The day after: An apocalyptic morning (135 page)

              "It ain't right," Zachary repeated.

              They both looked at the rapidly stiffening corpse of Staleworth for a moment, seeing the coagulating blood from the exiting .45 caliber bullet on the top of his head. Until the comet neither of them had even seen a dead body before. Now they were surrounded by them and forced to constantly worry that they would be the next.

              "I'm not gonna let this shit happen to me," Lexington said quietly. "I'm not gonna end up as some fuckin corpse in the woods because that asshole Barnes wants to score some fresh pussy and his own personal helicopter."

              "What do you mean?" Zachary asked.

              "I'm gettin' my ass out of here," he said. "Fuck this shit."

              Zachary looked at him nervously, trying to read his face in the meager backwash of their flashlights. "What the hell you talking about? Where are you going to go? There ain't nothing but Garden Hill and Auburn left."

              Lexington shook his head. "That's where you're wrong," he said. "The militia done took everything in the neighborhood, that's true. But there's more than just this neighborhood. They haven't been past Grass Valley. There's all kinds a little towns north of there. Somewhere, some of them have to still be alive."

              "What if there is? What makes you think they'll take you in? And how will you feed yourself long enough to get there?"

              "Food ain't a problem," he replied, lowering his voice even further. "I'm a food supply carrier. I have enough to last two men for more than a month if we ration it."

              "We?" Zachary said. "You want me to go with you?"

              "You pack the ammo," he told him. "And there's safety in numbers."

              "I don't know," he said, shaking his head. "What if we don't find nothing? We'll die out there."

              "And we'll probably die if we stay," Lexington reminded him. "It's gotten to the point that I think the devil we don't know is better than the one we do. If you wanna get blasted apart on the trail or have your fuckin nuts blown off by one of those mines, than you just stay. Me, I'm going. I'd rather starve to death twenty miles away from here than have to put a pistol to my own head and get eaten by raccoons and rats."

              Zachary was not convinced, but he was swaying.

              "It's a better fuckin chance than what we got here," Lexington told him. "We've been through some shit, you and I, you know that. Come with me. We'll make it. And if we don't, we'll at least die like men."

              He took a breath, lowering his head a little. "How?" he finally said.

              It was almost absurdly easy to get away. The next morning, twenty minutes into the day's march, just as everyone was starting to worry about when the first hit and run attack would come, Lexington broke formation and trotted over to Stinson.

              "I gotta take a shit, sarge," he told him. "I'm gonna lag back for a minute."

              Stinson, who, like everyone else was strung out with nervous fatigue, looked at his private in annoyance. "Why the fuck didn't you take one after breakfast like everyone else? Jesus Christ, Lexington."

              "I didn't have to go then," he said. "I'll just be a few minutes."

              Stinson shook his head. "Hurry the fuck up," he said. "We ain't slowing down for your ass. Be back in formation in ten minutes or I'm gonna cut your lunch rations."

              "You got it, sarge," Lexington told him reassuringly. "Thanks."

              With that, he trotted off to the side, his weapon held at the ready, his sleeping bag and his fifty-pound pack of rations on his back. He darted into the middle of a group of trees and squatted there, not bothering to pull down his pants, just waiting while his comrades passed on both sides, none of them even noticing his presence so widely were the troops kept spaced.

              Stinson's squad was near the rear of the formation that morning. It took less than five minutes before the rest of the group passed by him. He waited another five minutes and then stood up, edging out of his hiding area and looking around. No one else was in view. He was alone.

              Moving as quickly as he could, he moved back in the direction from which they had come and then darted into an area of thicker trees near a minor mudfall. He then began to move north, quickly disappearing into the dense forest. He moved from tree to tree, over hills, through thick mud, pushing himself to the limit of his physical limitations. By the time Stinson noticed that he had never returned to his place in the march twenty minutes later, he was nearly a mile away.

              He climbed to the top of a large, heavily wooded hill. He and Zachary had managed to meet briefly just after breakfast and had decided upon this location as a rally point. Once atop it he waited nervously for another ten minutes before the sound of wet footsteps and a clanking rifle reached his ears. He trained his rifle out over the approach, vowing that if it were the militia giving pursuit he would go down shooting. It wasn't. A minute later the familiar form of his friend, very out of breath and moving only on reserve energy, appeared.

              Zachary had used the same ruse to escape from his squad, which had been marching a little closer in towards the front. Again, this was something that probably would not have been possible had they been in a tight formation such as the one they'd left Auburn in, but Bracken's rules were no less than fifty feet between soldiers at all times. This allowed many gaps to be used and exploited.

              The two men shook hands warmly at the top of the ridge.

              "No one's behind you?" Lexington asked.

              "No," Zachary breathed. "Not as far as I know."

              "Good. Let's get moving before there are. I don't think they'll bother looking for us, but the farther away we can get, the better."

              He nodded, exhausted from carrying his own sixty pound pack full of ammunition, but determined. They went down the far side of the hill and then began to work their way north.

              "Sir," Stinson said as he approached his lieutenant, "can I have a quick word?"

              "Sure," Colby said, slowing up a little. "But make it fast. God only knows when those fucks are going to start hitting us and I don't want to be standing next to anyone when they do."

              "Well, sir," Stinson said, trying to think if there was a delicate way to put this. There really wasn't. "The fact is that one of my men... well..."

              "What?" Colby demanded, in no mood for word games. "One of your men is what?"

              "Missing, sir."

              "Missing?" he asked. "You mean we missed a KIA from the attacks last night?"

              "No, sir," Stinson told him. "He wasn't killed last night. It's Private Lexington. He was marching with us less than thirty minutes ago. He told me he was going to hold back for a minute to take a shit and then catch up. He never did."

              Colby scratched his head a little, his muddled brain trying to sort through this. "Thirty minutes ago? Are you sure he didn't accidentally form up with the wrong squad? A lot of the guys are kinda loopy lately."

              "I checked the squads immediately around mine, sir," Stinson told him. "He wasn't there. I'm wondering if maybe he... well... kind of ran off."

              "Ran off?"

              "Deserted, sir," Stinson said. "There hasn't been any gunfire from behind us. I simply can't think of any other reason that he wouldn't have come back. If he fell and injured himself or was attacked, he would've fired off a shot, wouldn't you think?"

              "Now let's not start jumping to conclusions," Colby said, although what Stinson was saying made perfect sense given the current climate. "Maybe he's..."

              "Sir," said Sergeant Standish from third squad as he came trotting up behind them. "Can I have a quick word with you?"

              Colby looked at him, annoyed. "Can it wait for a minute? I'm already dealing with something here."

              "Not really, sir," Standish said. "You see, one of my men seems to have wandered off."

              Five minutes later the march had been halted and the two sergeants and their lieutenant were talking with Bracken. Bracken questioned them thoroughly and, upon discovering that the two men had disappeared independently of each other by using the exact same excuse convinced everyone that desertion was what they were dealing with.

              "Shall we try to find them?" Colby asked. "They should be hanged as an example to the other men."

              "They should be," Bracken said, "but I don't think there's any point in looking for them. They could be miles away by now in any direction."

              "So we just let them go?" Stinson asked.

              "There's nothing else to do," Bracken told him. "Let's get everyone moving again. I want to put some miles behind us. In the meantime, keep this quiet. I don't want to give the other men any ideas."

              Had he not been so tired he probably would have realized the futility of this. Already the word had been passed both up and down the ranks.

              They lost seven more men to ambush attacks during the course of that day; a little less than what had been average. Though fatigue had slowed them down in almost every other action, getting their asses down on the ground when the bullets started coming in was not one of them. Many times the people in the vicinity of the attack were able to spot the flashes of the rifles shots and hit the dirt even before the initial shots could take them out. As a result the average number fell a little each day, with this day being the lowest yet.

              At night too they had found a way to decrease the amount of people killed and wounded by the strafing attacks. Though they could not eliminate them entirely, they had found that by setting up their camp against the base of hills, they could at least cut in half the potential directions from which those attacks came, therefore making them more predictable. This served two purposes. One, it saved time when the guards returned fire. Instead of having to search 360 degrees of surrounding area to spot where the attack was coming from, they only had to search 180 to 220 degrees. This factor led directly to the second advantage - that the helicopter had to fire from further back to avoid being hit, thus decreasing the accuracy of the fire. At night the Garden Hill helicopter was lucky if it could hit one person per firing run, thus cutting the average men hit to around six or eight per night. That was still a considerable rate of attrition, but it was not nearly as bad as the first few days had been.

              But still, the threat and the reality of random, unpredictable death was undeniably there as the militia made camp on this night. They did not know that Skip and Jack had stood down the helicopter at 4:00 PM that afternoon for a maintenance regime and to get some much needed rest for themselves. The militia only knew that they enjoyed an unheard of ten-hour period without being attacked in any way, shape, or form. Though nobody got much rest because of the anticipation of attack, the tracers did not roll in for the first time until just after 2:00 AM. There were only two follow-up attacks after this. In all, only four men were killed and one slightly wounded in the hours between sunset and sunrise.

              But in the morning, as they pulled themselves out of their sleeping bags and came off guard detail to face a new day, it was discovered that three more men were missing nonetheless, they, their weapons, and their packs all vanished, there whereabouts unknown. With them had gone more ammunition, another of the precious automatic weapons, and nearly seventy pounds of rations.

              It had been five days since the uprising that had placed Auburn in the hands of Jessica and the rest of the women and still the town was a flurry of activity. Jessica had appointed Madeline - who had the most military training and experience - as the commander of the Auburn defense forces and her titular second-in-command. Although Madeline had no real power to make town decisions (Jessica had seen to that), she had almost complete autonomy when it came to raising, training, and equipping those women who would be responsible for firing the guns at the returning militia when that happened.

              Luckily Barnes and company had already taken care of the most basic part of the defenses: the fixed bunkers and trenches from which the battle would be fought. At every one of the major access points to the town was an impressive array of sandbagged trenches atop of hills, many of which were protected by barbed wire mazes. These defenses had been constructed with the purpose of repelling a group at least as large as the militia itself. Would they think it ironic when those very defenses, those very emplacements, those very guns, were used to chop them up? Perhaps. Or perhaps they would be too busy dying to notice.

              On this rainy, dreary morning, while Jessica pulled herself out of bed at 9:00 AM and made a mad dash to her private bathroom, the sound of gunfire could be heard coming from the training ground out beyond the high school. It was the popping of M-16s and AK-47s mostly. Usually it was the single pops of semi-automatic fire that went with basic aiming and shooting practice but every once in a while there would be the extended bursts as the women practiced on full automatic. It was Maddie's intent to qualify as many of the women as possible in the time that she had left (which was estimated to be about three to four weeks). From her best shooters and leaders, she would then construct a chain of command by choosing lieutenants and sergeants to lead the corporals and privates.