Dark New World (Book 2): EMP Exodus (2 page)

Taggart’s thoughts and his meal were interrupted by a knock on the door to the bedroom where he and Pvt. Eagan were encamped. He looked up, calling, “Enter.”

The door swung open, and his liaison came in, smiling. “Sir, please let me introduce the man you’ve been waiting to meet, Mr. Black—not his real name, of course. He’s a subleader in the Resistance. It’s his patronage that got you these quarters, intelligence, food and ammo, so in effect, you’re under his command. ‘Temporary Additional Duty,’ he calls it. Anyway, Mr. Black, this is now-Captain Taggart, the guy commanding those grunts we got holing up in your houses.”

Mr. Black, ironically, was just a touch lighter than midnight in complexion. He wore baggy jeans with some sort of silly civilian imprint, expensive white sneakers with blue accents, and a black net wife-beater shirt. He topped it all off with a damn ridiculous fedora. To Taggart, it seemed a rather silly costume, but Black radiated an iron confidence that suggested he’d had a hard and violent life. That might be good, given their new realities. Taggart decided it would be best to show him at least a pretense of respect, if only for his importance to the mission.

“Mr. Black. Although my boys and girls are outside of any kind of official chain of command, I welcome you, and I am glad to finally meet you.”

Mr. Black frowned. “Shut the fuck up, soulja boy. I don’t give two shits about you or your posse, other than they can help my cause. You got me?”

Taggart laughed out loud, then struggled to regain his composure. “Mister, I understand you completely. You’re a fucking civilian wearing a wannabe gangsta cover—that means hat—and you look like a fucking cartoon. But you’re in charge here, and you earned it somehow, so, either way, we’re in your debt. Bark away little Chihuahua. I’ll listen to you, and my grunts will listen to me. So now I’ll ask
you
if we’re clear.”

Mr. Black first grinned and then let out a belly laugh. “Oh yeah, grunt. I get you. We’ll get along fine. Don’t much like you, but I need you, and you sure as fuck need me. Yeah, we’ll get along like applesauce.”

Whatever that meant. “So what’s the SITREP, Mr. Black? What can we do for each other?”

“Two things. First, you already know that the 411 we gave you about where to find more soldiers came from the 20s. We got no idea who they are, but they been right by us with everything they give us so far. Keep an eye out for anything that might help figure who they are.”

Well, that much was obvious, and Taggart already wanted to know who they were. So, it would be easy to agree to that. He nodded. “Roger that. Anything else?”

Mr. Black continued, “And thing two is, we need you to run licks for us when we got targets.”

“What the fuck is a lick?” asked Taggart. Pvt. Eagan coughed, probably trying to keep himself from laughing, and Black rolled his eyes.

“We got lots of info from the 20s,” Black told Taggart. “Invader troop movements, supply caches, that sorta thing. I want you runnin’ and gunnin’ to get those supplies, and run some ambushes. Run a lick, grab what you can, and fade. Crystal?”

“Yes. We can do that. The fact is, mister, I want to use my groups to harass the enemy so much their soldiers have to guard caches and look for us, not be out there conquering America and squeezing civilians.”

Mr. Black grinned, the smile getting wider and wider as Taggart spoke. “Soulja boy, let me tell you about the first supplies you gonna grab out.”

As Black went into details, Taggart’s face gradually took on a nasty, predatory grin.

* * *

1300 HOURS - ZERO DAY +6

Frank sat with the rest of his newly expanded clan as they ate lunch. Michael wasn’t present since he had gone out a half hour before to scout after Cassy said there were roads and settlements ahead, going by her local map.

Sipping at his water, Frank heard the warbling call of a quail. That would be Michael returning, notifying the clan he was coming in so no one got jumpy and shot at him. Frank stood, wiping dirt from his jeans, and waited for Michael to arrive.

“Welcome back,” he said when he saw the former Marine scout. “Find out anything useful?”

Michael spat. “Sure did. Reese Road, going north to south, with houses and little businesses on it as far north as I went. There’s people there, too, all of ‘em armed. They were hiding, but not well enough.”

Frank frowned. “Damn. Well, we knew we’d find people eventually. This little forest we’ve been walking through couldn’t last forever. Can we go around to the south?”

“Negative. I-76 is over that way, and the Pennsylvania Turnpike. People with guns are on the turnpike, too. It’s a mess.”

Cassy shifted the sling that held up her wounded arm and stepped toward them. So no one else could hear her, she said in a near-whisper, “We can’t go south of I-76, either. There are more towns along the south side of 76, and there’s a group of whack-job armed farmers somewhere down there too. I don’t exactly know where. Could be I ran across their main encampment when they shot at me, but we can’t take the chance that I only stumbled into a temporary camp. They were bad dudes, shooting first and asking questions never. I was lucky I got away, and I’m pretty damn sure they were still tracking me when the van blew up next to me, and Michael saved my life.”

Michael nodded, acknowledging her and her information. “Well then, we have to dogleg north a bit and try to thread the needle—there is a thin strip of trees running between an auto body shop and the next house down. With luck, the trees won’t be guarded. Everyone, check your weapons and make sure you’re on single-fire. I’ll double check each rifle to make sure we’re squared away. Fire discipline isn’t something I can teach in five minutes, but this will make sure you don’t burn through ammo. And don’t shoot unless I yell for covering fire, or fighting already started, and you have a real clear shot.”

He paused for a sip of the water Frank offered him, then continued: “We will move out at dusk. That’s enough light for us to see where we are going, but will make it harder for them to notice us.”

Frank clenched his jaw. The odds of a small, in-town strip of woods being unguarded, when Michael had already seen people in the buildings to either side, were pretty small, dammit. He had to make sure everyone was on high alert when they went through. Maybe he should tell his clan to shoot anything that moved? No, that wasn’t what the clan was about. But they’d sure as hell better draw down on anything that moved and looked armed. And of course, Michael would have to be up front, catching any surprise heat.

Sometime soon he’d have to set Michael up to mentor at least one other person in the skills and tactics that he’d picked up in the Middle East, but for now, Michael had to make announcements about how to proceed. And goddamn if he knew why the scout had suddenly stepped into a leadership role with these misfits—his friends and family, as far as you could get from military discipline. As long as they were in a nearly combat environment that was fine, but Frank knew that as soon as they were safe, Michael would step back again, and leadership would fall on him once again. Cassy better heal quick, he decided, so he could drop this dog turd of a job onto her and hope she saw it as peaches and ice cream.

* * *

Cassy accepted Frank’s plan without comment. She doubted she could come up with a better one. It grated that he put her in charge of herding the children, but with her arm in a sling, she could only fire her pistol. The M4 over her left shoulder, which Ethan had passed to her from his stockpile, was just a decoration until she healed up enough to use it.

Hell, she was just happy to be able to keep up with the group, given the severity of her wounds. The metal shard that impaled her right shoulder at the joint had done some serious soft tissue damage, and no one could say how fully it would heal. For now, it was stable, and she had plenty of Percocet and antibiotics from Ethan’s medical supplies. Yippee!

She saw her mother edge toward her as they finished preparing to move out. “Hey Mom,” Cassy said. “What’s up?”

Grandma Mandy, as the kids called her, smiled. “How are you holding up, honey? The kids and I worry, you know.”

“C’mon, Mom. I’m fine. It hurts, but I made it this far. I won’t crap out on you guys. But you knew that already. What do you really want?”

“Fine, sweetie. The kids and I want to know if you’ll join us in a prayer before we get walking again. From what I overheard, the next little bit of our journey could be rough, and they need reassurance. The Lord will provide if they only ask Him.”

Cassy fought an urge to roll her eyes and managed to keep her reaction in check. Praying to God would not help them, she figured, but it might help her kids. And anyway, it couldn’t hurt to throw a word upstairs to the Big Guy. “Okay, Mom. We can use all the help we can get, right? I’m in.”

Mandy smiled and led her to the kids. They all grabbed hands and stood in a circle as Mandy led the prayer. Cassy couldn’t help but notice how her mom seemed somehow stronger, more potent, while she prayed. That was probably just a trick of her imagination.

Just as importantly, Cassy noted that her thirteen-year-old daughter, Brianna, and her seven-year-old son, Aidan, seemed to stand straighter, more confidently, as they prayed with Mandy. Cassy herself was conflicted about the idea of God, but Grandma Mandy had zero doubts. That stark confidence seemed almost to permeate the kids, now; where before they had been beaten, terrified, constantly worried about losing their mom or their grandma, they transformed into confident, hopeful people, and Cassy grinned at the sight.

Lost in her thoughts, she almost missed the end of the prayer and hastily replied, “Amen” with her kids. And it was time to move out.

- 3 -

1400 HOURS - ZERO DAY +6

CAPT. TAGGART MOVED from cover to cover with Eagan behind him. Two soldiers they’d picked up earlier followed behind Eagan. They’d all ditched their uniforms and were now dressed like normal civilians, only carrying pistols and a few grenades. Being out of uniform without rifles made Taggart uneasy, but dammit, uniforms were not the right garb for running and gunning “licks,” guerrilla-style.

Taggart stopped at the corner of an older brick building. He recognized a row of gouges in the brickwork as bullet holes. Four evenly-spaced, dry blood stains showed that it was probably an execution. The enemy was shooting anyone too old or too young to work, or who had disabilities. Fuck, the bastards were mowing down able-bodied adults, too, when they rounded up more than they needed. The word was that they were breaching random buildings and just taking, however, many people they needed for one task or another. Then they simply killed whoever was left. Slave labor beat dying, Taggart figured, but not by much.

The sound of an engine reached him. When he motioned his three soldiers to take cover, they hid behind a dumpster. Ten seconds later, a Jeep-like vehicle Taggart didn’t recognize rolled by with four enemy soldiers within, their rifles pointed in all directions, faces masked with black shemaghs. Taggart fought the urge to open fire on it. The vehicle was not part of their orders, and opening fire recklessly would only draw more of the enemy to this area—the last thing he wanted right now. This mission wasn’t a sweep-and-clear. They were going to retrieve a cache of ammunition and medical supplies hidden in an apartment building that was one of the points of interest they’d learned of from their mysterious 20s contact. The word was, they’d hidden it before the lights went out, and that made Taggart briefly wonder what they’d known ahead of time—and who they really were.

Once the enemy vehicle had passed and turned a corner, Taggart breathed easier and motioned his soldiers to move out. All over the city of New York, similar scenes were playing out with his other thirty or so soldiers, who now led about as many civilian resistance fighters as well as troops. Taggart had the only unit with no civilians, but his was also the day’s most important mission. The other missions were really hit-and-run raids meant to draw down enemy strength and improve the odds that Taggart’s group would succeed.

Twenty minutes later they arrived at the building, a four-story brick apartment building. The once-secure entry door hung open on a single hinge, and the thick metal door bulged inward at the center. Someone had battered it down. Taggart peered into the building using a mirror to avoid exposing himself to anyone inside. The small mirror would hopefully not alert any occupants.

He need not have worried since nothing moved inside except the flies buzzing around two bloated bodies by the mailboxes in the foyer. He didn’t have time to worry about bodies or about the stench of rot and sewage that permeated the building.

“The mission objective is in unit #309, third floor, east hallway,” Taggart said. “Unknown if it’s occupied. Advance by pairs. Noise discipline, soldiers. That includes you, Eagan, you little shit.”

Eagan grinned, and the other two soldiers moved out. They had their pistols drawn and went up the stairs with a steady four feet of separation. The lead soldier kept his pistol aimed up the next flight of stairs, almost walking backwards to do so. As they moved up toward the second landing, Taggart and Eagan moved into position behind them on the landing they had just vacated. And so it went, flight by flight, until they reached the third floor. The lead soldier motioned that both halls were clear, then one of the pairs covered the west hallway and the other, the stairs as Taggart and Eagan flanked the east hallway.