The day after: An apocalyptic morning (120 page)

              He went over this plan with everyone again and again, explaining it and pointing at the map every evening after dinner. He encouraged questions and there were many. He answered each one to the best of his abilities and with complete, sometimes brutal honesty. "Yes," he told those who asked about casualties, "we will more than likely have some of our people get wounded or even killed. I don't like it and I wish I could tell you that it won't happen, but this is a war and that is the nature of war. What I can promise you is that we will make every attempt to care for those who are wounded. Paul and Janet will serve as our battalion aid station and El Dorado Hills has agreed to take in our wounded and allow their doctor to treat them if we can get them there. Unless the fate of the entire town is resting upon using the chopper for something else at the moment, I will fly our wounded immediately there."

              After the evening's lecture was wrapped up it would be time for the recon flight to check the vicinity of Auburn for the invasion force. So far, there was still no sign of them. Skip was grateful each night that he and Jack flew out there and saw nothing on the FLIR but empty woods and abandoned interstate. He was not so optimistic as to think that they might have called off the attack but he was grateful for each additional day of preparation that they were given.

              After returning from the recon missions he would then typically spend an hour or two going over the status of the day's work with the people that had been placed in charge of each task. Christine was in charge of the digging crews while Mick was in charge of the weapons and ammunition crews. There were also several other special projects that were underway that Steve Kensington was working on.

              If he got to bed before midnight, Skip considered himself lucky. In the morning, he would wake up to the blaring of his wind-up alarm clock at 4:30 AM so he could spend a few hours training the eight people that had been chosen for the task of harassing the advancing Auburnites. Christine and Paula, his original guard force members, were his squad leaders for this force. They were each in charge of a four-person team who were going to be dropped in the woods very near the advancing enemy. Though everyone who was in this task force had been through either Skip or Christine's advanced training class, this type of warfare was something that he felt they needed additional instruction on. Most of the training consisted of lectures.

              "There's no reason why any of you should get hit out there," he told them. "You actually have one of the safest jobs in this whole conflict if you do it right. You pick your ambush site carefully and you make damn sure you have good cover and a good path of retreat. When they come into view, you hit them fast and then you get the hell out of there before they have a chance to engage you. Christine and Paula, you assign targets to your riflemen and make sure they know who they're going to be aiming at. If two people shoot the same person, it's a waste of ammo. Riflemen, you all fire at the same time at your assigned target and just like that, three enemies are dead or wounded. Once the riflemen fire, the squad leader opens up for a quick burst with the automatic weapon. And I mean a quick burst. Don't get greedy. That's how you get killed. As soon as they start to return fire, get the hell out and back to the helicopter."

              As exhausted as he was all of the time, Skip was still quite pleased with the pace that the war preparations were moving forward. The townspeople had pulled together like they never had before. Previous enemies had managed to set aside their petty differences in the interest of efficiency. Most of the workforce marched out after breakfast each morning and dug trenches in the hills, filling their best pillowcases with the mud that they dug out of the ground to make sandbags. Others ripped the gas tanks out of cars so that Steve could use his welder to convert them into bomb casings. Others still helped load ammunition clips and clean weapons or assembled combat packs out of children's backpacks. And because all of this war-related labor did not allow for such routine tasks as wood gathering and drying, they were forced to go without their once-demanded luxury: hot baths in the evenings. They did not complain about this, not even the most vocal of them. They simply bathed in cold water or went without. Similarly the food that they were served was now usually served cold for the same reason. Although Stacy and Sara managed to put fresh bread on the table every night, they did this only with the wood that they gathered themselves and everything else was served directly out of the can. Again, no one complained, apparently realizing that survival took precedence over luxury. Skip sometimes found it hard to believe that these were the same yuppie women that had followed Jessica's teachings and tried to oust him from town.

              He began to have hope that his crazy scheme just might work.

              "Skip," said Steve Kensington on the morning of January 11, just as he was heading from his early training session with the harassment force to the cafeteria to pick up his ration of cold food. "You got a minute?"

              "Sure," Skip said, stifling a yawn. "What's up?" He noted that Steve, who had been working like mad for the last three days, looked even more tired than he himself felt. There were dark circles under his bloodshot eyes and his skin had an unhealthy pallor to it.

              "I think I managed to make an operational mine," he said. "Come outside and have a look."

              "Yeah?" Skip asked, pleased. Part of his defensive plan called for some sort of landmine to help protect certain parts of their perimeter. Steve, as their resident mechanical genius, had been tasked to come up with a design if he could. "Let's go check it out."

              "I got the idea from what those assholes that killed Missy and Dale did with the Raid cans," he said, leading Skip down a hall and out through one of the side doors. "They key to the whole thing are the mousetraps."

              "Mousetraps?" Skip asked. "Where did you get mousetraps? There weren't any of them in the supply room."

              "But there were in the grocery store," Steve said. "We never brought them over here because we didn't have a use for them. None of the stragglers that picked through the store in the early days had a use for them either. They were still sitting in the storage room yesterday, four boxes of fifty."

              They walked through the rain to the maintenance shed, a room that had become Steve's workshop. He had a variety of tools and equipment stacked on the floor of the shed, including an air compressor, a welder, and various power tools, all of which he powered with the inverter on the fire engine. Several of his gas tank creations were sitting on a shelf, waiting their turn to be turned into bomb casings, and several completed ones were stacked outside. Skip saw that he had been using a power saw and a drill recently. The former was sitting on the edge of the bench, it's blade dusty with sawdust. The latter was sitting on the floor next to a vise. It was still plugged into the power cord that ran from the fire engine and it had a one-inch drill bit installed in it.

              "It's very simple actually," Steve explained as he picked up a three-foot length of lumber that looked like it had been cut from a two by four. "All I need is scrap wood from the collapsed houses, a shotgun shell, a mousetrap, and some fishing line. Here," he handed it over, "check it out. This one is safe, it doesn't have the shotgun shell in it yet."

              Skip took the offered piece of wood. He saw that three holes, one large and two small, had been drilled in the center of it. On either side of these holes was a seesaw type of assembly made out of 3/8-inch dowels and a twelve-inch wooden ruler. Fishing line had been tied to the ends of the rulers and run through the smaller holes where it was attached by means of a fishing hook to the spring of a mousetrap. "How does it work?" he asked.

              "You put the shotgun shell in the big hole with the primer side facing the trap," Steve explained. "The hole is just the right size so the shell will fit snugly. If you look at the mousetrap you'll see that I cut a small hole in the base of it and cut the trap part in two and bent it upward. The bent-up piece will strike the primer of the shell when it's tripped. The wood will act like a small shotgun barrel and channel the blast upward."

              "And these rulers set it off?" Skip asked, running his finger over them.

              "Right," Steve said. "Go ahead and arm the trap."

              Skip did so, forcing the powerful spring backwards and setting it.

              "Now you see," Steve explained, "that fishing line is connected to the rulers on one end and the trip mechanism on the other. If anyone steps on this thing on either side, they'll push the far end of the ruler down which will force the near end up which will then pull on the string and spring the trap. Go ahead and try it."

              Skip pushed on the ruler. Nothing happened at first except the ruler bent a little. Steve told him to push a little harder and he did. This time there was a snap and the trap slammed home.

              "Boom," Steve said with a grin. "They step on that thing and the pellets will blast upward right into them. It'll either take them in the crotch if they happen to be straddling it or it'll take out the side of their leg if they're off to the side."

              "Ouch," Skip said, wincing a little at the thought.

              "It probably won't kill them," Steve said apologetically. "Especially if we use the birdshot shells that we have."

              "It doesn't have to kill them," Skip assured him. "In fact, it demoralizes the other soldiers even more if it doesn't. Especially considering the lack of field hospitals and medical care. Trust me, you blow a guys balls off with that thing and leave him writhing in agony on the ground, it has a detrimental effect on morale."

              "I guess it would at that," Steve said. "Anyway, that's the ground version of the mine. I've also come up with one that you can mount on a tree or in a bush or on any other solid surface."

              "Yeah?"

              Steve picked up a smaller piece of two by four, this one only about four inches square. It had the same hole for the shotgun shell drilled in the center of it but only one smaller hole to string fishing line through. The bottom of it was different as well. Small strips of plywood had been screwed into all four sides of it. These strips extended about four inches past the bottom of the thing so that there was a hollow area under it to give the trap room to swing shut.

              "It fires with the same principal," Steve told him. "A fish hook connected to the trap mechanism. Only this time you put the thing on the tree or whatever, camouflage it with some branches or some mud, and then run a length of wire down to the ground. I figure that we put a small pulley on a stake and then string the wire about two inches or so off the ground. When someone trips over the wire, boom, that's their ass."

              "Fucking brilliant," Skip said.

              Steve gave an embarrassed shrug. "Just doing my part," he said.

              "Well you just keep doing your part," Skip said. "How many of these things can you make us?"

              "I can make two hundred of them," he said. "That's how many mousetraps I have. Can you use that many?"

              "I can use them," Skip said. "Trust me on that. Make a hundred and fifty of the ground mines and fifty of the tree-mounts."

              "I'll get right on it. I'm almost done with these gas tanks so I'll have the crew that's been stripping them out for me start working on these."

              "Coming up on the mudfall," Jack, looking through the FLIR scope, reported that night at 9:30. They were on the nightly recon flight to the vicinity of Auburn and the mudfall in question was the first one east of the town - the same one that Anna and Jean had walked to in the darkness on their first night of freedom.

              "Copy," Skip said. "Slowing up."

              "You're about two miles and closing," Jack reported. As they got closer he continued to read off distances every fifteen seconds or so. "Okay," he finally said. "About a mile out. No sign of activity."

              "Right," Skip told him, exhaling a breath of air. "Banking left to check the south." He turned to the left, keeping a careful eye on his compass and his altimeter. As often as he had done night flights over the past few weeks, he was still not comfortable with him, he couldn't afford to be comfortable with them, although he had learned to trust Jack, his navigator and remote eyes, implicitly.

              "Still looking good," Jack reported as they neared the edge of the impassable zone. "And still no signs of soldiers. Go ahead and come around to 270 now, we're past the edge."

              "Banking right," Skip said, watching the compass swing around to 270 degrees.

              They flew in this direction for nearly five minutes and then banked right again, heading back to the north to pick up the interstate again. It was in this area that Skip figured they were most likely to find the soldiers they were looking for.

              "Nothing," Jack reported as they ambled along at thirty knots. "Coming up on the interstate again. It's about two miles in front of you." Once again he started announcing the distance as they closed. Skip's goal was to stay about a mile away from the actual roadway - close enough to see if the troops were camping on it but too far away for them to hear the helicopter if they were there. "One mile," he announced when they reached that point. "And still nothing visible."