The day after: An apocalyptic morning (96 page)

              "Yes, sir," Bracken said, sipping from a bottle of beer and taking a puff of his own stogy. "Some of the other men wanted to push ahead anyway, but I figured a forty percent casualty rate was a conservative estimate for that kind of operation. That's just way too high."

              "I would've skinned you alive if you would've got half your people killed," Barnes assured him. "If any of those men give you any shit about it, you have them come talk to me. I'll straighten them out."

              "Yes, sir."

              They were in Bracken's modest house, just down the hill from the high school. It was the first evening since the return of the company from their broken mission. Though he had already been given an official debriefing that afternoon, Barnes had invited himself over for dinner so he could get a more informal view on the Garden Hill situation. Though most of the town ate community meals at pre-set times in the high school cafeteria, those in Barnes' inner circle, which Bracken certainly was, were privileged with a certain amount of personal groceries from the stock each week. Utilizing these groceries, Jean and Anna, two of his wives, had prepared a stroganoff dish out of dry noodles and canned beef. The remains of it were now littering the dinner table where the two men sat.

              "I must say," Barnes told his newest official captain (that news had been the first offered that evening) as he patted his stomach, "your bitches surely did a good job on dinner."

              "Thank you, sir," Bracken replied, pleased with the praise. Though both Anna and Jean were hovering nearby, one clearing plates away, the other delivering fresh bottles of beer, it did not occur to either man to extend that thanks to them.

              "Maybe I'll send two of my bitches down here to take some cooking lessons from them," Barnes said reflectively. "God knows they could use them."

              "Anytime, sir," Bracken assured him. "Anytime."

              Bracken's other two "bitches", as the term went in Auburn, were sitting on the couch just outside the dining area. Kelly, the blonde, was spooning pureed meat into Sharon's mouth. Barnes looked at this sadly for a moment. "Still no improvement with her huh?" he asked.

              "No," Bracken replied. "I think the comet has driven her completely insane. I've been hoping she'll snap out of it but so far she just keeps getting worse. I'm afraid I might have to... you know... put her out of her misery."

              Barnes nodded understandingly. "Whenever you think the time is right, I'll sign the order for you," he said. "We can't keep feeding people that aren't able to function as productive members of the society."

              "Maybe we'll do that in the morning," he said. "It's a pity. She really was a fine bitch when I first got her. She had one of the tightest cunts I've ever felt."

              "Well go ahead and give her one last ride before you bring her in," Barnes grinned. "It should still be tight, shouldn't it?"

              While they laughed about that Jean and Anna, their faces completely expressionless, made a trip to the kitchen with their dishes. By the time they returned a minute later to finish clearing, the subject of Sharon had been tossed aside in favor of Garden Hill.

              "So what do you think it will take to counter the forces at Garden Hill painlessly?" Barnes wanted to know.

              "Well," Bracken replied, "taking into account their air superiority and their bunkers, I'd say that four hundred to five hundred men would be required just to make them consider giving up without a fight."

              "And suppose they demand a fight? Would that many men be sufficient to win?"

              "We would have won with the men we had," Bracken said confidently. "The question is not of winning or losing but of what casualty rate we take and what sort of damage we inflict upon the spoils that we're after. I'm sure we could take them with little more than a hundred men, but in order to minimize casualties to an acceptable level, we'll need at least five hundred."

              "We don't have five hundred men," Barnes reminded him. "The last class from Grass Valley has been through the training now and that brings us up to a grand total of four hundred and fifty troops, a lot more than we had in the beginning, but not nearly enough to attack in the strength you are suggesting and still maintain enough of a force here for security and self-defense. What if I gave you three hundred troops? What kind of casualty rate would you expect from that?"

              Bracken thought about that for a minute. "High," he said. "But I could minimize it by attacking from two different directions at once."

              "Use a diversionary force?"

              "No." Bracken shook his head. "The chopper they have rules out that tactic. With three hundred men I would have two full-blown attack forces hitting them simultaneously from two different directions. Overwhelm their defenses all at once and basically use speed to get inside that wall before too many of us get chopped up. It's not pretty but its sound."

              "The D-day technique," Barnes agreed. "That would do it."

              "But losses would still be rather high. Maybe as high as thirty percent if we were unlucky."

              "Ordinarily that would be an unacceptable loss," Barnes told him. "But in light of the need to either capture or destroy that helicopter, it becomes acceptable. We have to get our hands on that machine and its pilot, no Micker what the cost."

              "I understand that, sir," Bracken replied. "And I agree with your reasoning. However, if we could take that town painlessly or force a surrender, wouldn't that still be the more acceptable option?"

              "Of course it would. What are you suggesting?"

              "If you could give me four hundred men," Bracken told him, "I think that just might be enough to convince them to give up the fight. I could hit them from three different directions at once - three companies of one hundred and twenty men apiece and one reserve platoon of forty that could be moved to wherever it's needed. I think we'd have a decent chance of forcing surrender very early in the battle if we did this. And if not, the sheer numbers alone will make it a very short fight. I would project no more than ten percent losses at worst and we might very well be able to overwhelm them before the helicopter can even leave the ground. After all, it takes a few minutes for it to spin up and lift off. You don't just jump in it like a car and start driving."

              Barnes clearly didn't like this idea too much. "That would only leave forty-five troops inside the town," he said. "What if we're attacked? That is stretching our defense way too thinly."

              "Who's going to attack us?" Bracken asked him. "We've already cleaned out every other town within a thirty mile radius."

              "Somebody from beyond that thirty mile radius," Barnes returned. "We don't have the luxury of that helicopter like Garden Hill does. We don't know what is out there except for the places we've physically walked to on the ground. If a major attack comes two days after you take four hundred troops out of here, we're fucked."

              "What if we left you some of the most experienced men and most of the automatic weapons?" Bracken countered. "That would make your forty-five men more like ninety. And I wouldn't need either the experience or the rapid-fire capability as much. Just give me some squad leaders and some officers who know what they're doing and the sheer numbers will do the rest."

              They discussed this back and forth for a few minutes as Jean and Anna finished clearing and cleaning the table. Barnes, though clearly reluctant to commit so many of his troops, eventually decided to go with the plan.

              "I'll need to reorganize them in to different units and exercise them for a bit first," Bracken said.

              "Of course," Barnes agreed. "When can you have them trained up?"

              "Give me three weeks and they'll be ready to march," he said.

              "Three weeks," Barnes said.

              Jean and Anna said nothing to each other as they went about cleaning up the kitchen. Though they had much they wanted to discuss with each other - the day had been rife with rumors and stories from the returning attack force - neither dared talk inside the house. There was too much danger of Bracken or Kelly overhearing their words. It was best to pretend they knew nothing, heard nothing, saw nothing. So they washed dishes in the large tub of cold water and dried them with a towel. They put them neatly away in the oak cabinets over the useless sink. They did not even share a meaningful glance at each other.

              And then it came time to take out the garbage. They each grabbed an end of the large plastic tub that they stored disposable Micker in and lifted. After informing Bracken that they were going to dump refuse - it was required that a woman check with her man before leaving the house unexpectedly - they went out the back door and began walking slowly down the darkened, rainy street. A Ford F-250 was parked at the intersection, discreetly hidden in the closed garage of an empty house. This was the street's garbage collection point. Whenever it got full a work-crew of men (it used to be women until Marla's escape - it was suspected that she hid in the garbage to get out and that the other women covered for her) drove it two miles outside of town to a dumping area that had been established.

              "Garden Hill is still there," Anna whispered excitedly. "They couldn't attack it!"

              "It doesn't sound like Marla made it there though," Jean said. "I heard Asshole tell the head asshole that that woman they picked up said she never made it."

              "Oh, fuck Marla," Anna said. "We knew she was probably dead all the time. Think about us for a moment."

              "Us?"

              "Us," Anna confirmed, slowing her pace a little more so they'd have more time to talk. "If we can get out of here, there's someplace for us to go now! Someplace where the women aren't slaves."

              "Anna," Jean said carefully, "they're in there right now planning on how they're going to attack that place. What good would it do for us to go there if Asshole is just going to destroy it next month?"

              "Maybe if we warn them," Anna suggested, "they won't be able to take it. If nothing else, maybe they can evacuate everyone to someplace else."

              "Or maybe they'll still take the place and hang us once they do."

              "It's a chance, Jean," she said. "We might die, but if there's any hope of getting out of this life, I'm going to take it. I'm going to go. You can stay here if you want."

              "I'll go if you go," she said with a nervous sigh. "You know that."

              "I know," she said, giving her an unseen smile.

              "But how do we get out?" Jean wanted to know. "How do we escape and get far enough away so they can't catch us? And then there's the fact that it's almost a ten-day walk to Garden Hill. What will we eat?"

              They reached the house where the garbage truck was parked. They set down their tub and lifted up on the garage door, which was kept unlocked. They picked the tub back up and then, with a coordinated heave, they dumped the contents into the back amid the rest of the garbage.

              "We need to start stashing food," Anna said thoughtfully. "We need a place to hide it where we can recover it later."

              "How will we do that?"

              Anna looked at the mounds of debris in the back of the truck and had an idea. "We'll throw it away," she said.

              "Huh?"

              Anna explained what she meant. Soon Jean was smiling as well. "Brilliant," she said. "Is that what they teach you in college."

              "Yes," Anna said seriously. "It was a two semester class."

              They shared a small laugh as they closed down the garage. They picked up their tub and began heading back home.

              "How are we going to actually get out though?" Jean asked. "If we can't do that, then it doesn't do much good to solve the food problem."

              "I'll have to work on that one," Anna said. "Give me a little time."

              "A little time is all we have," Jean reminded her.

              Not too far away, unseen and unheard by anyone in the town of Auburn, a small black and white helicopter was hovering in the darkness. It was at an altitude of three thousand feet above the north side of the town, about half a mile from the closest habitation or manned position. Skip, behind the controls, was sweating nervously, his eyes ignoring the blackness outside the windshield and concentrating on the instruments in front of him. He was experiencing a strong sensation of vertigo, common among pilots under instrument conditions. His mind, with no visual inputs to counter the notion, was telling him that he was slowly descending and drifting to the right. His instincts cried at him to correct for this. Only the radar altimeter and the artificial horizon, which told him he was holding steady, kept him from actually doing this.

              "Let's do this quick," he said to Jack, who was peering at the FLIR display just as intently. "I don't like just sitting here like this. It's disorienting in the dark."