Avalon: The Retreat (34 page)

Mike leaped to his feet and was out the door and headed for the clinic.

She was looking down the throat of a child when he came in, grabbed her by the waist, and lifted her into the air as the lozenge went flying across the room. She started to laugh and he stopped her with a kiss.

“What in the world has gotten in to you Michael?” she asked, breaking for air.

He kissed her again and she pressed against him a little, but then pushed him away and said, “Michael?”

“I just found out,” he said, the sound of slight disbelief still in his voice. “I’m gonna have a baby.”

“Now that’s going to be some trick Michael.”

“No, no, I mean you’re going to, we’re going to, you know what I mean.”

She was laughing and he had a look on his face of total non-understanding, and she laughed some more.

Special Agent Beth Kelly, Doctor Len, Davey, and Tom were on their stomachs crawling toward the small crest of the hill. From here, they were able to look into the town of Fitch with the field glasses.

They stopped, arms propped up on elbows and Beth swept the main street with the glasses. There were no lights on in any of the buildings, but the glow from various fires lit the place up. There didn’t appear to be anything moving down there, and the fires looked to be in their last stages.

There was a car in the street with the hood up and a bicycle lying on the sidewalk. Fire reflected in the window of a small shop and she could see the window was broken in a corner and glass was lying on the sidewalk; the pieces flickered as they reflected the fire in unison. It was a ghost town of sorts.

“We have to go down there,” she finally said, handing the glasses to Len and turning to Davey, “Go get Jasper and have him come back here with a rifle and tell him to bring lots of bullets.”

The boy took off running back to the others.

“It looks like something radical happened down there Len; what do you think?”

“Uh huh,” he was looking through the glasses. “Sure does.”

He handed the glasses back to her while motioning, “Look at the passenger side of that car.”

She looked and saw it too; someone was sitting there slumped against the window but low, almost slumped all the way down in the seat. The head was tilted up and turned away from them. All you could see was a dark shadow instead of hair. It was a person alright.

She swept the area several more times and could not see anything in the shadows. The flickering fires were almost all they could see from here. Jasper laid down next to her.

“Jasper,” she turned to look at him as she spoke, “We’re all going to go down there and have a look around. When we get there, I want you to climb up to a spot where you can cover us. If you need some help to climb up, someone will give you a boost. We need you to watch our backs; so keep your eyes moving from left to right all the time. Understand?”

“Uh huh.”

They moved out toward the town.

“Mike, about twenty years ago a small town by the name of Fitch was situated down there in that little valley.” Doctor Dan was speaking in a low voice as if he didn’t want anyone else to hear, “It only had about five or six hundred people living there. It was settled a little before Eli started the ranch. They had an assayer’s office to determine the value of a claim and a claims office where people could file a claim on their stake in the mountains and hills all around here. It was important to make a legal claim to the land in case they struck it rich. There was a jail and a public gallows, and they also had a doctor down there. There was a lawyer, three or four houses, a saloon, and a whorehouse. Later, the town grew to about five hundred and stayed that way until about twenty years ago.”

“People who grew tired of the rat race in the big cities moved there about then and then another family came, and so on. One man built a factory that made computer chips and then a gas station went in followed by a school and a few more houses. Word got out about the clean mountain air and water and the town swelled to about fifteen thousand in five years. The main highway from Bishop went right down the middle of the town, which made the land values skyrocket and all that property along the highway was like gold.”

“They were sheltered down there until the war started. After that there was no word coming out of there and the rest of the world more or less lost touch with the residents. It could still be there in one piece, but the bikers started moving this way so who knows what happened to the town or the people. You boys be careful down there. To be honest, I wish you weren’t going!”

Mike chewed over what Dan said before he spoke, “Let’s each take a radio, a sub-machine gun, and a couple of hand guns. Sam, do you want one of my grenades?” He said it as if he were preparing for a picnic. “I expect the trip there and back to be two days, tops. I want to take some extra food, too.”

Mike looked at Dan and said matter-of-factly, “You know Doc, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”

“The problem with that thinking,” Dan retorted, “is you’re no ordinary man.”

Mike smiled and winked at Caroline. She was trembling as a tear slipped down her cheek and fell away.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” Mike gave his best smile of comfort, “I’ll be back soon enough and you’ll get so tired of me, you’ll want me to leave again for a few days.”

Her hands went to her face and she began to cry, her shoulders shaking. Mike reached over, wrapped her in his arms, and kissed her forehead and then her lips before gently pulling away.

“Stop that, wench,” he said softly. “If you keep this up, I won’t go.”

They all laughed except Caroline. The men went outside, cranked up their dirt bikes, and drove away through the big firs headed toward the hidden bunker. Caroline watched them go, rubbing her stomach absentmindedly as she watched them until they were out of sight.

Beth and Len were at the edge of Fitch’s main street and the smell of open sewage was everywhere. It was so powerful that she had a tough time breathing without the urge to vomit. It was worse than bad. She walked up to the car she had seen from the hill and saw a dead woman inside and a dead man slumped down on the seat with his head nearly on the woman’s lap.

There were hundreds of thousands of flies on the overhead of the car, and maggots were crawling all over the bodies. They all had to hold their hands over their faces because the smell was beyond nauseating. She saw Jasper crawl up a fire escape ladder and with a boost from Davey, scramble up to the roof. She suggested they split up; she would take this side of the street, Len the other, and Davey could walk behind her next to the walls of the buildings. Tom was on the other side behind Len.

They walked down the street and on Beth’s side was a restaurant. She looked inside and saw dead people everywhere. They moved on to a grocery store and there were dead bodies lying on the floor. They walked for an hour and it was the same everywhere; the whole town had been ransacked and looted and all of the people were dead, but there were no children anywhere.

Her gut told her that the Slavers had been here and done this terrible slaughter.

Beth was in a quandary; this was going to be more of a challenge than she thought. Her ultimate goal was to get to the old ranch, but if they got there in the dead of winter, she knew they wouldn’t survive and she had no illusions about how cold it was going to be near the top of that mountain. They would probably either freeze or starve, so she didn’t think it would make a whole lot of difference if they died here or there.

But for some unknown reason, the quest to make it to the ranch was overpowering. It was that single goal that kept her focused and driven throughout this entire journey and it seemed now, looking back on it all, that they were at it for months rather than days. She had counted on finding food here at Fitch.

In fact, she was hoping it would be the problem solver she desperately needed and the answer to her fervent prayers. She suppressed the urge to scream out her disappointment after seeing what was left of Fitch. This was no more than a place reeking with the stench of the dead and full of flies that tormented them nearly to the point of insanity.

Beth was at her wits’ end, so she decided to get everyone involved in the decision on this one. She called all seventeen of them together in a group. There were two men, three older teens, four younger teens… like Matt… three women including her, and the rest of them were younger children. She asked individually and they all said more or less the same thing; they wanted to stay right here until the flies died off and then go into town and stay. Nobody had an answer for the food situation except Len.

“Look,” he suggested, “we’ve only scouted a small portion of the town so far. Why don’t we go back tomorrow, in the late afternoon before it gets dark, and search along the perimeters? Maybe we’ll find something, but I say we don’t give up.”

It was as good as anything else, so they would go in tomorrow evening and see what they could discover. Right now they would go to bed hungry. Several of the children were crying because they wanted something to eat and it tore at her heart to hear them. She tried to sleep but it was fitful, and then it was morning. They had to wait until dusk to go into town so the flies wouldn’t drive them crazy. It was a long day and the children constantly complained about wanting food. Finally it was dusk and they prepared to walk into town again.

They went down the street but there was no food to be found; just about all the shops that carried food had been ransacked. Len did see one place that he wanted to explore, a dental office. He went inside and found what he wanted… tooth scrapers and picks, various supplies for filling cavities, drills, filling ingredients, epoxies, small mirrors, and more toothpicks. He found a medical bag in a supply cabinet and filled it with the things he needed, including vials of anti-biotic, Novocain, and mini-sutures. He also found excellent grade stainless steel hypodermic syringes.

There were other odds and ends, pliers, small stainless inserts that could make a dental dam, and various pieces used to build dental braces. If only he could find some pure gold for some bridging and reconstruction of the bridging, but that was a little too much to hope for. He took what he needed, at least as much as he could carry. It was a good haul and with what he had, he could do almost anything. The bag was heavy.

Back out on the street, Beth and the boys stood guard and waited for him.

“I was beginning to worry” she commented, “You took your sweet time.”

“I found almost everything I need to fix someone’s teeth,” he said excitedly. “I can do nearly any job with this stuff and believe me, when you need my services, you need them.”

She knew that was true. There were a couple of times that she had needed a dentist and, although the treatment was tedious and uncomfortable, the visits were worth it in the end.

“We need to go a little further,” she was talking to all of them now, “It’s critical that we find some food to take back with us.”