Snareville II: Circles (31 page)

The concussion of the blast knocked him off his feet and rolled him. He stood up, dusted himself off and raced toward the west end of the settlement. At the end of the short street, he ducked behind the home of his cousin, the Fritzes. For the first time, he looked behind him. The second story of his home was gone. Splinters smoked throughout the yards and street. Tears welled in his eyes as the tank clattered through the gate.

Men poured in around the tank, trucks parked behind it. The people fanned out through the community, shooting out windows, yelling for people to come out. They wore an assortment of dirty uniforms and clothes. Tattoos covered exposed, filthy skin. Beards on the men were untrimmed. The few women in the group had long, stringy hair and many tattoos similar to what Elizabeth wore.

A man climbed out of the top of the tank. He shouted for anyone to come out of hiding and talk. Several people ran from homes with armloads of family goods. William stepped from behind the wall.

“I am here,” he shouted.

Several rifles pointed his way. Some of the scavengers slowly approached him, eyes darting to windows that looked out over them.

“Where’s the rest, old man?” the man in the tank shouted back.

“Gone. They left yesterday.”

“Why’re you still here?”

“So you people could not follow them, or take what we worked to build.”

“What?”

William slipped his thumb to the headset. “Forgive me, Father, for what I do.”

He keyed the mic. The electrical spark shot through the air to connect with the six other headsets wired to the detonators of the tank shells. Four high explosive rounds, two incendiaries and several pounds of black powder erupted from around the settlement. Buildings dissolved. Glass shards shrieked through the air, splinters sliced through flesh. The fireball reached hundreds of feet into the air. Men and machines were wiped out. The small Amish settlement of Hickory Run winked out of existence.

Chapter 40

I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting this. I guess I just figured we were invincible. We’d survived a zombie plague. We were still alive. Just the fucking shock of remembering that humans sometimes shot back pulled me back to reality. Shit. The phone call from Tom found me out helping extend our fence around some of the northern fields. They had gone back to prairie grass. We figured to fence in some for pasture for our cattle and turn the rest to garden fields. We were getting so we needed the extra food.

I had rushed back into town on Cherokee, Kevin behind with Chloe. We got Leary going on prepping the Operating Room for casualties and called in the people in town who could help. Cindy, Tess and Heather showed up a few minutes later. Soon enough, they chased me out of the way.

I left and started to call my troop commanders. I told Gibson to make sure the landing fields were clear and get a squad together with trucks to transport the wounded back to the hospital. We’d never done anything like this before and it felt like an old M.A.S.H. episode. The choppers would need to be refueled, so I told him to make sure we had aviation fuel ready in the tanks when they got here.

After that, I waited. It was a two hour flight to my people in Indiana and an hour flight here. All I could do was stew. Pepper poked her head into the office.

“Hey, Baby. I’m going to help out at the hospital.”

“What?”

“I figure they could use as many hands as they could get. How many do they have coming in?”

“Shouldn’t you be resting?”

“I’ve rested enough. I’ve rested so much I’m going batty. I love you, but you’re too careful with me. I’m not glass. I’m healed pretty well. Besides, I was an E.R. nurse in Peoria. I’ve seen gunshots. How many of the others have?”

Damn. Now she goes and gets all logical on me. “Fine. I’ll walk over with you.”

I stood from the desk, slid my arm around her waist and gave her a kiss. “I don’t mean to baby you. I’m just…”

“Protective. I know. So am I. We lost Jen. We almost lost Cindy. Of our little family, you’re the one that’s been hurt least. You’re charmed, Danny.”

I squeezed her gently. “I’m blessed. C’mon.”

We walked around the corner. The girls moved a couple of benches out of the way in case they had to put more than one truck at the entrance. Seems they didn’t want anything to trip over.

A thought occurred to me. “Hey, who’s watching the kids?”

She looked at me and smiled. “Your girlfriend, our new son and Ella. Cat rode over to see if Kevin was back from the field as I was thinking about leaving.”

She kissed me, tickled my ribs. As she turned to the door, I swatted her on the behind. She grinned at me, shouted for an update as she went through the doors. I heard a babble of voices as the doors swung shut behind her. I didn’t even want to be inside. I’d just cause havoc. At his best, Leary annoyed me. But he damned sure knew his stuff. And he’d been teaching some of the others. We may not have had any neurosurgeons on staff, but we had a good general doctor who was turning his students into general doctors. Weird how things happen.

We were still an hour and a half from touchdown. I don’t know how Kenny stayed sane when things like this happened. Send people out, get casualties back. When I was in the field, I took people with me. I kicked in doors with them. I laid out battle plans and carried them out. If someone got hurt, I got them back to Leary or Bailey, depending where we were. This. This was tough. I sent people out. They made their decisions and I saw the result of those decisions. Good or bad. And they were now all my people. Not just my team, or my squad. All of them were mine.

But it needed to be done. We couldn’t just hole up in this valley and wait for things to get better. We couldn’t just sit here and expect it to all go away. We needed to get out and inventory what was going on. Where there were people and where there were zeds. Now I knew why commanders all look like old men.

I stood at the corner, debating on going home, going to the office, or going to check on Gibson. We’re a small town, but I didn’t want to hike over to the area Gibson would be using. I headed for the house.

“Daddy,” Rachel shouted as I came in the door. She scampered across the floor to meet me. She wrapped her little arms around one leg and smiled up at me. “Daddy home. Hi, Daddy.”

I smiled back and picked her up. I tickled her ribs and she giggled. Mikey trotted in from the other room. He held his hands up to me. I hoisted him with the other arm and set him against my other hip. I stepped into the kitchen, to find Cat with Tony Junior attached to her leg as she made an afternoon snack for the kids. Ella pulled a bottle of powdered milk from the ’fridge, Kevin laid out plates.

“How is it I have three baby sitters and I end up with two of the kids?” I put both kids on the floor. Tony toddled over to them and together the three went off into the front room.

“You’re just good with kids,” Cat said. “Surprised to see you here.”

“I need a ride to the other side of town.” I picked the keys to my Harley from the hook.

“Ah. Don’t fall off that thing. We don’t want you damaged,” Cat said.

I grinned. “Funny.”

She smiled back at me and I felt my stomach do a little flip. Girlfriend, Pepper said. Funny girl.

The bike was in the garage. It fired on the first hit from the key and I made the run over to the airfield. We were an hour out from arrival. The bird should have been on the ground with Hawk’s troops by now. Pickups towed wagons loaded with tanks of aviation fuel to what at one time was the western end zone of the high school football field. The horses penned there had been caught and moved to another pasture. Gates were open and trucks lined the field, tailgates down. They would load the casualties into the beds and get them to the hospital.

Gibson reported in as I rolled across the parking lot. They were ready to go on his end. Everyone was in place. He had received word on the radio that the birds were taking on passengers. There were eight casualties coming in. Jinks was on the line. Various wounds. Bullets and shell fragments had made a mess. I called and passed word to Leary. He shouted the information on to the others as I hung up.

“What you think, Boss?” Gibson asked. His face was grim. He was a soldier. A survivor of this plague. Most of his Marines had been wiped out at Great Lakes Naval Station. He didn’t even know if anyone else in the Corps survived, outside of his fifty.

“About what?”

He cocked an eyebrow at me. His dark face was impossible for me to read sometimes.

“I think I’m glad that zeds can’t shoot back,” I said after a minute. “I think I want to blast the people that did this to hell and back. But I also think we need more information before we go off and pull some kind of raid. We need to make a trip to Fort Knox and see what the hell is going on.”

“Glad you’re thinkin’ of all that. You understand things better than a lot of Civvies.”

“Gib, I been fightin’ zeds and carrying a rifle for the last three years. I think I’m a little beyond the ‘Civilian’ title.”

He flashed a wide smile at me. “You still trainin’. I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks.”

We waited. Longest forty five minutes of my life. The birds started to chatter at us from thirty minutes out. They wanted clearance to land. We told them where to park. A hundred yards would be a tight fit for them, but they could do it. They informed us they were coming in low on fuel and wouldn’t be able to get much further. One bird would come in on fumes.

Finally, we heard them. Faint at first, but as they closed in on us, the sound thundered in our ears. One chopper came in, made a pass of the field, then turned and landed the length of it. The door on the side facing the trucks opened and troops ran to pull wounded out. Some Amish woman in a long dress came out first, white as a sheet. She held a fluids bag over a young blond girl, half naked and covered in tattoos. There was a bandage around the girl’s chest. Two Marines grabbed the makeshift stretcher the girl lay on, carried it over to a truck and gently slid her inside. The Amish woman followed. One man jumped in behind the wheel, the other in the back to hold onto the stretcher. The driver eased out of the field and onto the street as the second chopper slowly descended.

Jinks hopped out of the bird next, arm around another tattooed Amish girl. This one had her leg wrapped. I ran over to them. The girl weighed next to nothing, it seemed, as I scooped her up.

“I didn’t exactly plan on you bringing people home with you, Corporal,” I told Jinks as she trotted beside me. “Good to see you though, Kid. You done well.”

She smiled up at me through the grime on her face. “Wasn’t like I planned this either, Boss, but it’s good to be home. Now get out of the way and let me work.”

I put the girl in the front seat of a truck, Jinks hopped in beside as the troops slid another wounded girl in the bed. They drove off as we finished unloading the wounded from both choppers.

Two pilots, Busch and Vandevoorde, walked over to us, saluted and gave us the rundown of what they knew. They had two crew chiefs coming in with tanks, but they didn’t know how far they’d make it on the fuel in the machines. I asked Gibson to put them up for the night and asked the pilots to fill out an after action report for me. Tom would get a copy as well. I glanced up at the sky. Black clouds boiled out to the west edge of the valley.

“It’ll take awhile to refuel your choppers, Captain.” I said to Busch, “and I don’t think you’ll get home before this storm hits. Looks like we’re goin’ to get a soaker tonight.”

“Thanks, Major. Been a lot of time in the air today.”

They saluted as I headed for my bike. The crew chiefs went back to tie the rotor blades down and do a post flight check. I rode back over to the hospital. They were still unloading wounded into the emergency room. We maybe should have taken them to the hospital in Princeton, but that one was barely operational and it wasn’t secure.

I watched the organized chaos for a moment, decided not to go in and caught one of the troops acting as an orderly. I told him to have Jinks get with me as soon as she could. He nodded as he rushed back inside. I waited. One of the most useless feelings in the world washed over me. I had sent my people out on a mission and I got wounded back. I had recognized Vickie. She was bloody and bandaged in a shoulder and just above her hip. I turned the bike back to the house.

Chapter 41

I rolled the bike back into the garage, pulled a beer from the fridge, went out and sat on the porch. George came over and shoved his nose into my hand. He leaned into me as I scratched his neck. The kids played in the yard as Ella and Kevin pulled weeds in the garden. One of these days, we would have to go back to mowing yards, just to keep the rodents and snakes away, now that the kids were out.

There was a lot to think about. A lot to talk about. Maybe we’d been living in this little bubble for too long. Human nature being what it is, maybe I should have done this sooner, just to get the lay of the land. Cat came and sat next to me and we discussed what to do in the next few weeks. She was concerned about me. Worried that I was going to get down on myself too hard for something I knew nothing about. While I was the one who sent Henry and the others out on assignment, she reminded me they were the ones who accepted it. She also reminded me that if our troops hadn’t been there, the people in that little village would have been killed or taken prisoner. It made me feel a bit better. Her little kiss at the end of the discussion helped as well.

Jenny woke up from her nap and we went inside to take care of her. My daughter fussed as I picked her up. She needed a change, so while I did that, Cat got a bottle ready. Pepper had thought ahead and reserved some in the fridge. I started to feed her, but she still couldn’t get comfortable, so Cat took over. Jenny snuggled in with a little sigh and soon had the bottle drained. I went out to collect the other kids from the garden as thunder started to roll through the valley.

As I was walking back inside with the kids, I called Henry. He gave me an update. Told me some of the people who pulled off the attack were military. He bugged out after the first round and was holed up in a farm on the Illinois side of the line with the rest of the Amish and their stock. He didn’t know if they would make it through the night. There was a storm rolling in. We were in a bit of a lull right now, but it was building for him. West of us was another line of storms, according to Tom.