decay,” said Dawson. “This isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.”
“Sounds romantic,” he snorted.
“Pfft … what do you know about romance?” said Dawson.
“Okay … shut up and keep your heads in the game, guys.” I said as I shone my light around the back of the tractor, picking out a wall of hay bales stretching up to the bottom of the loft. As if she’d read my mind, Dawson scrambled over to the door and poked the barrel of her carbine inside. It opened with a screech and Dawson shone a light through the doorway.
“Clear,” she said firmly.
I dropped to one knee and gazed up at the hay loft. “I think this barn is a dud. Sid.”
”There’s a loft, I’ll have a quick look and if there’s nothing worth scooping up, we’ll head out.”
In seconds he was climbing up a rickety wooden ladder. I gazed around the barn and decided that if it had once been part of a functional farm, then it was probably before I was born. I felt a nudge of disappointment that we hadn’t found anything worth scrounging, but there were likely to be hundreds of barns between now and the time our fuel tanks ran dry. I was never a betting person, but there was still a chance we’d find something that ran on diesel; I didn’t care if it was a pickup truck.
“Oh shit,” Sid called out. “Dave … you need to see this.”
I glanced at Dawson and pointed to my eyes and then the doorway. She nodded as I walked over to the ladder and began climbing. He pulled me up with one hand and I steadied myself on the uneven floor. I glanced down and decided that a fall from this height would probably break something important, so I kept a healthy distance from the edge of the loft, following Sid over to a small wall of hay bales. What I saw told me that someone had been in this barn before us. Somebody downright evil.
In front of me were the bodies of a man, a woman and two little girls lying face down. The four were holding hands with one another. Each had a portion of their heads missing, and I spotted four small-caliber shell casings on the floor of the loft not more than three feet from where I stood. The word “Eden” was painted on the wall above them in white.
“These people are a family,” I whispered, trying to contain the horror in my voice. “A
family
, Sid.”
He nodded, his jaw tightening. I could almost feel the rage bubbling up inside him. “They were fucking executed, Dave. They’d probably come into the barn to take refuge, or to bed down for the night. And these Eden pricks frigging shot them.”
“These are fresh kills – otherwise we would have smelled them the moment we walked in the barn. Maybe they’d arrived in a car or something. Came up the main road and alerted a sentry.”
Sid shook his head. “That or a security patrol – to cover this much land, they’ve gotta be using vehicles and if that’s the case then they have access to fuel.”
I nodded, barely able to take my eyes off the grisly scene. “There’s nothing we can do for these four. Let’s get back to the carriers and push on to Dinsmore.”
He blinked. “You itching for some payback, Dave?”
“I’m not itching, Sid. But Dinsmore is a few miles up the road and if it’s occupied by breathers then the odds are they’re Eden people. And I have to tell you: if they decide to start shooting at us they’re going to pay dearly for it.”
Sid slapped me on the shoulder. “That’s the smartest thing you’ve said all day, buddy. Let’s head out.”
Six people dead. Each of them murdered simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A small knot of anger began burning inside my chest as I gazed down at the two little girls. They couldn’t have been much older than Jo when they were killed – put to death because their parents made the mistake of trespassing into Eden. I clenched my fists together so tightly that my fingernails dug into my skin and immediately thought of Jo back in the other carrier. I wanted her with me at all times. Nobody was going to get my kid sister. Ever.
We climbed back down the ladder. Dawson gazed up at me as I slung my carbine over my shoulder.
“We’re heading back to the carrier, Kate,” I said with a sharp edge to my voice. “Grab those Jerry cans and bomb up.”
Dawson didn’t have to be asked twice. She dashed to the entrance, grabbing both fuel cans without even stopping.
It was starting to look like Sid was going to wind up in a scrap after all.
And God help the Eden tribe if they decided to start shooting at us.
Sergeant Green always told me that no soldier in their right mind goes looking for trouble. If anything, they like to avoid conflict as much as possible. Killing fellow human beings isn’t something that comes naturally to even the best-trained infantryman. All my tactical manuals taught me that the role of the infantry is to close with and destroy the enemy, but they didn’t say squat about the end of the freaking world. Conventional rules of engagement ended on Day Zero and all I could think about were the two little girls, killed by some twisted individuals who’d decided to mete out their own kind of justice. A harsh, bloody set of laws that mirrored the harsh and bloody new world that we all were living in. I didn’t know who the hell the Eden tribe might be or what their fighting strength consisted of, but I did know one thing: those two little girls and their parents were murdered in cold blood.
I stormed through the entrance to the barn and doubled back to the carriers with Sid Toomey in tow. Cruze and Mel Dixon were standing atop their APC keeping a watchful eye on our surroundings.
“Prep for battle!”
I barked, as I climbed up the side of my APC.
Cruze threw me a firm nod and then gestured for Melanie to climb into the turret as she slid into her crew commander hatch.
I slipped on my headset, ignoring the rumbling from our engine. Doug Manybears gave me a worried look as he glanced at me over his shoulder.
I spun around in my seat to see Sid drop down into the turret. He cocked both machine guns as Dawson pulled out a case of M69 fragmentation grenades. She gently removed four of them from their containers and flipped off the safety clips. I reached over and she handed me two grenades which I dropped into the waist pockets of my combat jacket. Taking a deep breath, I adjusted the squelch on my radio and then stood up in my hatch.
“Ark Two stand by for orders,” I said amid a haze of static.
I glanced down at the map. Dinsmore was no more than 7km away from our current location. The gravel road heading in and out of town was wide enough to accommodate two APC’s abreast, but I didn’t want to present too obvious a target as we approached the village’s outskirts.
Infantry Section and Platoon in Battle
said that for mechanized small party raids, the proper thing to do would be to use one carrier to draw the enemy’s fire while the other carrier provided supporting fire from the flank. According to the contour lines on my map, there were no natural high features from which Cruze or I could act as supporting fire, so the best option would be to do a combat run right through the center of the village, drawing their fire and identifying their strengths before doing a full-blown assault.
I gave my head a hard shake as the anger in the pit of my stomach bubbled away like an unwatched pot of boiling water. I needed to stay focused; our goal had originally been to scrounge for diesel and supplies. We hadn’t counted on running into a stronghold of road warrior wannabes, and we’d already seen that the Eden tribe weren’t the kind of people who’d be prepared to sit down and negotiate. I wasn’t crazy about getting into a firefight, but six people had been murdered and I’d be damned if I was going to lose one of our team to those assholes.
I squeezed my handset and said, “Okay listen up. Ark One will proceed to Dinsmore with Ark Two staying three vehicle lengths to the rear. We’ll be hatches down on my command, over!”
The radio hissed loudly. “Ark Two, Roger, over.”
“If you’re wondering why we’ve gone full-blown tactical it’s because a family of four were shot dead inside that barn. They were put to death just like the pair lashed to the cattle fence back at Highway Two. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the kind of people we’re dealing with. I don’t want to get into a fight with anyone, but we’re here and we’ve all been trained. We’ll head into town with the goal of keeping ourselves protected. We will not fire the first shot – I say again, we will draw their fire. Over.”
“Copy that,” Cruze replied.
I exhaled heavily. “We’ve all stared death in the face many times over but we’re dealing with some seriously fucked-up people. I don’t know what their strength is, but I do know one thing: this Eden clan is going to rue the day the King’s Own rolled into town.”
Static sprayed out of the speakers on the radio. “Ark Two, Roger. We knew this would eventually happen … my team is ready. We’ll make sure that Jo stays hatches down.”
“No,” I answered back. “I want her in my carrier. Send her over now.”
“Ark Two, Roger that,” said Cruze.
I intended for my carrier to take the lead into Dinsmore and that meant a slightly greater risk for Jo than if she were to stay inside Ark Two, but after seeing that dead family, it was the only way I could actually feel right about what were going to do. If anything happened to Jo in Cruze’s carrier, I would never forgive myself for not being there to save her.
Dawson flipped off the combat locks and opened the right rear door of our carrier. Jo hopped inside and threw me a worried look as I motioned for her to come up to the crew commander’s seat. She flung her arms around me and gave me a hug. “Everyone is scared, David,” she said, her voice filled with the vibration of the carrier’s engine. “There’s going to be more shooting, right?”
I nodded as I lifted her onto my lap. “Yes, Jo. There’s going to be more shooting, but that’s the world we live in now. Nearly every day since we started hiding out at the armory has had some shooting. You know it and I know it. But this time it’s different.”
She tilted her head to the right. “Different? How come?”
I pursed my lips tightly. Jo had seen other children die during the handful of times that Mewata Armory was breached by the creeps. She’d had her own close call with a trio that broke through the old rusted window frame in our sleeping quarters. She’d shot one of them before Sid bashed them all to pulp with his baseball bat of doom.
I decided a little honesty couldn’t be a bad thing. I owed Jo that much.
“It’s different because we’re not going to be shooting at creeps,” I said firmly. “It’s going to be like those people that were trying to kill us when we were escaping from the city, only these ones are way worse. Do you know what we found inside the barn?”
She nodded. “Four people were murdered – a couple of them were kids. A family.”
“And we’re a family,” I replied. “The bad guys are going to want our carriers, weapons and supplies. They’ll gun down every last one of us, Jo. We have to be ready for anything and if that means we kill them, then that’s what we’re going to do.”
Her eyes narrowed sharply and Jo said, “I’ll wear my helmet and make sure that Sid and Kate get bullets for the guns. I’ll do my job – you don’t have to worry about me, okay?”
God love my baby sister. Sometimes her awesomeness completely overwhelms me. I ran my hand through Jo’s stringy hair and then kissed the top of her forehead. “You’re braver than me, kiddo. Okay – get back there and get ready, it’s going to get crazy here any moment.”
She scurried to the back of the carrier and slipped on her helmet as I stood up in my hatch and took a mouthful of air. “Ark Two, we’re good to go. Let’s move out.”
And with that, Doug slipped the carrier into gear, pulling hard left around the barn and onto the main road heading out of Neapolis. I could hear the turret gear engaging behind me as Sid positioned the twin machine guns on his prescribed arc of fire. I peered over the left edge of my hatch and looked back to see Cruze’s carrier take up its position on the rear, the turret guns covering the right side of the APC, and I leaned down behind the hatch door and pulled out my binoculars. I was going to look out for any potential ambush sites or areas where we’d likely come under hostile fire.
We cruised down the grid road for about fifteen minutes, the wheels kicking up a massive cloud of dust. I’d have felt sorry for Cruze’s team having to take a dirt bath in our wake if I wasn’t scared shitless about what we were potentially driving into. Doug maintained a decent clip – I was surprised at how good the condition of the road was. There were hardly any ruts, and the last time we’d seen an abandoned vehicle was back at Highway Two.
I gazed out through my binoculars to see a grain elevator on the horizon, the word
Dinsmore
emblazoned across its weathered wooden siding. I told Doug to slow down our approach, not that it would make a lot of difference: if there were Eden people in the village they would have heard our carriers approaching. A
Quick Gas & Lube
sign nestled to the rear of the elevator told me there was a strong possibility we’d run into someone because if there was any fuel left in the underground storage tanks, the Eden clan would be guarding it with their lives.
Ahead was a wall of smashed-up, battered cars, at least three high, spread across the grid road coming into town. The words “Eden Land” had been spray-painted all along the doors and fenders in large block letters. A makeshift barbed wire fence stretched from either side of the smashed vehicles for a good fifty yards. I ordered Doug to bring the carrier into the ditch to our right; I didn’t want to offer anyone the chance to take a pot shot at us before we could scope out any likely areas of ambush. The suspension groaned as we crawled into the low ground, and I glanced out to my left to see Cruze’s carrier taking up a similar position down in the ditch opposite.
I pressed the intercom. “What are you seeing, Sid?”
“We’ve got movement up by the elevator … wait … hand me your binos!”
I crawled underneath the turret cage and reached up to pass my binoculars to Sid. He grabbed them without looking down and I threw Jo a shaky thumbs-up.
Sid’s voice filled my ears through the headset. “Smart buggers, these Eden types,” he said, sounding slightly impressed. “They’ve been watching us come at them for a while now. There’s a cut away near the top of the grain elevator – hell of a good observation post.”
“Or a sniper’s nest,” I said, nearly in a panic. I squeezed the PTT button for the radio. “Everyone, hatches down
now
!”
I raced up to my crew commander’s hatch and pulled hard on the hatch door. It slammed shut with a deafening clang. I slipped on the combat lock and peered out through my periscope. Doug’s head dropped down as he lowered the seat and I watched as his hatch door closed amid a small cloud of dust.
I spun my periscope to the right to see if I could spot another access point into the village. Our carriers might have been 10000lb apiece, but they weren’t even close to being on a par with actual tanks – we couldn’t smash through the wall of cars. I’d just spotted a worn-down trail about 200m to our right when Sid’s voice called out through the intercom.
“Contact!” he shouted. “Stand by!”
Suddenly the hull of the carrier sounded like it was getting pelted by hailstones as we began taking on enemy small arms fire.
“What are you seeing, Sid?”
The turret spun sharply to the right and then back to the left. The whirring of the turret gear filled the inside of our carrier. “We’ve got a muzzle flash from a sniper in the grain elevator and about five others taking pot shots at us from behind the wall of cars. I’m ready to engage.”
“Line ‘em up in your sights, Sid,” I answered back. “Ark Two, what are you seeing?”
The sound of static filled my ears and then Cruze answered in a sharp voice. “There’s a big-ass cloud of dust from behind the barricade. I can’t tell what it is, Dave, but from the looks of it we’re talking heavy equipment of some kind.”
“Roger,” I said as my heart started pounding. “Well … they started shooting first. Ark Two, engage the barricade with your turret guns. Sid – fire a short burst into that sniper’s nest!”
The turret spun a quarter turn as I finally spotted the cloud of dust. It was big enough to suggest that whatever they had pulled out was likely a piece of altered farm equipment – possibly a tractor or a large front-end loader. I spotted the light trail of a tracer round fly into the top of the grain elevator as the general purpose machine gun spat a small burst of rounds over my head.
“Stay in the ditch and push forward with both carriers!” I shouted into the radio. “As long as we’re in the low ground they’ve only got our turrets to fire on.”
“Copy that!” Cruze replied. Doug slipped the carrier into gear and we started crawling forward, the engine rumbling steadily. I gazed out through the periscope to see round after round hitting the hull, bouncing off in a spray of paint chips and sparks. The cloud of dust to the left of the elevator was mixed with thick white smoke, a sure sign that whatever the Eden clan had pulled from behind the barricade was diesel-fuelled. That was a positive development – we’d have something to siphon off if we were successful in taking the village. I could see Ark Two’s turret to my left as we edged forward, still taking on small arms fire.
Another burst of rounds echoed through the carrier as the stench of burning gun oil and propellant gases filled my nostrils.
“Got him!” shouted Sid.
I looked up at the grain elevator just in time to see a man’s body slumped in the makeshift window near the top. The rifle over his left shoulder slipped off his body and fell to the ground.
“Holy shit!”
Cruze’s voice roared through my headset.
“What are you seeing?”
“Twelve o’clock and coming up from behind the barricade. That is one big-ass bucket … oh shit!”
Small explosions of dirt kicked up off the surface of the road, one after the other.
“Smoke! Smoke! Smoke!”
Cruze bellowed.
I couldn’t see what Cruze was seeing but I sure as hell knew from the trajectory of the dirt spraying off the roadway that the Eden survivors had a machine gun.
“I’m hit!” she bellowed.
A tremor of fear seized me as Doug slipped the carrier into reverse. “How bad?” I answered.
There was a moment of heavy static and then Cruze answered. “Mel’s bleeding … got clipped in the shoulder with some hull shrapnel.”
“Stand by!” I answered. “Smoke away, Sid!”
I could hear the distinctive
thunk
of our smoke dischargers firing off the left side of the turret. I peered out through my periscope to see the air fill with a billowing cloud of white smoke.