Wilkes County (restarted 10/17)

[URBAN ASSAULT]

Liking this... need MOAR.

-urban

[AeroRat]

Somewhere in the apartment the phone was ringing. Mike couldn't hear it, per se, but he knew it just the same. Not work. For work he'd assigned a special ringtone, a midi-file version of Take This Job and Shove It. This was the standard tone, an electric version of an old rotary-dial type. Unassigned. Family. Friends, possibly. Only family never called and friends didn't call after eleven. Slowly, he eased his feet out from under the sheet and sat upright, thinking. Either somebody was broke down on the side of the road or somebody was dead.

He pushed off the edge of the mattress and picked his way to the door. The tinfoil over the window in the bedroom half of the apartment kept the side in near complete darkness. Save the faint halo around the door frame there was no light. He navigated by touch, one foot sweeping slowly back and forth like a metal detector. On the way he encountered a handful of contacts - one shoe, probably his; a bunched sock, maybe his; a pocket knife, decidedly his; a heap of something silky to the touch and faintly warm. A dress. Not his.

Fucking stupid. He should have shut off the phone before dinner. Somehow it had slipped his mind. Should have left it in the damn car.

Well, he was paying the price for that little oversight.

God help whoever was on the other end if this was a wrong number.

He eased the door open and slipped through, closing it softly from the other side. The clock affixed to the kitchen wall announced in subdued green digits that it was just past four o'clock Sunday morning. The witching hour was past. The murdering hour was at hand. By some minor miracle he worked around the coffee table without knocking anything over. His phone buzzed faintly on the glass and he picked it out from amid the flotsam that piled up in the course of an average week. He glanced towards the bedroom, pulling on a pair of wrinkled shorts from the waiting laundry basket on the futon. Still moving silently, he burrowed his feet into a pair of flip-flops and stepped out onto the walkway.

The central yard of the apartment block was washed in moonlight the color of an old nickel. From his second storey vantage in Building C he could make out the silvered pit of the volleyball court and the rounded rectangle of the pool, vaguely luminescent behind the bars of its fence. Across the way, tucked into the ground-floor throughway of Building A, the glowing green box of a soft drink machine provided the only manmade light. It made him thirsty and he started for the steps. Only once he was moving did he bother to look at the phone.

Harper, David.

Shit.

David Harper was the flight commander of the local Civil Air Patrol flight. Covering a somewhat lightly populated chunk of territory, the unit amounted to a dozen or so members, most of them from Everett but a few driving in from small towns in the further-flung reaches of the county. On paper it was comprised of two dozen members. Realistically, a strong meeting might net three adults and seven or eight cadets. Once a quarter they ran some kind of field training exercise with the rest of the squadron, the sheriff's department, nearby volunteer fire departments, and the odd state trooper.

Of course that kind of thing was established well in advance. The reason it only happened once every three months was that the planning, inter-agency paperwork and memorandi of understanding, and school schedules affecting cadet availability took at least two months to get hammered out. Not the sort of thing sprung on the unsuspecting in the wee hours of the morning. Which meant there was probably a genuine emergency of some kind afoot.

That'd be about right. The first free weekend he'd wrangled in months. Dinner, a movie, and the company of a well-figured brunette for the evening. Tonight would be the night somebody got lost. Or maybe they'd crashed an airplane out in Buttfuck, Nowhere. Maybe the dry spell of late was being broken by a storm that suddenly whipped up and dumped half the Gulf of Mexico onto northern central Texas and the sudden appearance of rain in midsummer was causing widespread panic.

He spat in the grass alongside the walkway, trying to clear the fuzzy feeling in his mouth. An electric irritation ran behind his aching eyes, low and pulsing. The last time he recalled checking the clock was a few minutes past one, just before they'd called it an night and retired. Three hours of sleep, give or take a few minutes. If anything he felt more beat than he had when he passed out.

By now the phone was still. The display showed one missed call. He'd call back soon enough. First he needed something to drink. He filtered through the contents of his pockets - lint, pebble, plastic wrapper of some kind - and dredged up a handful of change, which he fed into the machine. He collected his root beer prize and started for the apartment, thinking. He hadn't called back yet. He could still dodge this one. In fact he could take a brief detour and dump it in the front seat of the Exploder, conveniently out of the way until he returned to work on Monday.

Against his better judgment he opened the phone and punched redial.

"Mister Duncan," Harper said before the third ring.

"Guilty." Mike considered the root beer, wondering if it could be opened with one hand.

"What's your availability tonight?"

"I answered the phone." He tried to twist off the cap with thumb and forefinger. Easier said than done. "What's the occasion?"

"Have you been on the highway in the past forty eight hours?"

"On and off. More traffic than usual, but it was moving last I checked. Mostly going west."

"Well, it's not moving now. An eighteen wheeler jackknifed west of town about...oh, two hours ago. On an overpass if you can believe it. Still can't figure out how the driver managed that, but no matter. Anyway - turns out it was a tanker. The whole stretch has been shut down until the hazmat teams can get it cleaned up enough for the wreckers to clear the road. Given the congestion and how thin the county mounties are spread right now they tell me we're looking at a matter of days to get it open and it's a possibility we'll just get one lane westbound. You can probably imagine how that's going to go over."

"Okay," he said, not quite seeing how the Civil Air Patrol fit into this new development. "Do we need to direct traffic or get pictures from the air or what?"

"No. Sheriff wants us at James Fuller Middle School. The Red Cross is expanding their temporary shelter for anybody stuck behind the accident but they're short warm bodies, at least until the powers that be free up some people. I'm calling everybody. Seniors, cadets, guys who haven't showed up to meetings in six months...everybody. Supposedly there's a couple of community organizations willing to put up food and supplies, but we'll see how that goes. So bring your seventy-two and a change of clothes."

"How many we got so far?"

"Well, there's me - on the wrong side of the bridge - and there's you. If you would I'd appreciate you calling Schipper. I don't have his new number."

"Sure, cap. You bet."

"Great." Through the earpiece he could hear Harper draw a long breath. "Well, hell. I gotta go wake up a bunch of a kids and their parents. I expect that'll fly like a brick. Anyway, keep your phone on you. I'll call if anything else comes up."

"All right. I'll be out there in an hour or so."

Mike folded the cell and absentmindedly took the first pull off the bottle, a heavy syrupy sweet taste that cut through the last vestiges of sleep and let the gravity of the imagination begin to seep in and replace the haze.

That was the trick, he'd found. Too many people lost their heads and got stupid at the first sign of the unexpected, tried to grasp the big picture all at once. Like seeing a split-second image of a trainwreck and trying to paint it all by memory. The solution was to focus on something small. Penny-ante shit. Get that one little piece correct and then advance to the next.

First was the basic parts. His 72-hour gear was set already, the lion's share in an old army surplus ALICE pack in the closet. That was ready because it stayed ready. The other half, a butt pack and two ammo pouches that comprised the independent 24-hour gear, was hanging next to his working greens. On top of that he'd take his folding cot; chances were there'd be extras available at the shelter if he had to camp there overnight, but experience told him not to bank on it. From the kitchen he'd take the partial case of bottled water under the sink and a couple of cans of spaghetti and beef stew, stuff that didn't require additives like soups and which could be stomached cold.

That was about it for personal gear. He couldn't remember if he'd ironed creases into his greens and polished his boots or not. Didn't matter much, anyway. What he'd seen working minor disasters and a couple of big ones, nobody got too sore over little shit when there was work afoot. Nobody with any sense, at least.

As for transportation he'd topped off the Exploder before he'd picked Cindy up Saturday afternoon so aside from a couple of gallons burned out it was good. All the inspections were in date and he had a good spare, a breakdown kit, and two quart bottles of oil that stayed in there all the time. At last check none of the lights were burned out and the CB was operational. Once upon a time he'd carried a spare jerrycan on a bracket on the rear bumper, but some needy soul had relieved him of the extra a few weeks back and he hadn't yet replaced it. Fuel was always a concern, especially when traffic was heavy; sometimes the local gas stations gave emergency responders preference - usually by chit or prearranged agreement - sometimes not.

By and large he should be ready to go, save a couple of minor details. He ran a hand through his hair and sorted through the names in the phone until he came to Schipper, John Lee...aka Shifty, the flight's only other regular senior member besides Harper and himself. He had no idea whether it would pan out - the man burned his mornings part-timing at his uncle's boat shop out by the lake and spent the rest of his days doing pick-up metalwork around town. Where he might be in the dark hours of the morning was anybody's guess.

"Yellow."

"Hey. I wake you up?"

"Nah." Shifty drew the word out. He had a particularly unhurried way of speaking and Mike waited to see if there was anything else on the way. "I been up a while."

"Good. We got us an emergency."

"Yeah?"

"So I hear. Captain wants us at Fuller middle school. He says there's a shelter going up. We're supposed to go until the Red Cross or whoever can scrape up some competent help."

"Sounds fun." An indeterminate smacking sound from the other end. "Anything special we ought to be bringing?"

"He says seventy-two gear and second set of BDUs. No idea how long we'll be there."

"All right. You give me a few minutes?"

"Yeah, I gotta get my shit together. I'll be around in twenty or so."

"We'll see you."

His mind was moving again as he hung up the phone. Even before the show got rolling there were going to be issues. Always were. It was summer and a number of cadets were probably gone on vacation. Some would be held back by over-concerned parents, as happened anytime the flight got called out. Some wouldn't even answer the phones, either on account of the early hour or for other reasons less apparent. It was one of the great conundrums of the Civil Air Patrol that while cadets were the backbone, seniors did most of the heavy lifting. They might - might - get half a dozen kids to show, plus Harper, Shifty, and himself.

There was light under the bedroom door when he returned to the apartment. For that much he was grateful; light meant she was awake, and her being awake spared him having to tiptoe around while he put his gear together.

Cindy was propped up on her side and facing away, a marvelously tempting swirl of raven hair and pale skin. At his arrival she half-rolled, not quite covering herself in the process, and fixed him with dark eyes.

Of all the things he'd ever had that he never could have earned, she was the top of the list; she came from a good family, she worked at the bank in Everett - one of the few jobs in town that wasn't a dead end - possessed the patience of a saint, a sly sense of humor, and a pin-up girl figure about which she was oddly self-conscious. She wasn't a stick figure, no, but he'd always figured bones were for dogs. He liked her in the same way he liked N-frame Smith & Wessons - a little extra heft, maybe, but the same classy lines. She'd laughed when he explained that one.

"What's this?" she asked.

"Another CAP adventure," he said, and relayed Harper's message.

"How long will you be out?"

"Beats me."

"Tonight? Now?" She groaned. "Seriously?"

"Yeah, I know. " he said from the closet, where he was taking down the hangars that held his fatigue uniform. He tossed them on the foot of the bed and went back for the ALICE gear and pistol belt, which went into pile in the living room. She watched in dismay and he tried not too look too hard at her. Cindy was a difficult woman to part with, especially wearing just a bedsheet. She didn't complain, though. She didn't complain about much, really - and he was glad for that, because he knew there were a lot of things about him that would be nigh-on indefensible to woman who could have done better. Little things like having to leave in the middle of the night because some fuckwit tanker jockey spawned a hazmat spill in the middle of the Indy 500 at two in the morning.

He rustled a clean undershirt from the dresser and spared her a glance on the way to the shower. She had turned back and was reading one of her mysteries. For a moment he paused, trying to commit the details to memory. The curve of her bare shoulder. The way her hair curled down across her back. The smooth line where her waist flowed into the hip.

Fucking stupid tanker jockeys.

When he got out of the shower she was in the living half of the apartment, seated on the futon in front of the television in one of his t-shirt and a pair of khaki short-shorts. The sound was way down and the screen cast her in flickering silver and green. The news was on, though there wasn't a whole lot that counted for actual news at this hour.

"Here," she held up his BDU blouse. "I rolled the sleeves like you like. Your backpack and the other stuff is in the car and there's half a case of water and a bag of canned food in the back."

Mike took the blouse and buttoned it on, silent.

She walked with him down to the the parking lot where he kept the Exploder moored. Neither of them said anything, but the disappointment was palpable. Her schedule was pretty flexible for the most. His - and Clower's, for that matter - was another story. He didn't know how long before he'd be able to swing another full weekend off. It was the pushing July and this was only the second time he'd been able to arrange it this year.

"I'm sorry about all this," he said. "I shouldn't have answered the damn phone."

"You told them you'd go." She made a show of picking a piece of lint off his sleeve.

"Yeah, I know." He forced a smile to match hers, and she put her arms around him and laid her head on his shoulder. He pulled her close, inhaling her particular scent - not the smell of clean clothes or perfume or artificial aftermarket things, but something uniquely hers.

"I'll stay as long as I can tomorrow," she said, muffled through the thick cotton.

"I'm going to try and be back at a decent hour, but there's -"

"It's okay. Shit happens, right?"

"Yeah." He moved a hand along the small of her back and brushed his fingers along the waistband of her shorts. Shit happens. Shit happened. If he chanced to meet the genius who'd tried to turn a tractor-trailer rig around in the middle of an overpass shit was going to happen bigtime.

"I probably ought to be going," he said.

"Mmm-hmm." She cinched her arms momentarily tighter, then kissed him and took half a step back. "Be careful."

"Well, you know me."

"I do. That's why I told you. All the free-range idiots out there...desperate people...Reelfoot..." Of the three the last seemed to concern her most. She looked away and shuddered faintly. "I want you back in one piece. You don't do me any good otherwise."

"Yeah. I'll call when they turn us loose."

Cindy nodded her faint approval and he climbed into the Exploder. He let the engine sit idling for a minute until it smoothed out, then eased out of the parking space. In the rearview mirror he watched her until she rounded the corner for the stairs. Be careful. Shouldn't bother him in the least - she always said that. But tonight there was something different in the words, some small inflection or edge usually absent.

Most times his having to leave at odd hours or cancel a date or leave dinner early was for something stupid. The results of somebody wandering off, or landing a plane too hard and activating the emergency radio beacon, or flying into the ground someplace that wasn't an airport. The kind of situations that weren't to be handled lightly but which generally posed little threat to whomever got involved after the fact. So long as nobody got bitten by a rattlesnake or stepped off a cliff in the dark most call-outs were nonevents in the big scheme of things.

Tonight...tonight he wasn't sure. Something was off. Nothing he could quite articulate, just a gut feel that all the puzzle pieces were adding up to a picture he didn't much like. Shaking his head, he turned on the radio and punched through the handful of presets. Most stations tonight were playing an endless loop of public service announcements, warnings, and notifications. One was evidently an audio feed from one of the Everett news stations; he was pretty sure he recognized the voice as the guy who did hazardous weather updates. Another was the same canned message played ad infinitum. A few were just static or silence.



To collect Schipper meant crossing the railroad tracks, and crossing the railroad tracks meant passing from semi-respectable Everett into Little Mexico. Despite the name and the greater prevalence of houses painted in neon colors it wasn't much different from the rest of the city. The headlights picked up the shapes of rangy dogs and stray cats, head and tail down, always moving low. The yards in his peripheral vision were overgrown or dead, strewn with children's toys, garbage, or old car bodies. Now and again would be an exception, a well-kept little house with a chainlink fence that didn't sag and small clipped lawn and a tiny porch that was host to a table and chairs or a porch swing.

All the houses were old, really. Everett hadn't had a boom in years. Nobody came here anymore. Shaken down, the populace fit into three neat groups; those who were stuck here until they could make a break, those who were stuck here with no hope of a break, and those who had been here in better times and watched things deteriorate around them until they were stuck in a used-up husk of a town waiting for the inevitable.

The last hurrah was decades gone, an oil and gas boom that had landed them a pretty decent medical center, upped Rigland from a pretty decent strip to a regional airport, and drawn a whole swarm of speculators that swept into town on in a minor maelstrom of hope and promise and quietly packed up and left in darkness when the prospects turned sour. As it stood the medical center was passable and slowly declining. Rigland hadn't seen scheduled commuter service in years.

Nobody prospered here. Some, like Shifty, could bend and flex just enough to keep fed and ahead of the reaper. Most just lost jobs and went on welfare. More than a few started cooking meth, about the last vestige of homegrown industry in Wilkes County. Conveniently, the practice spawned a whole spate of law enforcement and corrections jobs; the sheriff's department hired on a semi-regular basis and rumor had it a big new prison was in the works just up the highway. Which, if true, would make it the largest of all the local employers for the foreseeable future.

When he pulled up the curb Shifty was standing by the door. At his feet was the lumpy form of an ALICE pack - pretty much the whole flight had those, seeing as they were durable, cheap, and eligible for CAP discounts from the surplus store out on the edge of town - and he was stuffing a fresh wad of chewing tobacco down in his cheek. Shifty and his habits were always interesting. Especially when the flight had occasion to stand review for visitors and there he was, the perfectly squared-away flight officer with one eye pinched in a permanent squint and a Skoal ring engraved neatly on his blouse pocket. Usually there was a brief ass-chewing by Harper and all was forgiven and forgotten, or ignored, until somebody with heavier costume jewelry than captain's bars made the point again.

Shifty threw his gear in the back and came around to the passenger side. Neither of them spoke until they reached the interstate, Mike fighting the aching tendrils of a headache and Shifty doing...whatever it was that Shifty did.

"Jesus," his passenger said when they turned out of the residential areas and onto the service road, all the while stretching a five-letter blasphemy into an exercise in extra syllables.

But he wasn't much off the mark. The entire state highway running west was clogged solid with refugee vehicles as far as the eye could see, some of them still occupied by stranded motorists. Far in the distance, the flashing lights of an emergency vehicle moved through the logjam, honking and squawking at the cars parked two-abreast on the shoulders and the westbound side of the median. It reminded him vaguely of the news coverage from his childhood showing the Iraqi highway of death, though nothing was visibly on fire yet and the A-10s were conspicuously absent. At least temporarily the highway had become the world's worst parking lot. It was going to take a minor miracle to get it moving again, too.

Meanwhile, the eastbound lanes were barred to everything save emergency traffic. He stopped at the nearest on-ramp, blocked by the two-tone shape of a DPS cruiser. Presently a state trooper unfolded from behind the wheel and approached. Mike rolled down the window and winced as the trooper shined a flashlight into the cab.

"You boys got business here?" The voice was ragged. Not impatient, but not likely to suffer any fools at this hour. Probably running an overlong shift on bad coffee and no chow, and the heat-retaining properties of body armor weren't likely to improve matters. Mike explained the news of the shelter and the trooper listened, impassive.

"Identification?" he asked, to which both of them fished out licenses and CAP cards. He looked doubtful. Actually he looked strung out. The trooper studied the cards wordlessly. A minute passed. Then two. Mike was beginning to wonder if he should say something. Or if the man had fallen asleep on his feet.

A crackle on his radio broke the silence. The trooper blinked, then returned the cards.

"Alright. I'll let you through. You might want to get some placards for this vehicle, though - " he rapped his knuckles on the side of the Ford. "Save you a lot of questions later."

"Yes, sir." Mike said. At some point the unit had possessed a number of magnets for that purpose. Damned if he knew where any of them had gone. He'd have to ask Harper later. Using personal transportation as organizational vehicles was a tricky matter when it came to regs. Fortunately - or unfortunately, depending on who was asked - the captain was pretty good about expediting certain matters when the mission called.

The cruiser rolled back. They drove up on the ramp and onto the highway proper. A mile or so distant, a helicopter rose from the blacktop and cut towards town, buffeting the Exploder as it passed overhead. When they arrived at the point of takeoff a fireman waved them on. For reasons not readily evident the authorities had erected a battery of work lights, directing the light to the far side of the highway. The glare flooded the cabin as they continued east. Even so the big attraction remained the clog on the other side.

"Ain't this some shit," Shifty mused.

[223shooteresc]

good stuff, need more

[Laager]

Looking real good!

[AeroRat]

In the three years she had lived in Longbranch Evelyn gradually come to understand what ten acres meant. Her first impression on arrival had been that her aunt and uncle lived on a farm. After all, it showed all the signs she'd come to associate with rural America through television; there was the small two-storey house, wooden framed and whitewashed once a year whether or it was needed or not, a barn of rough lumber and corrugated tin, and two cattle of indeterminate breed that wandered the back six of those acres. Her uncle owned both a tractor and a pickup truck and her aunt kept the flowerbeds that wrapped around the foot of the house.

The grass surprised her more than anything.

Back home grass was something encountered in small plots. A quarter acre in general, perhaps a half, hemmed in on all sides by six foot privacy fencing in the backyard and concrete driveways in the front. By the time she learned that the tractor was a riding lawnmower and the bovines were strictly present as an agricultural exemption she was too entranced for the facts to register as disappointment. After all, she had fallen through a strange portal into a world wholly unfamiliar, a place where open space was the norm and signs of civilization were the exception.

It seemed more alien still when her Uncle Charlie had taught her how to drive the tractor and trusted her with its use unsupervised, especially considering she hadn't shown much driving aptitude with anything more complicated than a bicycle prior to that point.

She found something faintly ironic in learning to drive a tractor before a car. One of those things that would have been unthinkable to her mother or stepfather. So crude, so unrefined, so...unforgivably rural. Like yard work it was a skillset to be left to less fortunate people from another part of town, usually brown ones with too many kids that spoke English as a second language and parked their truck on the yard in front of their house every night.

Evelyn didn't know if her mowing the yard was scandalous. She sort of hoped it was.

She'd have been glad for some wind, though. Or clouds. Pretty much anything besides a thirty-fifth day of clear, cloudless, triple-digit plus weather. Given a few more week she guessed there wouldn't be much of a lawn to keep. Her Aunt Beatrice was running the sprinklers in the evenings but that was a stopgap measure in a losing fight. More than once she'd wondered if God had intended for people to live in Texas, and if so, whether or not they were meant to have green plants.

The best thing about working outside, though, was that it gave her time to think. And today she needed to do a lot of thinking. A night's worth of mediocre sleep had neither erased nor made sense of what exactly had transpired at the tank farm the day before. The more she thought about it the less sure she was herself; she hadn't actually seen anything. Heard, yes, but a collection of steel that had been baking in the sun all day was bound to settle and creak after dark, and there were so many unsecured pieces of loose trash that even the lightest of breezes was certain to make noise. Had there been a breeze? She couldn't recall.

The handprints on the back of the truck...that was unsettling. Highly so. By the same token, though, she didn't even know how long the prints had been there. Or even if they were blood. For all she knew one of the day shift idiots had been playing in grease or brake fluid and smeared their fingers across the tailgate. The effect of various semi-liquids sitting all day in the sun probably wouldn't be much different from blood in temperature or consistency - sticky and sort of gooey. Besides, she'd learned from living in the country that blood had a particular scent. A hot, coppery odor not present. At least not that she'd smelled.

What weirded her out more was the closing of the airport. That sort of thing led her to believe there was something larger and less benign afoot. Of course she'd decided to seize the opportunity - days off were a fair rarity at Clower. According to Mike they usually stayed open Easter, Thanksgiving, and the 4th of July for God's sake. What kind of sadist did that? She didn't know, but she wasn't snubbing opportunity when it came around. She'd go back tomorrow with the defense that she'd been ordered off by Deputy Reed. If the FBO was locked up and there was a CLOSED sign in the window she'd just return to Longbranch and wait until somebody called.

She was torn on that count. She loved her some downtime, but...she needed the work. Her uncle's retirement check still showed up in the mail every month like clockwork. Her aunt worked part-time at a little cafe in Longbranch proper when business was good, but business hadn't been good in a while and she was lucky to pull ten hours a week. Which left Evelyn and her sixty-four hours of minimum wage pay as a good chunk of their income. It was lucky her aunt canned vegetables and brought home scraps sometimes. Those two things helped to take some of the sting out of the food and grocery bills, if only a little.

She rounded the house and began another circuit. Out of her peripheral vision she saw the cows moving towards the barn. No great surprise. Uncle Charlie had always said that cows were a thousand-odd pounds of pure stupid, and anything that would stand out in the sun wearing a black fur coat certainly fit the bill. She thought it passing strange that they'd be moving at a trot, but...cattle were stupid. There was no telling why.

Another couple of turns around the house came and went before she saw the reason, if only in passing. She stopped the mower and climbed off, shielding her eyes against the sun. From the slightly higher vantage point she could see it now. A dog of some kind, not much taller than the knee-high grass, moving at a staggering lope in the general direction of the retiring cattle.

A large, square head. Probably a pit bull of some stripe.

Dammit.

Strays were a huge problem in Longbranch. Or, more accurately, their dumbshit owners were. The origin was twofold. First, the stupid redneck neighbors who - as upstanding red-blooded Americans - believed that their rugrats' lives were somehow incomplete without a puppy, and thereafter allowed Junior and Missy to bring home a whole parade of mutts, usually at a rate of a couple a year. Of course, of the half dozen or so occupants of the trailer house or tarpaper shanty or government digs were always more in love with the idea of having a dog than actually raising one. Spay and neuter were terms unfamiliar to the local white trash. Leash laws fell under the purview of Jesus-hating flag-burning big-government communist intrusion. Suggestions of fencing in their mongrel hordes was a notion less galling, but not by much.

Second, the well-meaning but ultimately naive view held by natives or suburbia or city apartment dwellers, who - for similar reasons to the rednecks - allowed their kids a dog for Christmas one year without considering what all pet ownership entailed. Usually the shine held on for a couple of months before the kids lost interest, Mommy got sick of having her dress shoes chewed into rawhide, and Daddy tired of shelling out for a fifty pound bag of Purina every week. So one fine day Daddy loaded up Rex or Max or whatever the other little preciouses had named their newest bestest friend and took a long trip out past the city limits where began another magical disconnect from reality.

Evelyn left the mower parked by the back porch, ticking as it cooled, and went inside. Her bedroom was upstairs, first door on the left, and she went to her closet and pushed aside the hanging clothes to reveal a pair of standing canvas and leather cases in the back corner. She felt for the lighter of the two and laid it out across the foot of her bed.

There was a long-held delusion among urban and suburban pet owners that there existed a place called The County. However they might picture it, The County was a wondrous land of plenty, populated by kindly old farmers and their womenfolk, people who rode John Deere tractors and kept perfectly hedged victory gardens out behind the hundred year old farmhouse. The men drove dusty pickup trucks and wore boots and spent their days jawing at the feedstore. The women wore aprons over flowerprint dresses and hung laundry on the clothesline and knitted. And somehow in this little piece of Norman Rockwell paradise, this good-ol-boy Xanadu, a smiling pastel Jesus with clear skin and designer hair had neglected to introduce dogs.

And so it was only sensible - only right! - that the family pet should be spared the indignity of the dog pound and, God forbid, the threat of the euthanasia needle. After all, just out past the county line old Farmer John and his wife were looking for a hound to keep them company. Ever since their daughter done gone off to college and their boy went in the service. Dogs were animals, after all. They needed sunlight and fresh air and freedom. A big old farm was just the place.

So like a chickenshit they'd drop them off by the side of the road, or at the foot of a long dirt driveway, or on occasion set them over the first chainlink fence. Then they'd drive away, smiling kinda sad to themselves in the mirror, paying lip service to regret but quietly glad that they'd managed to rid themselves of this extra responsibility. Having abandoned their charge and fled they drove home, knowing in their hearts that they'd done right by their animal. Because ol' Rex, he had some wolf blood in him. Wild dog. In later times they might think of their former pet leading a pack of coyotes. Hunting and surviving with the best. And in his absence they could be damn proud.

The leather case was old and cracking in places, worn through in others. Feeling around the edges she found the pull tab of the zipper and drew it along the edge. Once or twice the teeth caught and she turned it over and picked pieces of the lining out of the mechanism. She worked the zipper to the end and laid open the top flap of the case. The inside was lined in a beige-colored cotton and smelled of dust and spent gunpowder and years of oil soaked into the padding. Sandwiched between the halves was a shotgun, well oiled and gleaming dully.

It struck her that her hands were shaking.

Out of habit she drew the pump back and looked into the chamber, ever cautious of the bolt that protruded from the rear of the receiver. Empty. She'd never knowingly stored a gun loaded, but her Uncle Charlie had drummed into her the importance of checking. She closed the action and thumbed the hammer forward. And she hesitated.

They brought dogs here. Dozens in a month. Abandoned them all to keep them from a cold, clinical death on a veterinarian's steel table somewhere. But it didn't work that way. Contrary to the belief, strays were unwelcome by owners of commercial livestock. A former pet turned loose in the country lived on borrowed time. They died from starvation or infections of wounds picked up in dogfights. Some died under the wheels of cars on the road or the hooves of horses or cattle or mules. Those that made it past all that met their end by farmers and landowners that viewed an unfamiliar animal as a threat to stock and livelihood and killed them wholesale.

She walked to the dining room and laid the Winchester on the end of the table. In the kitchen she began a search of the lower drawers, several of which had been pressed into service as storage for bits and pieces of hardware for her uncle's various projects. The largest was a repository of tools - plastic sleeves of screwdrivers with pieces missing, bags of washers or commonly sized screws, a rusting hammer, a set of wrenches - and wedged into the back corner she found a yellowed paper box of shotgun shells. She put the box beside the gun and pried open the corner.

In the light of the window she studied one of the shells. The red hull was smooth and faintly waxy, a faded numeral six inked on the side. The brass at the head was discolored with a faint green tint. She had no idea how old this stuff was, but she'd stupidly misplaced her last few boxes of buckshot and neither her shoulder nor the gun were built for handling slugs.

From the living room she heard the couch springs squeak. Toenails clicked across the kitchen's linoleum floor and a damp nose pressed against her hand. On instinct she moved her hand to rub the ears, feeling the head move to follow. She looked down at the dog. Her dog. Ranger had been something her uncle had allowed with certain unspoken reservations, a stray to which she'd taken a particular liking. So much so that she'd - stupidly, in hindsight, but not regretted - put herself between him and the shotgun when she figured out what exactly Uncle Charlie meant by 'handling it'.

He was what was known as a Border Aussie - half border collie, half Australian shepherd. Judging by his color and pattern Ranger's mother had supplied the Australian half, and presumably the blue eyes. Somehow, having a blue-eyed dog amused her. She smiled to herself as the he stretched, the long pink tongue curling and the ears pinned back. Excepting supervised outings, Ranger spent most of his daylight hours sleeping. On a good day, when nobody was watching, he slept on the couch. It gave her aunt fits, but in time she'd learned to accept the inevitable. Life was rough for him.

She watched him as he moved to investigate his food bowl by the pantry and crunched through his mid-day snack. In the meantime she counted out four shells from the box and fed them into the bottom of the shotgun. When the last was in she racked the action and stuffed in a fifth. She very cautiously lowered the hammer to the half-cock notch and looked out the back window.

He was a dog. He should be outside, marking his trees and rolling in disgusting things and swimming in the cows' water tank. But she couldn't leave him alone, even in the chain-link confines of the yard, and she wouldn't risk having him killed or torn open or shot by the stupid asshole neighbors when their dog jumped the fence and started shit.

Bastards. Fucking stupid irresponsible bastards.

She looked past the fence, past the cows grazing in the back lot and into the farmer's field beyond. It was part of the reality in which she had to live, brought about by people who couldn't face it themselves. She couldn't even leave her dog outside anymore because a bunch of assholes she'd never met wouldn't do their part. But that was how it usually worked. Knowing that didn't make her feel any less ill. When it wore off it didn't leave her any less upset, either.

The thought of people abandoning their animals was one thing. The mental picture of laying the bead on a dog and pulling the trigger with intent to kill was enough to make her heartsick. Not that she'd mind popping the former owners, but somehow those never came around.

Before she stepped onto the porch she dialed the sheriff's department to report the possibility of a dangerous animal. The woman at the other end told her that all available cars were tied up at the moment, but if possible they would send a unit when the next one was free. Judging by the response, she read it differently.

She was on her own.

Of course, she wouldn't have bothered had there not been cows at stake. Were it just her and Aunt Beatrice and Ranger she'd have been content to bottle herself up in the house and wait.

Instead she found herself out in the sun, crossing the half-mowed yard to the gate. The shotgun felt ungainly and clammy in her hands. Unnaturally cold and somehow more serious by the slight extra weight of the five shells, the subtle difference signifying the change from a simple machine to an implement of death. When she walked she held it at waist level, the muzzle angled down to the ground. She'd found she was a pretty fair shot that way. The recoil didn't seem so sharp at the hip as it did from the shoulder. Had to watch that bolt coming back, though; her first time shooting it she'd forgotten, and she still had the pale scar on the top of her thumb where she'd peeled it good.

She opened the upper half of the dutch door and looked inside. Both cows stared back, highlighted against the opposite entrance. The dog was nowhere to be seen.

Slipping the latch, she let herself in.

The barn was a long affair, built to house more than its two current residents. At some point in the not too distant past there had been a horse here, though it had been gone before she arrived. Now it was mostly storage for the things that didn't fit in the garage and stuff that was seldom used but which somebody, for whatever reason, saw fit to keep around.

Something rattled in the loft and she started, pivoting to the noise and snapping the business end of the old Winchester up. Perched insolently on a crossbeam, a one-eared barn cat looked down at her with mild contempt. They had a history, her and the barn cat, and if she hadn't been worried about putting holes in the roof she'd have blown it clear to the next county. Instead she knelt, found a dried chunk of cow shit - another of those little country niceties to horrify her mother - and pegged it square in the ribs. It lit off like a cheap firework and shot hissing and spitting into the shadows, presumably to higher ground. If she ever had the fortune to catch it in the open the lesser angels of her nature might lead her to square up for a couple of others scars.

She walked to the far opening, now keeping her ears out for both stray dogs and the newer threat of screaming feline death from above. Neither materialized and for a minute she stood looking out on the endless acres of golden grass. The tops rippled gently from a wind she didn't feel.

If something was out there it had gone to hiding. Or better yet, maybe it had just cut across. If there was to be a killing of dogs she'd as soon it happened on somebody else's watch and property. If, on the other hand, there was a sudden invasion of feral cats, she'd very happily sit on the roof with her Winchester and a case of No. 9 shot and make a day of it.

Worthless mangy bastards.

Shaking her head, she tucked the shotgun under her arm and returned to the house. The phone was ringing as she approached. The house phone, not her cell. Her aunt calling, probably; she'd been notoriously close-mouthed towards her coworkers when it came to her home number. After a few weeks at Clower she'd even lied to the boss and told him the house phone was disconnected, as ignoring cell phones didn't work half as well when a determined caller had a secondary number. She put the shotgun on the table and made sure the door was shut.

"Hello."

"Hey Evie, this is Del -"

Del. From work.

Shit.

Dammit. Fucking dammit.

"How did you get this number?" she demanded. For reasons she couldn't entirely put to words she felt offended at the very existence of this call. It was an invasion of her home and privacy.

"Mike told me to try it. He said he thought it was disconnected but it might turn something up. Anyway, he's tied up doing...something. I forget. But I got a call from Clower saying there's going to be six national guard helicopters coming through in about an hour."

"So? We're closed."

"Right," Del sounded oddly giddy. No surprise there. She'd always considered him the mildly-retarded sidekick to Mike's top-dog asshole. "That's the beautiful part. If somebody wants gas while we're closed, we charge a call-out fee, right?"

"Yeah. So?"

"It's fifty bucks."

"Yeah." She knew that. Everybody at Clower knew that.

"Per bird," he said. "Fifty bucks per tail number. I don't really need the help, but if you want to make three hundred bucks for half an hour's work you got a chance. No sticking tanks, no clocking in, no opening/closing. You want in? I mean, I'll call the day shift guys if not -"

"I'll be there," she cut in. Fifty dollars was enticing. Three hundred dollars was essentially an extra paycheck. And it was paid by the customer, so Clower couldn't bitch about being fleeced by employees. In a way this was fleecing the government instead, but...she'd long since figured she'd never see the money that came out of her check for social security and assorted geezer medical programs, so she was willing to chalk it up as a fair trade.

She took a few minutes to hangar the tractor and wash her face. Then she topped off Ranger's food and water. The Winchester was still on the kitchen table and she was inclined to take it back upstairs. On second thought she propped it in the corner of the pantry and scrawled out a quick note to her aunt, whenever she might return, that she'd spotted a strange dog in the backyard. She made a whirlwind pass through the house, noting left and right the things she'd meant to get done today - vacuum the living room, get the dishes in the sink, wash the contents of the laundry hamper. Regrettable that it would have to wait, but none of those jobs were three-figure work.

Ranger was asleep as she went through the living room, fetched up against the armrest of the couch with his feet hanging off the side. At intervals his entire hindquarters twitched. Evelyn smiled to herself. A dumb half-breed stray he might be, but he was her buddy. She'd be lost without him. If Clower was still formally shut down tomorrow she'd see about going for a run. Ranger liked those. Whatever else he was, he carried the genes of dogs that thrived on work and exertion. He was also getting a little thick through the middle.

Quietly she shut and locked the front door. She'd have loved to have taken him running tonight, but...three hundred dollars could stretch a long way in the hands of people well practiced at doing more with less. She sorted through her purse and came up with her keyring, tossing it from hand to hand as she walked to the garage. A long way.

[Laager]

Really enjoying the story!

[223shooteresc]

good stuff, thanks for the new chapter

[AeroRat]

No pointy sticks yet?

I'm surprised. And kind of scared.

[URBAN ASSAULT]

No pointy sticks yet?

I'm surprised. And kind of scared.

Sharpening 'em as we speak !

Truthfully, I'm really liking everything I've read so far, but when something rings false or there is a glaring typo I'll be sure to chuck a spear at you to try to improve your excellent story... as long as you don't mind of course.



-urban

[AeroRat]

Heh. I'll put on my boiler plate.

[Laager]

Be still my beating heart.............it is not a new chapter.......moar.........

[AeroRat]

They pulled off the road and into the dirt parking lot, yellow-white dust boiling up from the wheels to momentarily blot out the world beyond the windshield. Before getting out he picked a fresh bottle of water from the case between seats. He put down half, screwed the cap back in place, and shoved what was left in the leg pocket of his greens. Water was the trick today. Not the big thing. The only thing.

Since sunup his day had been a whole palette of washed-out colors; the brittle gold of dead foliage, the saturated powder blue of the sky, the thick dust that was quick to rise and slow to settle. The world had taken on a decidedly sepia tint until the whole affair blurred into the uneasy confluence between dreams and waking reality. In point of fact there were broad swaths between the start of search and the present when he wasn't sure whether he'd been lucid or not. Long stretches of nothing - no traffic on the road, no livestock in the fields, no signs of anybody alive anywhere. Nothing but the steady rushed of hot air past the window, the occasional crackle on the radio, and the odd roadblock manned by law enforcement or national guard.

Carlo Echeverria, the corporal driving in the humvee, was in worse shape yet. Where Mike had run a twelve hour day on two hours of sleep Echeverria - he answered to Etch - had seen two dawns, and if things kept on at the present pace he'd get in his second sunset before he had the chance to grab some downtime upon their return to the shelter.

As near as Mike could gather Etch had been part of the guard presence in San Antonio before orders shifted them north to the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Somewhere north of Austin they'd been redirected and the convoy cut away on what was supposedly a green lieutenant's shortcut to Everett. The shortcut didn't work out too well, but it did have the effect of sparing those involved the horror of shooting the I-35 corridor through Waco which, by scuttlebutt, was a near-complete write off.

"Yeah," Etch had said, fishing around the pile of trash, maps, and paperwork on the dashboard. "Waco's pretty much a shithole, but it always was. My sister got a scholarship to Baylor, you know, but she only went for like a semester. I went up to see her once or twice. Place was fucked, man. You got a little enclave of rich motherfuckers right there on the interstate and everything else was like fucking Detroit. And that was when the power was on."

Maybe more than anything else, Mike had discovered his new companion was a talker. He talked at great length about anything and everything. He had opinions on anything and everything. Sometimes he had multiple opinions, and sometimes they didn't even conflict.

Conversation stalled as the dust began to go down. The cause was a squat building of red brick, corrugated tin, and heavily weathered wood siding. Two old square gas pumps stood out front in the meager shade of a flat-roofed covers. RED MAN'S COUNTRY STORE was printed around the edges in fading paint, and like everything else they'd encountered today the place was dead.

The Red Man's County Store was one more in a long list of unscheduled stops on the way to Granite Falls to pick up a reserved pallet of water and canned goods from the Wal-Mart. What had become painfully apparent in the meantime was that one pallet probably wasn't going to last the day, if even that long. So Echeverria's superior had authorized him to make emergency requisitions as supplies became available; put bluntly, the man had a license to smash and grab.

Mike was still unclear as to how he was affected by the order, whether he was covered, and whether or not it was even remotely legal. Hell, his presence was a last-minute addition, something worked out between the powers that be at Camp 70D - formerly James Fuller Middle School - as a way of stretching an already thin national guard presence. He was supposed to stop by the CAP building and pick up a few things, and rather than send two vehicles it was easier to add another stop to Echeverria's route. When he'd first been told he expected more. A couple of five-ton trucks and at least half a dozen guardsmen at the least. Surprised didn't come close when he found it was him, the corporal, and a single cargo humvee.

He climbed out, stretching slowly, and reached behind the seat for the twenty pound hammer - another compromise being made today - and balanced it over his shoulder. Echeverria had an M16, one of the older models sans all the whiz-bang cool gadgetry as seen when the evening's coverage of the ongoing excitement in the Arab world. Being a measly civilian, albeit a uniformed one, Mike didn't have the same option. He'd split the difference by having the corporal stop by the Exploder so he could pick up his favorite caveman weapon.

Echeverria had eyed the sledgehammer, then him. Then he shrugged.

The two of the stopped in front of the station. A sad little pile on an overgrown lot. Several tons of scrap iron out back in the form of wrecked cars. The front windows were tinted dark and plastered with advertisements, notices, and dead neon signs, and the covered walkway up front was cluttered with newspaper stands, an ice machine, and a number of empty wooden picnic tables. The sort of place that had gone months without even basic external upkeep care, a sin forgiven by the regular clientèle as long as the refrigerators within kept the beer cold and the nightcrawlers alive.

Pressing a shielding hand to the glass, he looked inside. Had he not known better he'd say a bomb had gone off within. In the dim light he made out shelves overturned, broken glass, and no lights. Nothing moved.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Echeverria open the ice machine and stick his head inside.

"Anything?"

"Nothing." Etch left the door hanging open and Mike angled over for a look. The bottom of the machine was littered with dozens of plastic bags. Nobody'd emptied the machine. No looters, thieves, or roving gangs out here. No ice, either.

Shame, too. In a Texas summer ice might be more valuable than gold.

For all appearances the power had been shut off for some time. Word through the grapevine said that the electric company was doing that as an emergency measure. Cutting the supply to less-populated parts of the region in hopes of avoiding blackouts in the cities and towns and, by extension, keeping the risk of riots and civil unrest to a minimum. Which probably worked just fine until Reelfoot showed up and turned social order into a crapshoot.

"You see anything?" he called.

"There's some cold storage in the back," Etch said. "I can't see if there's anything left."

He waited for a minute as the corporal pounded on the door and shouted for anybody inside to present themselves. The move was strictly a formality at this point. An act. When he gave up he looked to Mike and shrugged.

Mike hefted the sledgehammer and sized up the double doors. Light gauge steel frame with an upper and lower glass panel and a single lock mechanism about waist high. The glass was bisected in the middle by a push-bar on the inside and webbed through with chickenwire, the idea being to deter the casual rural miscreant. Swinging doors. Not sliding.

He touched the head of the hammer to the glass just above the bar, then drew back and swung. Two or three solid hits had the reinforcing wires sheared out of the frame and he backed off. Etch reached in through the hole and twisted the lock, pulling the door open with a weak pneumatic hiss.

Almost immediately Mike stepped in something sticky. An ice cream freezer near the door, the treats within having melted and oozed into a sticky, sour-smelling trap for the unwary. He supposed that was the price of admission for state-sponsored crime.

Shelter or not, something about the whole smash-and-grab nature of doing things for the public good didn't sit well.

The odor didn't help. Nor did the damp, dark heat of a small building shut up and exposed to the sun without artificial cooling. Feeling lightheaded, he pushed the unease to the side and moved deeper into the store. The rear wall was a solid bank of glass refrigerator doors, progressing from beer at the leftmost to sports and soft drinks in the center to water and dairy on the right. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the cases were mostly empty save several dozen gallons of milk in varying grades. Probably best to leave those be.

At the far end of the freezers was a short hall. A unisex restroom to the right, and office ahead, and an EMPLOYEES ONLY to the left. He was willing to pass on all three - but Etch stood with his head cocked. He nodded at the middle door.

"You hear that?"

Mike paused. He didn't hear anything. Or maybe he did. Sort of a scrabbling sound on the other side. Like a mouse, but heavier. Probably a raccoon or possum that had found a way in once the people were gone.

He tapped the door with the hammer.

Silence.

Then it came again. A soft thud against the door. He looked to a Etch a heartbeat before the thud repeated, heavier this time.

Suddenly he felt the urge to say something. To announce their presence. But what to say? Civil Air Patrol? Nobody knew what that was. Disaster relief? Not much better. We're from the government and we're here to help? Knowing the prevailing attitudes in Wilkes County that last was some kind of coded invitation for whoever was on the other side of the wall to level a gun at the door and run the magazine dry.

The crashes were heavier now, more violent. He retreated to someplace behind Echeverria and his rifle and choked up on the hammer. Then just as abruptly as it began the noise cutout.

"I didn't hear anything if you didn't."

"I'm thinking that way, yeah." Etch had the rifle up now, pointed but not yet aimed. He was moving slowly backwards in a strange sort of dance, not willing to take his attention from whatever lurked behind Door Number Two but equally disinclined to cut and run.

They were as far as the entrance by the time it broke loose. From somewhere deep in the shadows came the sound of splintering wood. Halting footsteps approached, accompanied by the clatter and rustle of things knocked off the shelves. Then it hesitated.

"Out," Etch said. "Now."

Mike didn't argue. Instead, he turned and found himself staring at his first real-live up-close victim of Reelfoot. Once a girl, it was now a pale, lumpy imitation, the skin spotted with bulges the size and shape of chicken eggs. Milky, unfocused eyes seemed to look past him.

Nobody moved.

A heartbeat later the spell was broken by the high crack of the rifle. A lot of things happened fast then. Sometime between the first and second shots the girl at the door gave off a low sigh and stumbled forward, drooling.

Wishing he had something better Mike shoved her back with the sledgehammer. She hissed and swatted him with a three-fingered hand and leaned into the next push, leading with her chin. A glancing blow to the side of the head took her off balance. Still she came up swinging, and this time he connected under the jaw with the longer blunt top of the hammer. He felt something give - a sickening, wet, bone-breaking crunch - and the infected stumbled backwards and facedown into the parking lot, where she promptly rolled over and rose shakily to her knees. Little chunks of busted teeth dribbled over painted lips to stick on her misshapen chin.

Pressing the attack, he swung again. The hammer connected low on the ribcage and she went over like a rag doll. The sound she made was something he'd only heard from dying animals. The rapid, shallow breathing. Panting almost, the lungs spasming. Though some of that was him, he realized. He leaned heavily on the sledgehammer with both hands and watched the death throes, trying to make some kind of sense of it all.

He got nothing.

Presently Echeverria came out of the gas station. The corporal studied the scene briefly, then walked to the girl and held the muzzle of his rifle a few inches from the temple. The prone figure jumped at the report.

In the humvee Etch picked up the radio and reported contact with a pair of infected. Two dispatched. No friendlies lost. No recoveries of water or food supplies. They were proceeding to the pickup point and keeping an eye out for other potential stores. There was no more to report at this time.

The corporal was uncharacteristically quiet until the arrival in Granite Falls.

"Shee-it." Echeverria broke the silence.

Evidently the Wal-Mart was a popular place for the end of the world. The parking lot was crammed to overflowing - cars, trucks, recreational vehicles...even a couple of tents pitched on the asphalt. A huge crowd milled near the doors, though from a distance it was hard to say that any of them were getting inside. The corporal laid on the horn and moved through the masses at a crawl, gesturing for the hollow-eyed bystanders to clear a path.

Mike watched the human wave as it eddied and flowed. Did they know what was loose just down the road? If so, why did they stay?

At once he was confronted with a revelation. Most of these people were going to die. From starvation, from dehydration, sun exposure or Reelfoot. They were running on borrowing time now. And most of them didn't seem to care. The resignation was written on their faces.

These were people who lived in a world where chaos was kept in careful check by a well-tended safety net; the water from the kitchen tap was safe to drink; the toilets would flush. Lights came on at the flip of a switch. If the house caught fire, there were people to respond. If an ambulance was needed, one could be on-scene in minutes. Police caught criminals. Jails kept them conveniently locked away. If those undesirables couldn't be eliminated they could at least be kept at arm's length. Reduced to so minute a chance that it won't happen to me and it can't happen here were almost valid defenses.

"On the roof," Echeverria said. "You see them?"

He looked. Two figures directly above each entrance, clad in black. Propped up against the facade he made out the shapes of rifles topped with long, fat scopes.

"Hired guns. Guess the management don't trust in the inherent goodness of man, eh?"

The inherent goodness of man had been an earlier conversation. Echeverria didn't buy it. He didn't buy into the inherent goodness of anything except tits, horsepower, Johnny Walker Green, and bullets of thirty caliber or better. It had all been covered in some detail.

"Shit." Mike stuck his head out the window. He didn't imagine the crowd was liable to sit by and just let them roll home with a bed full of pinto beans and Ozarka. "How are we supposed to get to the pickup? And how are we supposed to get out?"

Echeverria didn't answer.

Not that it mattered much. The crowd had closed in again, seemingly oblivious to the presence of the humvee, and marooned them a good hundred yards from the nearest entrance. Meantime the sky was assuming the tinge of early dusk. Full dark wouldn't be for an while yet, but this wasn't the kind of place he cared to spend time after nightfall. Darkness made people even more short-tempered and suspicious than usual and the middle of the mob was a bad place to be when its constituents suddenly got a raging hard-on for all things government.

The break came in the form of more hired guns. A quartet emerged from an emergency exit and pushed through the crowd. Mike watched the pair that passed the humvee on his side; dressed all in black, armed with short carbines or submachine guns and swaddled up all in black. By the extra girth under their vests he presumed them to be wearing armor. On one he saw the brief flash of an insignia of some kind, muted gray against black. Not military - there were no unit, name, or rank devices to be seen. Private security, then. Contractors.

One appeared at the driver's window and spoke briefly with Echeverria. Mike only caught the conversation in brief snatches. Even calm, the crowd outside kept the air alive with a steady buzz.

Whoever they were, they worked fast. Two climbed into the back of the humvee. The others moved ahead, pushing a way through the mass. Through hand signals the leader directed them around to the loading docks in the back. A hasty perimeter of chainlink panels had been erected, reinforced at the foot by bags of sand, cement, and potting soil. Four more of the black-clad men kept watch at the makeshift security gate. Another pair strolled back and forth atop the building, rifles slung. At intervals one would stop and peer out towards the horizon with binoculars.

Seven-oh delta wasn't the only effort to send trucks, evidently; after some gesturing and a few words between Echeverria and the element leader they fell in at the back of a line of emergency vehicles, cargo trucks, and one small flatbed trailer hitched behind an SUV in highway patrol colors. At present an unmarked pickup was backed down in the loading well. Two men were stacking boxes of supplies in the bed. Neither was moving all that fast.

"You seeing this?" Etch said.

"Yeah, I see it. We'll be here all damn night."

For a minute, Mike pondered the meaning of his own grim words. Night meant the thousands in the parking lot would become anonymous, faceless figures. They'd be hungry and thirsty. Desperate. In his mind he saw them in little clumps, sitting on tailgates or under the makeshift shelter of tarps, talking low amongst themselves. Little by little they'd show the signs of unrest. Then they'd begin to move. In pockets at first. Then as groups. Before long they'd travel like a visible current in the aimless body of the assembled. Then somebody would start shouting or throwing rocks. The press would reach the doors and spill around the sides of store. Whoever got caught in front of that would be in a world of hurt, sandwiched between those with nothing to lose everything they stood to gain.

He didn't know if the men on the roof had night vision or crowd control equipment. Even if so it wouldn't make much difference to anybody on the ground. He just knew he didn't want to be around to see if his theories panned out.

"Where you going?" Echeverria called after him. He only raised a hand in passing on his way to the dock.



Even with the three of them loading it was a good hour before Echeverria backed the humvee down the ramp. Just as soon the corporal went into the store; the events of the day notwithstanding, this was less a smash and grab and more a formal requisition, meaning signatures and bills of lading were required. Presumably the various agencies involved meant to settle up later. As a member of the national guard Echeverria's stripes trumped Mike's bars and so it was his name on the paperwork. Mike picked up his blouse and folded it over his arm. Everything from the shoulders down burned and his t-shirt was soaked through. He'd sleep well tonight and be hurting in the morning.

"Hey," one of the dock monkeys called. Mike turned to see him gesturing with his chin at a double-decker case of canned energy drinks, half in shadow. "You forgot something."

Mike knew full well that they hadn't. Nonetheless, he grinned and stowed it in the back of the humvee. On second thought he went back and cut a slit in the plastic wrapping, drawing out one of the cans and concealing it under the drape of the shirt.

He was waiting in the passenger seat when Echeverria returned, dreading the extra stop at the CAP building and the radio gear he was to pick up. Old, heavy stuff that looked like it came out of a missile silo after the Cold War fizzled. None of the pieces weighed less than a good forty pounds. Most had fixed carrying handles, fortunately, but the set was nevertheless a graceless, bulky affair.

Echeverria looked like refried shit. He moved slowly, his eyes sluggish in his head, and every movement labored. Once the engine kicked over he sat for almost a full minute, staring through the windshield at the now-closed loading docks.

"Here." Mike pushed the can at him. The recognition dawned slow.

"Holy shit, man - " he turned the energy drink slowly, studying every detail as if he'd been offered a long-lost holy relic. "Where did you find this?"

"Dock ape gave it to me."

"You don't want it?"

"That?" Mike forced a grin. "I always heard drinking that shit makes your heart explode and your dick fall off. But if you can chug that sucker and get us back in one piece I'll give you a whole case."

Echeverria popped the can, then took a long pull and belched. "You know, you're okay. For a gringo and a butterbar."

"Drive, wetback."

The moon was full up and the last trace of daylight gone by the time they made it back to the shelter. A sheriff's deputy with an AR-15 met them at the entrance of the parking lot, and after a brief exchange of formalities shone his flashlight towards the school proper. They rumbled to the to delivery entrance, Mike already thinking on the next thing and Etch hunched over his partial case of carbonated adrenaline. The way he was guarding the stuff Mike was amazed he wasn't calling it Precious.

Between the arrival and the unloading was something of a daze pockmarked with oddly unimportant flashes of sharp clarity. He stayed around until a cadet showed up with a cart to claim the radio equipment, then bid a brief farewell to Etch, threw the hammer up on his shoulder - winced - and staggered off to find Harper.

On the way he fished his cell phone from his back pocket. The display showed six missed calls, a few from numbers he didn't recognize. Two were of somewhat greater concern. He redialed and pushed the phone to his ear.

No dial tone, no busy signal, no nothing.

Shit. The cell towers were probably overloaded. That usually happened with disasters, right? Either put out of commission or overwhelmed by the sudden surge in call volume. He folded the phone and put it away. He'd heard that sometimes text messages would get through, albeit delayed, but just now he barely had the dexterity to operate a doorknob. It'd have to wait.

Unsurprisingly, he found Harper in the middle of the excitement. The shelter management had set up the beginnings of a communications center in one of the science labs. The captain, being a pretty experienced hand at disasters and also the flight's authority on things radio, wasn't far away.

"And you found everything."

"We did." Mike tried to stand semi-straight, an act made somewhat more difficult because he swore there were roaches on the walls in his peripheral vision. And spiders. Big ones.

"Very well," Harper glanced up from the table where he'd spread the guts of an electronic device of some kind.

"Will that be all, captain?"

"For now. The shelter director gave us the room next door. Most of the others are already bedded down for the night. They tell me there's a shower around here somewhere, but I haven't found it. Either way I suggest you knock off for a few hours. Any argument?"

"Not from this quarter, sir."

"Good. I'll find something here for you tomorrow. I'd as soon not send my officers out two days straight."

Mike nodded. His brain felt fuzzy and he couldn't think of a proper answer. Then it flashed through the haze.

"One thing," he said.

"Yes?"

"Do you have a landline phone I could use?"

Harper eyed him for a moment. Then he pointed with a screwdriver towards the back corner of the room. "Be quick," he said.

Mike found a student desk and sat on the back of the seat, elbows balanced and his knees and his forehead propped against his knuckles. Slowly he punched the numbers on the pad. Then he waited. Two rings. Five. Seven.

"Harris residence." A gruff voice. What time was it? Fuck. Maybe he'd dragged them out of bed. He should have waited until morning when he was firing on all cylinders. Too late now.

"This is Mike. Is Cindy home?"

"One minute."

"Mike?" her voice cut through the fog in his skull. "Mike, are you there?"

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah. Sorry I missed your calls earlier. I was kind of tied u - "

"It's okay. I wasn't sure I should call, anyway. I didn't want to distract you. Is something wrong? You sound tired."

"Like you wouldn't believe. Today was...a day. Did you get home okay?"

"Yeah. There's some family here. It's a full house right now."

"Good. Stay home."

"Mike, what's - "

"Just trust me. Stay home. Lock your doors. Leave the outside lights on. If you got a gun, leave it by the bed. Loaded."

"Mike," she said. "What's wrong."

"Look, I can't talk about it. I'm not even supposed to be on this line right now. Just promise me, okay? Stay inside and keep your eyes open."

"I promise," she said. "I miss you. Do you know how much longer?"

"No idea. But I'll call."

"Promise?"

"Yeah. I promise."

He didn't hang up until he heard the click over the wire. Even then he was slow to get moving. Everything hurt. Muscles he'd forgotten he had. Little forgotten folds of his brain he didn't think he'd ever used that had been forced awake today.

The image of a girl with lumps under her skin and a mouthful of broken teeth was lurking in there somewhere, creeping through the same recesses were he kept memories of a shy brunette with dark hair and a come-hither smile. He didn't like those two occupying the same spaces. It was wrong, somehow. The good and the bad walking that close together.

God, he was tired.

[Laager]

Makes me wonder who the MIBs are......another interesting chapter.

[223shooteresc]

good chapter, thanks

[AeroRat]

Among other things it was a day punctuated be the sound of gunfire, some distant, some not. Evelyn didn't know when it began. What she did know was that she hadn't passed a full hour yet without the crack of a rifle, and that it was beginning to fray her already strained nerves. She'd tried to call the constable's office in Longbranch - busy, naturally - and when that fell flat she'd briefly entertained the idea of walking to the Calhoun's to see what they knew. So far her curiosity had yet to build up sufficiently to make her put on shoes.

Instead she went to the video cabinet in the living room and sorted through the offerings on the lower shelf. A lunchtime search of the dark corners of the fridge had yielded up a box of Junior Mints. Too lazy to cook a proper meal, she'd thrown a coke in the freezer to chill, and after half an hour or so outside with Ranger she came in for the afternoon's entertainment.

What Charlie Morgan saw in westerns she didn't know. When he was alive they had watched them together, but some part of her mind doubted they were drawn in by the gunfights and clapboard towns and horses for similar reasons. The pile of VHS tapes he'd left behind answered none of her questions. He showed no remarkable preference for one director over another, no favoritism among the major stars or lesser leading men. He kept copies of John Wayne's movies beside the collected work of Sam Peckinpah. There were black and white horse operas and Technicolor bloodbaths, good men and bad men and ugly men, straightforward morality tales and stories that meandered through an ethical landscape of shifting grays and growing shadows.

More than once she wondered why she hadn't asked. The question had risen in the back of her mind on several occasions, and always she'd filed it away for a later time. She only realized after he was gone that she knew very little of his early and middle years; places he had gone, things he had done, people he had met, tales he'd been told. Her memories of him were limited to those of an old man and his small farm, and there were few enough of those.

The microwaved dinged, announcing popcorn. Ranger was already in position when she arrived, alongside the counter with his nose shifting back and forth. The dog spared her a look and resumed his surveillance. Such a watchful guard dog she had. A SWAT team could break down the front door, a small nuclear device could go off in the backyard, and the house could catch fire, and it was a sure bet he'd be right there to make certain the food came through unscathed. She found a bowl in the cabinet and nudged him out of the way, arching an eyebrow as he retreated a few steps only to turn and wait again. She selected a kernel off the top flicked it at him.

Returning to the living room, she built a heap of couch pillows and stretched out, curling her legs underneath her and balancing the bowl on the side table. Ranger appeared, licking his chops fresh from the last find, and jumped up on the far end of the couch. She picked a handful of popcorn and smiled at the dog. Early on she'd discovered that he wouldn't touch food if watched, but when left to his own devices nothing was safe. Part of that was her fault, she guessed.

She started the show and popped open the aluminum can, the exterior coated lightly in flaking ice from the half hour spent in the freezer. She really should have driven in and checked the office today, but nobody had called and she sure wasn't chancing the roads to find out.

Capitalizing on her aunt's continued absence today's feature was The Wild Bunch, a movie her aunt abhorred but her uncle had counted among his favorites. Whether the objections had come from the violence (possibly) or the half-dressed Mexican whores (more likely) was never put to words.

Halfway through the opening gunfight the windows began to rattle. Then the house.

Taking her popcorn, she paused the movie and went to peer through the front window She narrowed her eyes as the source rounded bend up the road

The pickup was familiar to most of Longbranch. A fairly recent model with off-road tires, spray painted flat black and festooned with more chrome than was probably legal, it could usually be encountered at least once a week, hauling home after dark with all the lights on high and foot-long flames shooting out of the oversized exhausts behind the cab. Early on she'd encountered the owner, a local washout named Roy, who took one look at her beater S-10 and asked if she wanted a ride in a real truck. To her later chagrin he'd figured out where she lived and stopped by two or three times - usually parking outside the fence, gunning the engine and honking.

Or so he did until her uncle got tired of that and walked out with a .44 Colt under his belt and put an end to redneck assholes interrupting his television time. Afterwards the rumor had spread that she was just a stuck-up city bitch with VD, but if that was the price of keeping Roy at a distance she'd decided she could live with it.

She hadn't seen him around in a while and was disappointed to see him again. In truth, she'd sort of hoped he'd taken a corner too fast on that jacked-up suspension and pulverized himself into hamburger in the ensuring spill. No such luck, apparently.

This time he wasn't alone, though. Somebody was riding in the passenger seat, and in the bed were four or five other local yokels, all of them carrying guns. Most wore camouflage of one pattern or another. She'd bet most of them were either drunk or getting there.

Evelyn felt her throat go dry.

This couldn't be any kind of good.

And...shit.

The pickup slowed, the pitch of the engine changing from a growl to a warble. In disbelief she watched as it idled across the oncoming lane and turned into the driveway. As soon as it came to a halt Roy dismounted, tugging a rifle after him like a disobedient pet. After two or three tries he got it slung over his shoulder and let himself through the gate.

Evelyn swore under her breath. Setting the popcorn out of the dog's reach she ducked into the kitchen and got the shotgun out of the pantry. For all his stupid hick bluster Roy had never shown the balls to invite himself into the yard; not when her aunt was home, and he damn sure wouldn't have done it when her uncle was around. When Charlie Morgan was still alive the boy wouldn't even slow down. He'd turn his head forty-five degrees away from the house and mash the gas until he was at least a quarter mile down the road.

Ranger growled from the living room. She felt the first tremors begin. Way down in the tips of her fingers and the pit of her stomach. She tried to hold the gun loosely, to not be tense. Tense people did stupid things like inadvertently pulling triggers and putting holes in walls and she was pretty sure neither her nor her aunt had the aptitude or spare cash to fix that right now.

"Hey - " Roy was beating on the door. "Hey, anybody home in there?"

Ranger continued to growl. Very seldom did he bark. She supposed that was the border collie talking. One of the neighbors had told her once that the breed wasn't known for making a racket.

She made sure the chain was fixed in place and cracked the door a full three inches.

"What."

"Longbranch Infected Task Force. We here to check and see if you got an zombies hiding around in there. You - "

Despite herself she broke out laughing. Roy's face fell, if only momentarily.

"I'm sorry," she said, still giggling. "That's epic. Really...truly...epic. Did you make that up on your own, or did you have help?"

"I know you." His eyes narrowed, and then he grinned small and slow. "Yeah, I remember you. And no, this ain't a social call."

"Sure."

"No shit. Constable deputized the bunch of us this morning. Said we was to go around checking to see if anybody locals got the Reelfoot. You ain't been infected...have you?"

"What's the symptoms?"

"Well, you got fever, sweats, delirious - "

"Delirium?"

" - watery eyes, itching, swelling - "

"I don't know," she said. "I didn't feel sick until you came around. But thanks for asking."

She started to push the door shut. It jumped back at her.

The two stood and stared at each other. She saw a lot of things she didn't like just then. It struck her that she was facing a man who'd likely never had any kind of power over anything. No control past parts of his miserable little flea's existence. But now he'd been given authority of some sort, however tame that might have been on paper, and he didn't have the self-control to keep a patchwork solution from outgrowing the problem it was meant to address. For the briefest instant he was the rabid animal. Then it flickered briefly and was gone.

A line had been crossed.

"Bitch, you listen to me. I saw a man with half his face chewed off this morning. You know what that is? You know what that's like? You sit there and fucking laugh. Well, go ahead. You do that because there's people out here keeping you safe from that. Like me."

She fought - unsuccessfully - to suppress a smirk. He slammed a fist against the door, harder this time. The chain gave up and the door flew open, and at once Ranger was at her feet, an angry fifty-odd pounds of sawed-off fury with a mouthful of teeth on the sharp end. By sheer luck she got ahold of his collar before he got out of house.

Roy looked up at her from the lawn, splayed out in a way that was almost cartoonish. Slowly he extended an accusing finger at the dog.

"That looks like Reelfoot to me."

"You're in his yard, you dumb bastard," she shot back. "This is his house."

She could see others now. Some of his friends climbing out of the back of the truck. Roy pushed himself slowly upright, untangling himself where he'd landed on his rifle and gotten wound up in the sling.

"Get out of the way."

"Fuck you!"

"That's a dangerous animal."

Single-handed, she brought the shotgun up.

Things got quiet. And still.

Breathing hard, she looked at the faces arrayed before her. Ranger surged and clawed to get free. If she let him go Roy was done for. That left half a dozen. She had five shells. If she made five debilitating hits before any of them fired...

...six targets...

...she was still fucked.

"Roy," she said. "You're going to put down your gun. You and your friends are going to climb back in your little clown car, and you're going to leave. Because if you don't, I'm going to shoot you. And even though it's a tiny fucking target, I can still hit that little piece of fishbait you're using for a dick. Your friends might get me - they probably will. But you'll probably go to jail for killing me...oh, they're going to love you. You'll be the closest thing to woman those guys are liable to see for long, long time."

She licked her dry lips. The shotgun was heavy, the brass bead on the muzzle end starting to waver. She could hold but not for long.

"Call it," she said.

The heart was hammering in her chest as Roy waved his friends off. He got slowly to his knees, moving like he was a thousand years old. When he took to his feet she saw the damp patch on the front of his pants. She couldn't say she was sorry. He bent to collect the rifle.

"Eh - " she waved the business end of the shotgun and he froze. "Uh-uh. You leave that. Your mommy can come by and pick it up when the apocalypse is over. And close the gate on your way out."

She watched him hobble to the truck. When everybody was on the other side of the fence she let go of Ranger's collar. One of the guys in the bed made like he was going to stand. She swung the Winchester across and laid the bead on his chest. Right between his shirt pockets. She'd played this game before. With steel plates, maybe, and she sucked at reloading on the clock, but that big a target at that short of range was child's play. He sat down.

The truck rolled slowly backwards, Ranger tearing along the fence line in full attack mode. She stood on the porch with the gun butted hard into her shoulder until the whole lot of them were gone. Then she went to the yard to collect her prize, called Ranger inside, and double-bolted the door.

By the time she got her head on straight she realized the movie was frozen. Absentmindedly she set it in motion, her mind elsewhere. Even afterwards she was having a tough time keeping it in line - she knew that Roy had effectively broken in and that she'd pulled a gun on him, but beyond that everything was a blur. In a way it was like waking up from a half-remembered dream, seeing the action go by in short bursts but unable to piece together a coherent whole. Onscreen, the slaughter of a small south Texas border town resumed.

For the longest time she'd sat on the couch with Ranger in her lap and stared at nothing, not remembering but replaying a long sequence of what-ifs. In each she was outside her own body, watching. She saw herself bring the gun up and fire and watched as the seven men offscreen riddled the front of the of house and her and the dog collapsed in piles of bloody rags. She watched herself shoot a perfect clean sweep, reloading on the fly and center-punching all of them. She watched herself fall and saw Ranger standing over her body, growling and showing his teeth until Roy came up to the foot of the porch and blew the dog to shreds.

What was so strange is that she felt some small measure of regret. Like if she'd had that one more shell she could have done it. She knew she could, because it was something she'd practiced time and again until running a pumpgun was second nature. And part of her - the vengeful little voice that understood all too well why Roy did the things he did - whispered that she could have, should have, gone for broke. She had them. Seven justifiable homicides lined up on her front lawn in a perfect shooting gallery. Seven assholes whose sole contribution to the world was throwing trash on the sides of the highway and hitting on whatever girls came in earshot and otherwise bothering people too well-mannered to sit them down and bitchslap them until they quit.

Seven free murders.

She kind of wanted it.

She sat on the couch and stroked the dog. Ranger had such soft hair. She bathed him three times a week with good shampoo. They looked out for each other. He was a stray and a half-breed. Some people thought that was reason enough to kill him. People like Roy. People who could never add anything to life, only take away.

She remembered when she'd gotten Ranger. She'd been here long enough to no longer be new, still alone and largely friendless, and one way or another he'd wound up inside the fence. Not knowing better she'd started petting him, then. Nobody had explained strays to her. So when her uncle walked out the house with his old Stevens broken open in the crook of his arm and found her sitting by the front gate with the dog in her lap she hadn't known what to think.

Evie he said. Get up.

She looked at the dog. Then the shotgun. Then the dog again. And for the first time in her life, she offered an act of real and significant defiance.

No.

Evie.

No.

That's a dangerous animal there.

No he isn't. Look. She petted the stray and he nuzzled at her fingers. And Charlie Morgan stood over both of them with a loaded shotgun and an expression of eternal patience. She understood then that this was a game of waiting, and that as soon as she turned her back on the dog that was the end. Hers was a losing proposition. But, having committed herself, she meant to stick. For once.

Look at his eyes she said. Aren't they pretty? He has blue eyes.

Her uncle was silent.

Aren't they pretty?

Charlie Morgan lowered himself to a crouch, the gun still broken open and laid across his knees. The dog tensed and went still and she swatted him lightly against the ribs, and then she locked eyes with her uncle. There was nothing left to say. She couldn't argue because there was no argument to be made. No trumps cards she could play. Her uncle looked at her, then the dog, then back to her. The battle of the wills lasted what seemed a long time. Finally he stood and dropped the shotgun shells in his pocket.

Go inside he said. Get my keys.

She got slowly to her feet, not quite willing to let go. She'd always wanted a dog, but her mother and stepfather had perennially refused. Too much responsibility. Too expensive. Too messy. And now she had found one that she thought marvelously unique, and more than anything she wanted to keep him. She stood, willing the dog to stay behind her. He didn't. He went and made his mark on the old pecan stump in the front yard.

Keys her uncle repeated. You can take this with you.

She gingerly took the shotgun and looked to her uncle and the dog and back again.

Go on. And get my billfold. It ought to be on the table.

Not on that day and not since had she been able to put to words the sense of joy and relief that flooded through her in that one glorious moment. She remembered riding to Lakesborough in the next county to visit the vet clinic, and picking out the first collar, and then the moment as her uncle was attending the paperwork when he hesitated. He voiced the question she had been afraid to ask all night, fearing that in taking the dog to the vet she had only been a ruse. Something to get her to go along with a plan that ended with a needle full of poison.

What's his name?

Ranger she said. And then a few weeks later the little metal tags came in the mail, and she threaded them onto his new collar, and it was official. Thereafter he was a fixture - he rode in the truck when it was time to make an alfalfa run; he growled at visitors who came calling late at night and jealously guarded the couch by day; he slept at - then on - the foot of her bed during the first winter; when her and her aunt came home from the funeral he crawled into her lap - in her good dress and everything - and licked at her tears and let her hold him while she cried.

She cried because her uncle was a good man. He understood things. She cried because he was gone, and the world was a darker place, and because she'd spent too many years dealing with people who were complete and utter shit, most of whom were still alive.

And some days, when she got the chance, she put on an old western and ate junk food and tried to recall a time when things had been better. Today was one such day. Perfect except for stupid Roy.

As the shootout became an escape and the escape turned to questions of the future the popcorn ran out, leaving a cluster of uncooked kernels in the waxy goop of congealing butter. Ranger gave up and stretched out in front of the couch. Soon enough he was snoring, his front leg jerking at random. Evelyn polished off the last of the mints and dumped the whole mess into the popcorn bowl. She really should put it up, but...after the movie.

Ranger rejoined the living near the end. He half-rose and half-stretched, turning to point his nose up. She rubbed the nearest ear. She was feeling some better now, having put a few hours between herself and the event.

"See that?" she said. "That's a water-cooled 1917 Browning machine gun. It fires .30-06 Springfield cartridges from a cloth or disintegrating link belt at a rate of four hundred and fifty rounds per minute. You should buy me that for Christmas. In case I'm ever stuck in Mexico in a village full of angry guerrillas led by a corrupt general."

The dog sniffed at her fingers and whined.

"Oh, fine. You can come with me. You better be careful, though. I think Mexicans eat dogs."

Ranger yawned and padded into the kitchen, toenails clicking.

She swung her legs off the couch and gathered up the remains of her movie night snacks. On screen the music was coming up as the credits began to roll. She dropped everything in the sink to await a later cleaning, then went to the bathroom to wash her hands and pick corn hulls out of her teeth. She was attacking a particularly stubborn piece when the lights dimmed momentarily. She glanced up the row of clear bulbs aligned above the mirror. Waited for a repeat performance. None was forthcoming.

Still, better to be prepared. She was pretty sure there was a flashlight in one of the kitchen drawers. With any luck the batteries were still good. Mentally, she kicked herself for leaving her good LED light in her locker at work.

She frowned at the receding sun though the windows. Somehow the hours had gotten away from her. One whole day shot to hell. No work, no real exercise...a zero-productivity affair from start to finish. And her aunt hadn't returned, or called, two facts that she found troubling. Of course, Aunt Beatrice was never a great fan of telephones. Were it not for the occasional emergency it was doubtful she would have tolerated one in her house at all.

A search of drawers provided her with the light and a box of mismatched batteries. She sorted through them, mixing and matching until she got a reasonably strong beam, and whistled for the dog.

"You want out?" She gestured at the door and he slipped through the gap and stopped, whined, and moved off with his ears up. Expecting a possum, she pointed beam across the yard. A possum or a raccoon, or maybe a few stragglers from that ragged band of strays. One of the cows was lowing and she moved the light in the general vicinity of the noise.

The beam highlighted one standing near the fence. Further back, she saw the second laying on the ground on its side.

The sight tripped a minor alarm; in her experience, cattle very rarely went over that way unless something was wrong. Which was about right - her uncle was gone, her aunt was in Granite Falls, and one of the damned stupid cows had gone and gotten itself sick.

"Shit," she said to no one in particular. Slipping on a pair of flip-flops she went down the steps and across the lawn after the dog.

She could feel the grass brushing against her feet. Being Texas, there were probably a million-odd fire ants out here, too, just waiting for her to come along. Or snakes. The weather lately was either good or bad for snakes, depending on where one stood. A few weeks prior she'd clipped the head off of one in the front flower bed. Afterwards she'd determined it was harmless, though that didn't give her any regrets or change her opinion of things that moved without legs. Vermin weren't appreciably better in her view.

At the gate she stopped and fixed the light on the downed bovine.

"Hey," she called under her breath. "Hey you. Get your sorry ass up."

She went to the gate and let herself through. Ranger slipped under the lowest wire and trotted over to circle the problem cow. She followed suit, watching her step both for creepy crawlers and freshly laid bovine mines. As she walked a breeze ruffled the shin-high grass, bringing with it the sharp, hot scent of blood.

[Laager]

Reminds me of something I heard many years ago.....something along the lines of complacency kills, being paranoid is the only reason I’m still alive......imho she really should have paid attention to what Roy had to say.....cause I have a feeling it is going to bite her in the rear end.

[AeroRat]

Mmm...paranoia.

[Laager]

AeroRat - You had to know him......he was crazier than a sh**house rat.......and usually it rubbed off on us, at least my wife says it did.... One little B-40 to the latrine and *poof*.

[AeroRat]

Well...crazy shithouse rats keep life interesting.

And sometimes frightening. But interesting.

[dantheremaining]

Reminds me of something I heard many years ago.....something along the lines of complacency kills, being paranoid is the only reason I’m still alive......imho she really should have paid attention to what Roy had to say.....cause I have a feeling it is going to bite her in the rear end.

You're right, Laager...that's a great quote!

[223shooteresc]

thanks for thew new chapter, hope she wakes up soon

[Nancy1340]

Well you got my attention!

Thanks, great chapter.

[AeroRat]

Four hours of sleep and he was back on the loading dock. Not running this time, but offloading the supply trucks as they came in. The work was simple, mindless repetition; trucks came in, crates and cases came off. Everything under the sun that was remotely safe for human consumption or could be made such with a little effort.

In the course of the work he saw the beginnings of a very distinct pattern, and even through the sour fog of sleep deprivation he drew the logical conclusion.

When he was rousted in the dark hours of the morning, the stuff arriving through the cafeteria storeroom had been almost uniform. If soft drinks, they came along in packs of six or twelve. If food, in proper factory packaging with intact or closed boxes. As the morning wore into dawn that began to change, ever so subtly. The cases were opened with units missing. Canned drinks came in singly or tossed into packing containers. At one point he'd he found himself hauling an open tub of cheese and cracker snacks, knock-off Twinkies, and candy bars. Only after it had passed through the hanging plastic flaps into the dark maw of the cafeteria did he make the connection.

Cheese and crackers.

Twinkies.

Candy bars.

Three things that most service stations and mini-marts kept at the front counter to tempt customers into a spur of the moment sale when they came in to pay for gas. Right between the folded cardstock stand advertising cigarettes and the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny bowl.

Whoever was doing the scavenging was getting desperate. The good quality stuff, the things that came in bulk, had been the first. When they'd run out of bulk units to requisition they'd picked up on the stock that was out on the shelves. When that ran out....crackers, twinkies, and candy bars.

He imagined the stores of the supermarket in Everett stripped bare. It spoke to the general state of things in Wilkes County that they were too poor and insignificant for Wal-Mart to come and crush the Mom & Pop places. No need, really. Most of those were on the downhill slide and accelerating fast. The largest of the grocery places would have fit three times over into a regular Wal-Mart. Probably six times over into a Super Center. A kind of sad, rundown place, usually packed between the hours of breakfast and dinner, with narrow and poorly-lit aisles lined with mismatched shelving units crammed with brands names so far off the map that even Mexicans wouldn't touch the shit.

Frankly, he half expected the next truck to arrive bearing a plastic bag full of those hideously shriveled and cancer-spotted hot dogs that lived in under gas station heat lamps.

He walked to the roll-up door and leaned against the frame. The world outside was filtered in hazy shades of pre-dawn gray.

Everything hurt. Every muscle, every nerve, every joint felt like it was under attack by a thousand wasps, radiating out until it hit the rashes he was growing from the sweat-soaked legs of his pants chafing against his skin. Though he hadn't passed a mirror since leaving the apartment he guessed his face and neck were probably the same shade of red as the back of his hands, and, on closer inspection he found he had acquired three split fingernails and that the dirt-lined creases of his palms were broken in a number of places by open sores or the swells of growing blisters. He'd slept with his boots on, too, and God only knew what he'd find once he peeled off whatever was left of his socks, which were doubtless indelibly imprinted on his ankles by now.

A guardsman sergeant approached, his ACU fatigues almost blending into the background. About the only time he'd seen that pattern hide anything the past couple of days. If anything, he'd concluded that ACU made the wearer more obvious. Especially in the time of the year when everything was dead and crispy-fried golden.

Mike knew the face and he was distantly aware that there was a name attached, but...damned if he could remember. He angled his head slightly, squinting at the name tape. The letters looked like little black worms to him. All wiggly and everything.

"Mister Duncan -" the sergeant called. He sluggishly tried to come to attention, though a foggy voice told him he didn't have to because...something.

"Hmm." He was pretty sure he'd meant to say something else. Yes, probably.

"That's all for now. We aren't expecting anymore deliveries this morning, so I'm turning your and your boys loose. We surely appreciate the help." The sergeant stuck out a hand. Mike shook dumbly, struggling to think of some worthwhile response.

"You bet," he managed. He turned to Staff Sergeant Buxton and Cadet Airman Brand, his two charges for the detail, and waved them up off the stack of pallets where they were making the most of the temporary respite.

Of the two Buxton was pretty sharp - a couple of months in and making good time on his promotions. Always had his shit together, his uniforms pressed, and his boots shined. Brand was another matter, the sort of cadet that most flight commanders dreaded. He had joined less because of the allure of flight or the draw of community service and mostly because his mother thought it would be something fun he could do to pass the time. Without fail, he also appeared at each and every CAP outing in Wilkes County, rain or shine.

Of course with Cadet Brand came Mrs. Senior Member Brand, forever hovering around her baby, pestering the officers and senior cadets as to whether it was really necessary that the children - they were all children to her, evidently - be drilling in the hot sun, or wearing those heavy long-sleeved shirts, or couldn't they reschedule to another weekend because the man on the television predicted rain. But if her boy had flaws she never saw them; the advancement tests were unfairly stacked against him, he was not well-liked by his officers and thus held back, he was slow to follow orders and observe even the most basic customs and courtesies because he had not be adequately attended by those in power, with the 'those in power' being a blanket indictment of Captain Harper, Lieutenant Duncan, Flight Officer Schipper, and any cadet bearing rank insignia exceeding that of her little precious.

Mrs. Senior Member Brand had not opted to participate in the week's shelter activities. He guessed that was something.

He reported their return to Harper, still holding court in the ersatz communications room. The captain looked him up and down and, presumably seeing a camo-clad zombie, ordered him off the clock for a few more hours. He passed the word to his charges and went next door.

Sinking down onto his cot, he peeled off his BDU blouse and set to work on his boots. When he got down to his socks he arced them into the nearest trash can and just sat for a minute, the tiles cool against the soles of his feet. The feeling of being at rest was strangely alien. Since Sunday morning his entire schedule had been one of action and motion, always moving and never still. Save the few hours of sleep he'd stolen after his run with Echeverria there hadn't been anything recognizable as downtime. Now, with no immediate orders and no responsibilities, it felt as if the world had suddenly come to a strange and silent halt.

Mike twitched his toes, staring at the pruned and miscolored skin on his feet.

The problem with sudden stillness was that he all at once took notice of a number of things he'd managed to ignore in the past forty-eight hours. Like the layer of sweat, oil, and dirt that coated him like a second skin, and that the sour odor in the room grew exponentially worse once he'd tossed the blouse, and that his entire body itched, more or less.

Moving like an old man, he pulled his pack up on the cot and rifled through the main pouch until it yielded up a toilet kit, a freezer bag of fresh socks and underwear, and a camping towel. From the very bottom he shook out a fresh set of pants, and undershirt, and a pair of flip-flops. He put the sum of his haul in a mesh bag, forced himself up, and went to ask directions to the gym.

There was no hot water. The blast of the cold struck like needles. Once he'd gotten over the initial shock he went for the soap. Figuring on getting filthy on most exercises he'd included the heavy stuff, the kind loaded with pumice chips and usually marketed towards the automotive industry. The soap grated over sore spots he didn't know he had. He'd be thoroughly de-greased, though. No question about that.

Out and dry he felt almost human, enough so that he tarried long enough for a rudimentary shave. He turned his head left and right, studying his handiwork in the mirror. Even looked halfway presentable. He dried his face and was gathering his stuff when the bathroom went pitch black.

Well, shit.

Bag in hand he felt his way along the wall to the door. By habit he tried the light switches, expecting nothing and coming away unsurprised. From his short time in this part of the building he had a rudimentary memory of how things were situated. The showers were in the bathroom which led out into the locker room which connected with the gym which had a couple of doors leading to one of the main hallways. He naviguessed his way out, bumping frequently into concrete or cold cinder blocks or iron piping until he lit on the push bar of the exit and emerged into a corridor. Watery morning light played through the windows against the banked lockers and the passage was spotted with the signs of passage of the refugees who'd preceded him.

Shoeprints stamped in dirt on the floor.

A miscolored ring where vomit had been allowed to set before mopping out.

Empty soda cans and water bottles.

Food wrappers.

Napkins and soiled paper towels.

Mike rolled his head side to side, feeling the bones pop all in sequence. Eight straight hours of deep, uninterrupted sleep laid up alongside the brunette, a meal that didn't come out of a rubber bag, and a back rub and he might be worth a damn to society again. So long as he didn't have dreams about the reeler at the gas station again. He fought off an involuntary shiver. Shit was fucked up - the eyes, the lumps, the way the thing kept coming after he'd landed a good solid hit with twenty pounds of blunted steel. That ought to have been enough to put anything down.

Harper had sent him to talk to one of the medics about that. He knew why; the captain was concerned about his mental state, but honestly the heat, the lack of sleep, and the oh-shit nature of the excitement had him so spaced out that he felt nothing. Like it had been another man's hands swinging the hammer, another man's eyes seeing it all unfold. Then he collapsed on his cot and watched it replaying in a continuous loop until Shifty came around and prodded him awake. Only it wasn't the same; in the dream it was raining sideways, the gas station was a peeling and collapsing wood-framed church like in the old westerns, and for whatever reason the sky was reefed over with clouds in a funny shade of purple.

Kicking off his shower shoes, he laid back and laced his fingers behind his head. Clean or not, the feeling wouldn't last long. The presence of radio equipment in the vicinity meant the shelter manager was running the air conditioner in this building fairly low, but like most schools the idea was less to provide comfort and more to keep the middle grade prisoners within from baking to death in the hot months of the year. Moreover, the current accommodations were twice the size of a regular room, thanks to the lab tables towards the rear, and even with chilled air dumped in through the vents there was nothing to keep it moving, no fans to provide current, so what cool they got didn't spread out much. If he stretched his toes off the end of the cot he could just barely almost feel the cold. Sort of.

But he'd slept through worse and he'd sleep through this. Lack of creature comforts was something easily outweighed by exhaustion. At any rate he was doing better than some; a couple of cadets only brought bedrolls and wound up sleeping on the floor. As for the refugees...he wasn't sure what they were doing. Supposedly the Red Cross had some bedding material on hand and an arrangement with the army-navy store for extras, though he doubted they'd planned for quite as many as had showed.

Hell, they were still getting fresh ones. In the times he made the rounds with the shelter staff to distribute food he'd noticed a marked increase in the occupation of the rooms. If the word on the grapevine could be trusted another of the buildings had been opened for temporary habitation while he'd been on the loading dock, due largely to Reelfoot's sporadic but relentless push and the the stream of foot traffic that'd come up since the highway closed. In an earlier discussion Harper had even hinted that they might be absorbing an entire shelter - lock, stock, and barrel - from the next county, though where the extra food and water were coming from was markedly less clear.

In his mind he saw the situation as a collapsing building laid on its side. The uppermost floor went first. On hitting the next lowest it hesitated, if only momentarily. Then the top two kept going until their bulk pancaked down on a third. Sooner or later there was no delay whatsoever. Just one big heavy chunk of hurt exponentially building steam until finally it slammed into something with the immobile mass to match its energy.

If Wilkes County was one of those middle floors he figured they might be okay; the surge might screw things up locally, but with luck it'd keep going - just wash over them and push on to break somewhere west. If by chance they were the ground floor - the point where the freight train met the side of the mountain - they were well and truly fucked.



Early in the afternoon he got up and went to find Harper. The captain told him to get two cadets and go help the Red Cross move provisions. Mike put on clean socks, clipped a small walkie-talkie in between the buttons of his blouse, and set off with his small entourage, the awe-inspiring Duty Belt of Great Responsibility cinched around his waist.

It was the damndest thing; in his time here he had learned that people showed no particular appreciation for the gold bars pinned to his collar, paid no mind to the fact that he stood 5' 10" and weighed two hundred twenty pounds, and assigned no real significance to his having the radio. Some noticed the woodland camouflage. Rarely, they might even stop long enough to read the tapes over the pockets. One notable contestant asked if they were the part of the army that flew blimps; where they'd picked up that dumbshit idea he had no clue.

But they respected the belt.

They respected a bargain bin piece of army surplus olive drab woven nylon with a black plastic buckle and two rows of metal eyelets, shorn for the occasion of its ammo pouches and suspenders, an item which had probably been fifty cents to manufacture and cost the U.S. Government six dollars to acquire when new.

Not the man.

Not the rank.

Not the radio.

The belt.

Aches and pains aside, he'd much rather be hauling freight than dealing with refugees, their questions, and their herd mentality. Dispensing stations - the places where food, water, and blankets were distributed were bad enough. But the worst, the Unholy Grail of shelter assignments, was the in-processing desk, currently situated in a tent in front of the school.

He'd worked the desk upon arrival at the shelter. Never again. Registration was the funnel through which the disorganized and nameless hordes fresh off the highway were sorted, tagged, and diverted - hopefully in some semblance of order - into their temporary housing. According to Shifty it was the kind of operation direly in need of a squeeze chute, a couple of hot-shots, and a half-competent border collie. Until those came along it was a game of diplomacy and lung power.

Mike found out early on he lacked the patience and the people skills.

So instead he drew Buxton and a cadet airman first class named White and ventured off in search of heavy things to move.

It didn't take long. The obvious place to look was the cafeteria, presently the staging area for all supplies coming into camp. They had scarcely arrived when a guard warrant officer spotted the three idle bodies near the entrance and whistled. He waved a clipboard over the heads of other relief workers and the three of them filtered through the crowd.

"This pile - " the guardsman said, pointing with his clipboard to a pallet of bottled water - "goes to Room 310A. You'll be looking for Sergeant Cooper. Think you can manage that?"

"Sure thing, warrant. You got a cart?"

"Does it look like I got a cart? Jesus." The warrant rolled his eyes and dropped his chin to his chest. "No, I don't have a cart. You're just going to have to hoof it...lieutenant."

Mike felt the temptation of an unwinnable and largely pointless pissing match. He let it pass, though after each of them had shouldered their cases and gotten moving he heard White mutter "What a dick," presumably to Buxton.

He stopped in the hall and made a half turn, then shook his head at the airman.

The walk was uphill all the way; James Fuller Middle School was comprised of three separate parallel buildings built onto the side of a long hill, joined on the parking lot side by one main hall. The cafeteria and gymnasium were connected to the first by an open air covered walkway. In addition to the science and computer labs, Building A also contained all the school's administrative offices and as such had been taken over as the nerve center of the camp. Upslope, the classrooms of Building B had been the first reorganized to house refugees. With the impending threat of new arrivals Building C - geographically the highest point in the school, and the only building of the three with a second floor - was being likewise converted.

If the main hall was clear it was entirely possible to stand at the doors of the cafeteria and look up the corridor to the last building. Getting there in a timely fashion with a pack was another matter. Doing it with a case of bottled water on either shoulder was something else altogether; by the time they'd got the first six such cases delivered to the room they were out of breath. Outside room 310A, Mike settled against the wall with his hands on his knees

"Alright," he said. "We're going to keep doing this until we're done. But a word of advice - either of you sees an unattended dolly or a wagon somewhere, steal the son of a bitch."

Neither cadet said anything. Both smirked.

Midway downhill they met with a crowd of new arrivals spilling over from the tent. Most looked as if they hadn't eaten, bathed, or slept in days. Outside, the school's complement of yellow buses were parked along the curb, discharging more. A pair of guardsmen with MP brassards on their sleeves were trying to steer them towards the various services and dispersing centers in Building A, with limited success.

"Go to the cafeteria," he told his cadets. "I'll be along a in minute."

They vanished into the crowd. Climbing onto one of the benches that lined the hall he saw them break out the other side. Searching elsewhere, he spotted Schipper shouting instructions in Spanish and pointing. He shouldered through the crush and caught the flight officer's arm.

"What's this?!"

"Six-eight bravo!"

"What?"

"Six-eight bravo! Camp over in the next county. You heard the rumor? Turns out it wasn't." Shifty broke for a moment to physically point a wayward refugee in the proper direction, then gestured down the length of Building B with a jerk of the head.

They walked a hundred feet off the main thoroughfare, far enough that the cacophony was dulled sufficiently to speak normally.

"Man, you ain't gonna believe this shit," Shifty took out his snuff can and smacked it against his palm but didn't reload. "Whole camp went under. We got families split up, kids missing...somewhere in the evac they lost a bus. Misplaced it. A whole fucking school bus. How does that happen?"

"Well who brought 'em?"

"They brought themselves. What I've heard, their shelter manager and his help bailed two days ago. They got loaded up on their own account and came looking for us and got lost on the way. No cops, no guards, no uniforms anywhere in the bunch ...nothing. Like a chicken without a head."

"Shit."

"Yeah. Shit. In a great big way." Shifty put the can away and shook his head. "This is bad. We're picking up the dregs now. Sick, crazy, starving, you name it. This a bad bunch. You can see it on all of them. They got that dead look like they already gone."

A shout from the end of the hall. Schipper turned an ear.


"Look, I gotta get. Watch your step around these people."

Mike didn't stick around. He went to the cafeteria to find Buxton and White piling water into a wheelbarrow that hadn't been there before.

"Should I ask?"

"Probably better if you didn't, LT." White showed his teeth, grinning.

"We didn't take it from anybody," Buxton said. "It was sitting outside full of dirt."

"You can put it back when you're done." Mike hefted two more cases. "Let's get going."

White picked up the wheelbarrow handles. They started uphill, making a little better time this go around. An MP saw them coming and through some minor miracle got the refugees lined against the walls, leaving a passage through the middle. Not until the return trip did he fully grasp what Shifty had been telling him. As they passed he could feel the eyes following him, the stares feral in their intensity.

It occurred to him that these people probably didn't Respect the Belt.

They reloaded for a third time in the cafeteria and Mike took the barrow for the push. Again the MPs gave them a corridor. Only this time things fell apart. About midway through the gauntlet a hand snaked out and hooked one of the cases - some desperate soul going for a bottle - and yanked. The cart torqued hard and Mike fought to keep it upright. Past a certain angle it just wasn't happening; the entire wheelbarrow tipped over, twelve cases of bottle water going along for the ride.

The flimsy plastic packaging burst. Bottles rolled every which direction.

He could swear there was a heartbeat's pause before the enormity dawned. Then shit fell apart as three hundred dehydrated refugees opened a free-for-all for the spoils.

A booted foot slammed against his shin and he dropped to one knee, throwing an arm across to protect his face. In the process somebody stamped down on his splayed hand and he cut loose with a string of first-rate obscenities that would have done his brother proud. He elbowed his way up through a forest canopy of arms and legs and grasping fingers, throwing elbows at anything that came in range. Somebody punched him in the small of the back and he spun, hitting back hard enough to draw blood from a broken nose.

A whistle cut through the racket. Nearer the door the MPs were laying about with batons. He glanced left and right. Buxton was against the wall being pummeled by a trio of refugees. Of White he saw no sign.

Roaring, he plowed through the swarming mass. Nearing the sergeant he grabbed the nearest of the three by the collar and threw him towards the wall. He felt more than heard something crack and the man slid down the painted cinderblock face-first, leaving a dull red smear where he'd contacted. He tripped the second, shove a boot hard down on the stomach once he'd hit the ground; that one rolled over and vomited twice. The third fled.

He grabbed Buxton by the shoulders.

"White?! he shouted. Buxton shook his head. Mike jabbed a finger towards Building A. "Get Harper! Now!"

Buxton nodded and staggered off, and Mike did an about-face and waded back into the fray. From an adjoining hall came the thunder of stampeding boots - national guardsmen, he hoped. Though outnumbered, the two MPs who'd been marshaling the herd were holding their own, gaining some ground, even. He looked again, vainly hoping for a glimpse of his second cadet. No dice.

He started at the edge, grabbed whoever he could and throwing throwing them aside. If White wasn't visible, he wasn't standing. If he wasn't standing he could only be on the ground. He didn't care to imagine what an angry crowd in a confined space could do to a body trapped underfoot.

He'd cut a fair swath into the crowd when the hall rang with the sharp report of a pistol.

The intensity of the fight dropped by measurably, then petered out as attention turned to an MP corporal with a Beretta pointed to the ceiling and his finger on the trigger. From Building C came half a dozen guardsmen with rifles. From Building A, a dozen more military police, some with riot shotguns. The fury of the moment broken in an instant. Realization dawning, the mob began to dissipate like morning fog. Gaps appeared in their ranks. The reinforcing MPs came on, poking and prodding with their shotguns. Mike searched the floors.

For so brief an encounter there were more down than he expected. He pushed through the disintegrating mob, eyes fixed on the tile until he saw woodland camouflage. Shoving until he'd made a clearing, he rolled White over onto his back.

"Leroy!" he passed a hand back and forth over the cadet's face. The eyes stared up to the ceiling, unmoving. He grabbed a limp wrist and found a pulse and put hand flat against the chest, which rose and fell. Unresponsive, presumably conscious. A concussion. Maybe a neck injury. First aid and medical subjects had never been his strong suit.

Somewhere in the parking lot the ambulance sirens began to wail. The medics and paramedics weren't far behind. A pair materialized on either side of the downed cadet, and he didn't protest when asked to step aside.

Out of habit he reached for his radio and found it missing. After a laggard survey he found it lying on the tile, smashed to pieces. He picked up the remains and put them in his leg pocket. He should find Harper, tell the captain what -

"Duncan!" Harper called. He blinked, thinking he was losing it, and saw the captain coming up the hall. Buxton trailed him, moving with a pronounced limp. At the same time Shifty appeared from the direction of the processing tent.

"What happened here?"

Mike scratched his jaw, studying the fingers for blood. He saw none, but there was a vicious bootprint embossed across the back of his hand.

"Mike -" Harper was closer now, snapping his fingers. Sluggishly she looked to the sound. Harper. Schipper. Buxton behind the flight officer. White being strapped down to a backboard while a paramedic fitted him for an immobilization collar.

"I'm sorry, Captain," he said. "I think I fucked up."

[Laager]

Holy Smokes, not a good way to go, stomped to near death by a rabid mob. Great chapter!