Tread Fearless: Survival & Awakening (The Gatekeeper Book 4) (49 page)

Indeed, she loved the dog almost as much as she loved Mark. And that was a strong and unfamiliar love. She had never known a good love with anyone, let alone a man. Sure, she had relationships, but she guarded her feelings, always hoping, searching, and waiting even, for the right guy to come along. And come along he did. For the first time in her life, she believed Mark was the right guy. The guy she had been waiting for.

She wiped his forehead with a damp cloth, dipped it in the clean water from an old, but not rusty, VW hubcap, and after wringing the cloth, she placed it gently back on his forehead. Lauren watched him breathe, slowly and shallowly. She reflected on how quickly the infection affected him, and how quickly the antibiotics helped push it down.

When it came to medical treatment, she had no idea what she was doing. But she did what felt right to her. If it made her feel warm inside, like how she felt when she was in the house looking for medicine, she trusted her feelings.

The infection was very strange to her. She figured the coyote that bit him passed on something ugly, but she didn’t think it was rabies, and for that she was grateful. As for the wound on his arm, she could handle that. In fact she did. When she cleaned and bandaged his arm, Mark reacted aggressively, almost violently toward her. Lauren touched her lip as a reminder. It was swollen and puffy, but she’d dealt with worse.

Mark had flailed his arms, speaking gibberish, and Lauren was forced to sit on his chest to give him treatment. She ended up zipping him up in his sleeping bag to keep him from tossing her off. Now that he was finally calm, Lauren allowed herself to relax. She assumed Mark had collapsed out of sheer exhaustion, and she was glad he did. He was a strong man, trained in close quarter combat, and definitely not an easy patient, especially in a state of delirium.

She also realized they would be staying put for some time, a few days, if not for a week. That worried her for several reasons, but mostly for the need of food and water. They had a week’s supply of rations in the bike trailer, but she didn’t want to deplete them. They were their traveling rations, for the road, so she would have to go back to the neighborhood and collect what she could from the abandoned houses.

There wasn’t a lot of food to be found in the houses she already searched, but there was some, like rice, beans and pasta. And there were a lot of houses in that neighborhood, at least a couple hundred. Not all of them were abandoned, but enough to offer her hope.

There was water to be had as well in the hot water heaters. That’s how she filled the water bladder on her first trip. She also saw dried and canned dog food, but because of carrying space, she left it behind. On her next trip, she would reattach the saddle bags and fill them as much as she could. The weather was sure to change, and when it did, she wanted to be safely inside, even if it was a dusty old parts warehouse in a vehicle salvage yard.

Lauren leaned forward and rubbed Sage’s head. Like Mark, he was asleep, but on a piece of cardboard next to him. Lauren sat the hubcap of water on the floor for Sage, and walked over to the bikes near the door. She looked at Mark’s camping supplies, all laid out on the floor around the trailer, and decided to make the warehouse into something a little more comfortable.

CHAPTER 20

BABY

J
ohn listened only half-heartedly as Jenna and Bonnie continued to talk about their dream. He allowed his mind to drift away and soon lost himself in the passing scenery. Everything around him was flat and nearly featureless. Center-pivot farming rigs occupied nearly every marked plot of land on both sides of FM-281 as they headed west. A few of the large, quarter-mile squares still had large green circles in the middle of them. John didn’t know how that was possible with the ash and no power to pump water into the irrigation system, but he didn’t care.

To his left, two sets of railroad tracks ran parallel to the road on an elevated berm. John followed the track with his eyes into the distance. Ahead, a long line of tanker cars, parked and sitting on a spur line, appeared as a black ink mark on light-gray paper. Like an arrow, the hundred or more black tankers streaked away toward the horizon.

He wondered if they were filled with crude. And if they were filled, what would become of the oil? Would someone claim it for themselves and try to use it? Did crude oil even burn for that matter? He didn’t know, and wasn’t curious enough to investigate, but it was interesting to him. He knew there were different types of crude oil, and that some were more volatile than others, but he had no idea what type of crude was pulled from the earth in Texas.

The more interesting fact for John was the many possibilities for salvage and scavenging. Someone with a big brain could use the oil, and really set themselves up a little kingdom, what with all the farming and cattle in the area. John’s thoughts turned to Carter and he wondered
what would have happened if they accepted his offer to stay. No more travel, just good, hard, creative work and a mind toward survival.

The radio squawked and John reached for it. He barely beat Jenna’s hand to it, and smiled at her when he picked it up to hear Adam announce that they were stopping to help a woman and a baby. John acknowledge the transmission, and before he could give it any serious thought, Paul radioed to ask if they could stop for a quick bathroom break.

John knew Paul had the worst of it for want of breaks. A few times the kids had asked to stop and pee, only to run around and play. He knew it was hard to spend so much time in the truck, so John never judged Paul’s requests. Besides, this time, Jenna and Bonnie also wanted to use the bushes.

John looked for and quickly found a thick stand of brush near the road and pulled over. While the kids and ladies did their thing, John and Paul popped the hoods of their vehicles and checked fluid levels. When everything looked good in the engine compartment, they closed their hoods and walked around their vehicles. It was a synchronized affair, and would have looked strangely comical to an outsider. However, they took the drill very seriously, and did it every time they stopped; too much hinged on the performance of their vehicles to ignore preventative maintenance checks.

When the ladies were done, John and Paul took their turn as well, but for the sake of security, only one at a time. It was their practice to have someone armed with the vehicles at all times, especially when the kids were loaded up. After putting away the toilet paper, pulling out snacks, doing a headcount, and another radio check, the company was ready to go.

John enjoyed driving well enough that he rarely asked Jenna to fill in for him. He would rather occupy his mind with the basic function of breaking and acceleration than stare blankly at the featureless farmland from the passenger’s seat. Besides, with the break now behind him, he felt refreshed and eager to put down more miles.

For some reason, John’s thoughts turned to Pete. He grabbed the radio and tried to raise him, but was met with silence. He tried again,
this time more completely and formally, but still nothing. Jenna closed her book and said, “Maybe they’re still helping that lady with the baby.”

“Hmm. Could be, but it’s not like Pete to leave his radio behind, or Adam either for that matter. I also don’t want to pass them,” he said.

“Well, we stopped for almost twenty minutes. I’m sure they’re on their way by now,” said Jenna.

“Then they should have responded to the radio,” exclaimed John, as he unintentionally broadcast his concern in the open.

“What do you think it means?” asked Bonnie, perking up from the back as she too closed her book.

“I don’t know. But all we can do is wait for him to radio us,” said John.

John watched the road ahead, eager to see any sign of Pete and the boys, and was surprised to see a pair of headlights coming toward him. Normally he wouldn’t have been surprised, but Adam had been very good about radioing, “car-up,” messages along the way. It was a cycling term for an approaching vehicle, and Adam started using it when John did from behind with, “car-back.”

It wasn’t like Adam to miss a car. Now, with two strikes against them, John really began to worry. Only this time he didn’t say anything to the ladies. The last thing he needed was the distraction of concern from Jenna and Bonnie while he tried to think through the problem of negative contact with Pete and the boys. He didn’t know where they were, or what they were doing, but he felt something was definitely wrong.

He watched with growing interest as the vehicle continued to approach, thinking that it might even be Pete coming back to report a broken radio.
“No,”
thought John,
“make that two broken radios.”
The chance of two being out was not likely, and the longer he drove the more concerned he became.

Since leaving the hay barn, they had seen only three vehicles, and none of them were white, government rigs. The first was an RV, a short, late modeled Winnebago towing a small jeep behind it. The other two
were farm trucks, simple four-by-four pickups, dirty, and well used. Trucks seemed to be big deal in this part of Texas, and by the looks of it, John figured everybody owned at least one.

“Come on, please be the van,”
he pleaded to himself as he watched the vehicle draw steadily nearer.

For the most part, the roads they’ve traveled were pretty quiet. He attributed that to the fact that they stayed on the less traveled, secondary farm and ranch roads. He remembered seeing traffic on highway 40 when he drove under it, how snarled it was with abandoned vehicles. But the obstacles did little to slow down the drivers still willing to use it. Those daring enough to travel it seemed to think that traveling at speed was safer. He thought it odd how some people believed the primary roads were safer than the secondary ones, but he was fine with keeping that knowledge to himself.

The side roads had their risks too, so John and Pete spent a considerable amount of time war-gaming the many possible responses to a roadway ambush. They eventually decided to stop worrying about it all together because there were just too many possibilities to plan for. Too many variables meant too many contingencies. Instead, they decided on the scout vehicle approach: to send one vehicle far enough forward to give the rest of the convoy an opportunity to support, or flee, depending on the danger.

Of course, the main problem with their plan was that it could result in the potential sacrifice of four company members. And not just any four members either, but their entire security force. Pete and the boys weren’t any more valuable than any other members in the company, but they did perform a very important function, and their loss would be hard, if not impossible, to endure.

As the car got closer, John saw that it was a foreign sedan, silver, with four-doors, and slightly banged up on the front end. It slowed as it passed, and John followed it with his eyes. The driver, a young white man, didn’t even glance his way. But the passenger did. He was also young, and white, and talking on a hand-held radio.

John quickly reached for his radio and pressed the open-scan button. After a quick dash of static, the radio connected with the closest and strongest active transmission, which was the radio in the passing sedan. John heard over the radio, “Black SUV and a dually heading your way. What do you want me to do?”

“Do what you’ve been told,” came the terse reply. The second voice sounded odd, with a bit of a lisp, and from someone in charge. But the intercepted transmission was enough to tell him they were being targeted, and that Pete and the boys were probably in trouble.

Jenna came to the same conclusion, because she gasped and said, “John?”

John hit the home button and immediately reset the radio to their traveling frequency. “Lancer, this is Blue-six, over!” Still no response. He tried again, “Lancer, come in, over.”

“What’s going on, John?” asked Bonnie with concern.

“Quiet please!” he snapped. “Red-six, radio-check, over.” John looked at the radio’s LCD screen, saw that it was powered up, and then slipped it back into the cup holder. He slowed the Suburban and began looking for the possible ambush site. With no place to hide, he felt open and exposed. John wanted to get the vehicles off the road and into a defensive position as soon as possible.

“John! What’s going on?” moaned Jenna.

“I don’t know. And you guys asking me questions isn’t helping right now, so please let me think.” John pulled the Suburban onto the shoulder and waited for Paul to do the same. When both vehicles came to a stop on the side of the road, John quickly got out and ran up to Paul, who remained seated in the driver’s seat of the dually.

Paul recognized the look on John’s face when he approached and said, “Trouble?”

“I think so. I lost radio contact with Pete. He hasn’t replied or called in,” said John.

“Yeah, I heard your calls. It wouldn’t be the first time, though,” said Paul.

“True. But this is different. I picked up a conversation when I scanned the net. We’re being targeted. I think they might already have Pete and the boys.”