The day after: An apocalyptic morning (84 page)

              "Now go," Christine said, continuing to point her gun. "Pick up your backpack and go."

              "I don't want your fucking backpack," Jessica spat at her.

              "Fine," Christine said. "You can starve to death out there then. That's your prerogative."

              Jessica stared back at the three stony faces. "You'll all regret this," she told them. "I promise you that. You will regret doing this to me."

              No one said anything. After a long moment Jessica picked up the backpack and put it on her back. She turned and began to walk down the Interstate. She stopped and looked back at them once. "You'll regret this," she promised again, her voice shaky. "I swear to you." With that she began to walk again. Soon she was out of sight over the first rise.

              As soon as he lifted off at 10:30 that morning, Skip was able to feel the difference the additional weight had on the chopper's handling. He had a squad of four people - Jack, and three of the new guards, Karen Hanglon, Cindy Mackles and Ron Wells - the combined total of which weighed in at 684 pounds, including their weapons and packs. This weight, combined with the one hundred pound pump and the forty-pound water tank slung from the bottom, made for nearly three hundred pounds more than he had carried on his first trip, quite enough to feel a difference.

              Jack sat proudly in the passenger seat, the radio helmet atop his head, a top-of-the-line video camera in his hands that he would use to record the recon aspect of the mission. The three newbies, their weapons tucked against their bodies, were crammed uncomfortably close together in the limited space of the cargo area. The presence of the pump and the fifty feet of inch and a half hose that went with it made their discomfort worse.

              Skip brought the aircraft up to 2000 feet above ground level and headed off to the west at sixty knots, following the narrow ribbon of Interstate 80 towards the town of Auburn. To the left the canyon and its still-raging floodwaters were clearly visible. To the right were the smaller peaks and valleys of the Sierras, the fringe area where the foothills became actual mountains. In front of them they could see that the Interstate had been washed out in many places, either by mudslides or by floodwaters coming down from higher up. There were cars and even a few large trucks parked alongside the road in several places. They kept half an eye out for Jessica. The guards atop hill 1519 had reported that she'd continued walking down Interstate 80 until she disappeared from their sight. Skip wondered if she was heading towards Auburn or cowering in fear somewhere near the fringes of the detection zone. Either way, he couldn't tell. All he knew for sure was that she had moved off the Interstate and into the woods.

              "It doesn't look like a vehicle could get more than five miles down the interstate before it becomes impassable," Skip said into his mouthpiece, his words being transmitted to Jack's earpiece. "That's why all the people that left in the beginning never came back. Even if they tried, they wouldn't have been able to get around the mud after it closed the road."

              "What do you think happened to the drivers of those cars and trucks?" Jack replied, his voice excited as he pointed the camera out the window and filmed the passing Interstate.

              Skip shrugged, reducing altitude just a little as the land continued to drop below them. "They probably followed the road until they couldn't go anymore and then wandered off into the woods. It's likely that most of them died the very first night after the impact, either from mudslides or lightening strikes. Do you remember how it was those first few days?"

              "I remember," Jack said slowly, remembering the terror of the flaming rocks and the hurricane winds. It had only been through blind chance that he, Christine, and their parents had lived long enough to meet the biker gang.

              The first town of any size that they came to was Colfax, some twenty miles from Garden Hill. It had once boasted a population of about 2000 and had served as an anchor for gas stations and fast food establishments along the Interstate. Now it looked abandoned and dead, half of the houses washed away or collapsed to rubble. Skip slowed up and reduced altitude as they came over the top of it, his sharp eyes looking for any sign of human habitation or for anything that might be useful.

              "You see anything?" he asked Jack.

              "It looks empty," he replied, moving the camera this way and that. "I can see a few dead bodies down there but nobody alive."

              "I wonder what happened to the people that lived there?" Skip said. "There must have been survivors. Did they all die of starvation, or were they killed?"

              "Maybe they ran out of food and headed off towards Auburn or something," Jack suggested.

              "Maybe," Skip said. Feeling a vague depression at the emptiness of Colfax, he brought the aircraft back up to altitude and put on the speed once more.

              They flew on and found the same emptiness in Meadow Vista, the next town down the line. This time there were more corpses lying about and even from the air it was plain that they were in advanced states of decomposition. Skip spent less time examining that town, instead finding something very interesting off to the north to look at.

              There were railroad tracks over there, the Southern Pacific line that led from Sacramento through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. These tracks roughly paralleled the interstate (or actually, it was the other way around, the SP line had been built decades before I-80 had even been thought of) and they had already flown over them several times on their trip. But now, sitting idle upon these tracks, were the remains of a freight train. It was sitting in an area where the tracks climbed up the side of a heavily forested hill. It appeared that the train had come to a stop and then had the front two-thirds of it washed down the hill by mud. The back third was still sitting there on the tracks, although some trees and minor falls of mud had come down upon it.

              "Jack," he said, slowing up and turning that way, "pan over to the right. Zoom in on those freight cars on the tracks."

              "Freight cars?" Jack said, turning that way. He looked at them through the viewfinder. "Do you think there's something we can use in there?"

              "There might be," he said, bringing them in closer. "You see those yellow cars with the circular spouts on top?" There were six of them lined up near the center of the remaining cars.

              "Yeah," Jack said, filming them.

              "Those are grain carriers. I'll bet you twenty bucks to a bucket of shit they're full of rice or wheat from the Sacramento area."

              "Really?" he asked. "How do you know that?"

              "Military training," Skip said. "Blowing up trains used to be one of my jobs as an Apache pilot. I never got to actually do it, but they made sure I knew how."

              "Will the grain still be good?"

              "That I don't know. If it was kept dry it probably will still be edible, if water got in, it'll be useless."

              "Don't you think someone would have already gotten into them?" he asked next.

              "Maybe," Skip allowed, "but maybe not. This is a pretty isolated section of tracking. Unless someone was in the air like we are, I'm not sure they would have even seen these cars. Not only that, it doesn't look like the easiest place in the world to get to on foot. Those mud slides in front of and behind it would be hard to get through."

              "Won't that keep us from getting to it too?" he asked.

              "Not if we lower people down from the helicopter," Skip said, feeling real excitement now. He put the helicopter in a low hover about three hundred yards from the train. "And look over there, behind the grain cars," he told Jack. "Those are standard boxcars. There could be anything in those. We definitely have to bring someone out to take a look. Zoom in on the doors of them and tell me if they're still shut."

              Jack did this. "They are," he said.

              "The cargo is probably still inside then," Skip said. "If someone would have pilfered supplies out of there, they wouldn't have bothered to shut all the doors again, would they?"

              "No," Jack replied, catching some of the excitement, "they wouldn't."

              "Pan left now," Skip said after all of the cargo carriers were filmed. "There are about ten tanker cars there toward the rear. I'm sure there's no food in them but try to get a legible shot of those numbers on the sides of them."

              "What numbers?" Jack asked, looking that way. "There's a whole bunch of numbers on the sides."

              "There should be a four-digit number stenciled in white in large numbers. That's the Department of Transportation HAZMAT number. Every tanker car, whether it's on a train or a truck, has to have one so that the contents can be identified in case of a spill."

              "Oh," he said, finally locating it on the first tanker. "I got it. It says twelve-oh-three. What's that?"

              "I think that's gasoline," Skip said, "but I'm not sure. Paul will have a copy of the book that tells you all that on his fire engine. Every emergency vehicle with the potential to respond to a spill carries one."

              Jack filmed all of the tank cars finding that all but four of them were marked with 1203. Behind the tank cars were two car carriers full of Toyota 4-runners. He didn't bother filming those. Behind this were two empty flat cars and then three more generic boxcars. "I got 'em all," he said when he was done.

              "Good lad," Skip said, taking his hand off the control long enough to give a thumbs up. He then pulled up and began heading off to the east again to see what else was in store for them. Had he passed over the ridge that the train was stalled upon, he would have found himself flying over one hundred and sixty armed men that were heading east towards Garden Hill. As it was however, neither Skip nor Jack nor the three guards crammed uncomfortably in the back saw the slightest sign of them. Nor did the marching men on the ground see or hear the chopper. The ridge kept between them and the low noise output provided by the NOTAR system saw to this. The eyes of Garden Hill and the military might of Auburn passed each other peacefully less than five miles apart with neither realizing it had happened.

              Corporal Tim Hansen was leaning back against one of the sandbags that made up the defensive bunker on the east side of Auburn. He was smoking a cigarette from the dwindling supply and mulling over the idea of trading Cindy, his third wife, for Sally, Private Horn's first wife. The cigarette was somewhat stale with age but the little blasts of nicotine upon his brain that it provided helped him think. Granted, Sally was not as attractive as Cindy was, but she was different. A man got tired of tearing one off the same four pieces. Maybe he could arrange for a temporary swap for a while. That was an idea that was gaining quiet popularity in town these days; a kind of try before you buy policy. He would have to talk to Horn about...

              "Aircraft approaching!" Private Rimms, the young recruit from Grass Valley on his first assignment suddenly yelled, interrupting his musings.

              "What?" Hansen said, his eyes searching high in the sky in the direction he was looking. "Did you say aircraft?"

              "A helicopter," Rimms said, pointing. "One o'clock low. It has something underneath it!"

              Finally Hansen saw it. It was still very small with distance and there was no detectable sound as of yet, but it was unmistakably a helicopter. Slung beneath it by a rope or cable was a square device of some sort. "Holy shit," he said, picking up his radio. He turned to his men. "Weapons ready in case its hostile but hold your fire."

              The men all picked up their weapons and pointed them in the direction of the approaching aircraft even though it was still too far away for there to be a hope of hitting it.

              "Command central," Hansen said into his radio, "this is perimeter station 3. Level one alert! I repeat, level one alert!"

              Barnes himself, hearing the highest level of alert, came immediately on the radio. "What do you have, Perimeter 3?" he asked, his voice anxious.

              "Sir," Hansen said, "this is Corporal Hansen speaking from perimeter 3. I have a helicopter approaching my position from the east. It is a small, civilian type chopper with a square box of some sort hanging from the bottom of it by a rope or a cable. It's probably two miles out at this point, flying about two thousand feet."

              "Confirm a helicopter?" Barnes said, his voice registering shock.

              "That is affirmative, sir, a helicopter. It's heading right towards us."

              "Okay, we got something here," Skip said as they approached Auburn. From their height they were well above the two protective hills and able to see into what remained of the town. To the north was nothing but a floodplain with a few buildings sticking up out of it. To the south of the interstate however, was a good portion of town with the tiny figures of people clearly visible walking back and forth on the streets. As of yet they were still too far out to tell sex or age. "I can see people walking around out there."