Dead in Bed by Bailey Simms, The Complete First Book (26 page)

Another volley of
bullets shattered the front windows.

“What the
fuck
are you doing
?!
”
Chris was incensed.

“Making it up as I
go!” I shouted back. “What the
fuck are
you
doing? Let me fucking know if you
have any
better
ideas.”

I slipped back into
the restaurant kitchen, dragging Chris after me.

“This way.”

A stairway led to the
second-story apartment. I scrambled up and found the living room, which looked
over the street.

I could see the rangers
trying to position themselves. They were confused after the unexpected attack.
I’d caught them totally off guard. I doubt they’d ever been attacked before.
The young private I’d shot in the chest was still squirming in the road. I’d
fired the pistol so close to his vest, I’d probably broken most of his ribs.

I grabbed Chris’s
shotgun.

“Give me this.”

I stepped back from
the window and took aim directly at the squad’s brawny sergeant. He was still
standing across the road, exposed in front of the armored vehicle, waving at
his men to take positions.

I fired.

The living room window
exploded into thousands of tiny shards. The sergeant fell backward.

I knew the shot
wouldn’t kill the sergeant, but I’d been duck hunting with my Dad enough to
know that the spread of the shell’s pellets at this distance would be wide
enough to pepper him from head to foot. The sergeant tried to pull himself to
his feet. Already I could see that he was bleeding from his arms and his face.

I fired again. This
time I hit one of the rangers in the side. A concentration of pellets ripped
into his elbow. He cried out and clutched at his arm. Blood fell and splashed
onto the pavement like spilled coffee.

I could see the
wounded sergeant calling out to his men to fall back into the armored vehicles.
A couple of rangers ran out into the road and dragged the fallen private, who
looked like he’d lost consciousness. I didn’t fire. The squad knew they’d been
outmaneuvered. They couldn’t stay in the street while I was in an upstairs
window with plenty of ammunition. They all scrambled into the vehicle and then sped
away, but I knew that many, many reinforcements were bound to arrive in
minutes.

For now, though, the
pharmacy was totally unguarded.

“Let’s go,” I said to
Chris. “We have to hurry.”

We raced downstairs
and across the street. The electronic metal door that the Home Guard had
installed at the pharmacy had a simple card scanner, just like an ATM machine.
Chris slid in Jason’s access card and jerked it out. The door instantly opened.

We rushed inside. I kept
my gun ready.

I don’t know what I
expected to find, but the pharmacy looked basically like it had always looked
before the quarantine. Tim Huckabee was even behind the counter, the only
pharmacist I ever remembered working there. He had to be at least in his
seventies. The only difference now was that he was wearing a white Home Guard
medical uniform a lot like Chris’s.

He didn’t recognize me,
but I doubt I would have recognized myself. I probably looked absolutely insane
climbing up on top of the counter in scrubs and with bare, scratched feet,
waving a pistol in his face.

I had no idea what I
was doing. All I could think about was every bank robbery I’d ever seen in a
movie. The robbers almost always jumped up on top of the counter and started
screaming aggressive orders.

What else was I
supposed to do?

“Antibiotics and TGV
tests!” I screamed. “Where the
fuck
are
they?”

Tim Huckabee went
pale. He held his hands up and backed into a case of vitamin bottles, toppling
half of them on to the floor. He looked like he thought I was going to shoot
him any second.

“Ashley!” Chris said.
“They’re here! I
know
where the
antibiotics are kept!” He was already in the back of the pharmacy, stuffing
plastic shopping bags with boxes of antibiotics and other medications.

I jammed the gun into
Tim Huckabee’s face. He whimpered.

“Test applicators!” I
yelled. “Where are the test applicators?”

He gingerly pointed a
gnarled, arthritic finger at a safe beneath the register.

“Open it!” I screamed,
pressing the pistol’s barrel against his cheek.

He sobbed, bent over,
and threw up. I felt splashes of vomit reach my bare feet. And then he fell
forward and passed out cold.

Shit. I’d overdone it.

“You have to
chill out
, Ashley,” Chris called from
behind my shoulder.

I nudged Tim
Huckabee’s limp body with my foot. There was no way he was going to revive in
time to open the safe. I looked at Chris. “Now what?”

“Well, I have a
fucking lifetime supply of contraband antibiotics.” He was holding at least ten
plastic bags, each stuffed to bursting. “So not bad. And I found
one
TGV
Insta
-Read
test.” He tossed me the test, still wrapped in plastic. “That’ll have to be
good enough for now. Let’s not press our luck.”

I nodded.

I took half of the
plastic bags from Chris as we hurried from the pharmacy and back out onto the
street.

Sirens were blaring in
the distance. The Home Guard was on its way.

The hearse was riddled
with bullet holes. Both of the front tires were flat. Gas was leaking onto the
pavement.

“What the
fuck are
we going to do?” Chris was panicking. The sirens grew
louder.

“It’s better we’re not
in the hearse anyway,” I said, which was actually probably true. “We’d just
stand out. Follow me.”

I hurried into the
back alleyway behind the Bronze Dragon. My bare feet, already lacerated, were
practically completely raw, but I tried to ignore the pain as I stepped around
trash and broken bottles.

“Where are you hiding
the refugees?” I asked Chris, trying to figure out what to do next.

“With the Underground,”
he said. “Which means they’re all over the place. They’re with people who are
secretly sympathetic and willing to resist the Home Guard, in basements and
attics all over the quarantine zone. But it won’t last long. No one’s willing
to shelter anyone for more than a few days. Everyone’s afraid of the Home Guard
cracking down. They’re starting to search properties. A few of the refugees are
with your boss, actually. Your old boss.”

“Bill’s sheltering refugees?”

This actually didn’t
surprise me. My boss at the trucking company, Bill Hernandez, lived outside of
town on an acre of land at the foothills of the mountains. He definitely wasn’t
the type to sympathize with the Home Guard’s tactics. His place was maybe four
or five miles away.

“Bill actually kind of
started the whole thing,” Chris said.

“His place is good
enough for me.” I picked up my pace while we made our way from the alleyway to
the back of the high school.

“If that’s where we’re
going, we’re going the wrong way,” Chris stopped. “You know that, right?”

But I didn’t stop
trotting through the empty lot behind the high school baseball field. The
sirens had grown even louder. The Home Guard had probably reached the pharmacy
by now. I didn’t think anyone was following us, but we had to move fast. Chris
jogged to catch up. I could see the abandoned carnival rides rising up just
beyond the high school.

“Just follow me,” I
said.

* * *

By the
time we reached the fairgrounds, I couldn’t hear the sirens anymore.

When I opened the door
to the stables, the horses started whinnying and prancing. Now that they’d been
watered and fed, they were full of energy and wanted to get out of the stalls
they’d been stuck standing in for almost two weeks.

I found my sister’s
horse near the end of one of the stable rows. I rubbed my hand along her nose. “Ready
to go for a ride,
Kaypay
?” I whispered.

The horse stamped her
hooves.

“I don’t know how to
ride a horse,” Chris said.

“You don’t have to
know how. You just have to hang on.”

I led
Kaypay
and seven other horses out of their stalls and
tethered them all together with a long rope. I could only find five dusty
saddles in the tack room, but I brushed them off and put them on the five lead
horses. I secured the bags of antibiotics to one, and helped Chris climb atop
another.

I climbed onto
Kaypay
in the front of the line and tapped her sides with
my bare heels.

“Don’t fall off,” I
called back to Chris.

Kaypay
wanted to trot, but I kept her from going too fast. With all of the horses
tethered together, we’d have to take it slow.

I led the procession through the fairgrounds and
toward the fields. A dirt road led all the way through the fields to the
foothills of the Rockies. By following it, I was pretty sure I’d be able to
find Bill Hernandez’s house while still avoiding all the main roads where the
Home Guard would be patrolling.

* * *

We reached Bill’s place in
just over an hour.

Bill’s property was
filled with big rigs. They all must have been out of operation since the quarantine
began. There was also a big warehouse-style motor shop at the head of the
driveway, and behind it was the house.

Bill was really happy
to see me. He came out in the felt cowboy hat he always wore, smiling, holding
his arms open. Honestly, I hadn’t thought about Bill since everything had
happened, but he had always been a good boss, and we’d always gotten along. He
gave me a big hug when I slid off the horse.

“Ashley!” He looked me
over. “My oh my! I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see you again. Chris told me you
were missing, and it just about broke my heart. Thank God you’re okay.”

“We brought goodies.”
Chris started untying the plastic bags filled with antibiotics from the saddle.

“You’re kidding me!” Bill
smiled, smoothing his mustache. “Is that what I think it is? So much! How the
hell’d
you get all that?”

“Illegally,” Chris
laughed. “Very illegally.”

“My oh my.”

“You have Ashley to
thank for all this. All of it.”

Bill smiled at me.
“Well, somehow that doesn’t surprise me.”

I was actually feeling
a little bit good for the first time in a very long time.

While Bill helped us
hide the horses in the motor shop, Chris told me it was actually Bill who first
started calling the resistance “the Underground.”

“After that,” Chris
explained, “people who needed help started showing up. Bill was the one who
started figuring out who might be willing to shelter positives from the Home
Guard. He’s been able to find—what? Five or six households now?”

Bill nodded. “They’re
good people, but they sure are scared. The Home Guard’s getting more and more
nosey.”

“Bill won’t say who’s
doing the sheltering,” Chris explained. “He won’t even tell me. But it’s
probably not a bad idea to keep it all as secret as possible.”

After securing the
horses, we shut the motor shop’s large double doors and Bill led us to the
house.

“Come and have some lunch,”
he said. “You two must be starving.”

Nothing could have
been truer. I was famished.

I couldn’t believe it,
but Bill actually made us steaks. I’d never tasted anything better in my life. While
we ate, I told Bill about the cliff dwellings my dad and I discovered years
ago. It was the first time I’d ever spoken about them with anybody.

“I can’t imagine a
safer place to shelter refugees,” I said. “It won’t be easy getting provisions
out there, and the weather’s going to get cold, but if we can make it work, it
would be almost impossible for the Home Guard to find a hideout like that for a
long time.”

“Well, sounds like
it’s better than anything else we have now.” Bill offered me a second steak.
“You sure you can find it?”

I nodded. “I’m sure.
It might take two or three days on horseback, but I can find it. My dad marked
it on a topography map for me. And I’m going. I’ve decided. Any of the refugees
who are willing to make the journey can come.”

After lunch, Bill virtually
emptied his pantry, filling duffel bags and suitcases with rice and beans and
canned food. He gave me four sleeping bags and rolled up another eight or nine
blankets from his closet. He even insisted we take every box of shotgun shells
he owned. We secured all of these provisions and tied them under tarps onto
three of the horses.

“This won’t last
long,” Bill said. “We’ll work on getting more provisions soon.”

He was going to shut
himself away in a cluttered spare room to call all of the members of the Underground
who were sheltering positives, asking them to pass word to the refugees to
gather at his house if they wanted to go with me to hide in a remote location.

“Tell them that if
they want to come, it’s going to be rough out there,” I said before Bill closed
the door. “No electricity, no running water…none of that. We’ll have shelter
and plenty of antibiotics, at least. But they’ll have to be blindfolded on the
way out, too. Tell them that.”

Bill nodded. “That’s
probably a good idea. I understand the blindfolds.
The fewer
people who know the route, the better.
I’ll tell them. And it’ll be
their choice whether to go.”

He shut the door and started making calls.

Chris had emptied all of the boxes of antibiotics
onto Bill’s kitchen table. He’d taken many of the pills out of their foil
trays, sorted them into piles, and was now using a mortar and pestle to grind
and mix them.

“Next step is
measuring out the doses and filling the capsules with the powder,” he
explained. He brushed off his hands. “But first, let me have a look at those
feet.”