Enduring Armageddon (12 page)

“But you didn’t have to make every person take part in his murder!” I shouted.

“It was a sentence, Chuck, not a murder. We’ll have to agree to disagree about that. But, I can’t let you leave.”

I let my shoulders slump. I didn’t let myself admit it, but in the back of my mind, I’d known they wouldn’t let me leave. That’s why we’d snuck down the back roads instead of the main streets of the town. “We’re leaving, Allan. We don’t agree with how things are being run here. We’re not taking anything besides what’s in our backpacks and we’re walking out of here,” I said.

“No you’re not. I need you, Chuck. Virden needs you. You are this community’s shining star and we need you.”

“Allan, I’m sorry, but I don’t want to stay. I’ve seen how quickly the stars fall around here and we’d rather take our chances outside the gates than be subjected to what’s going on here.”

Allan took a step towards me and thrust his finger a few inches from my facemask. “You listen here you insignificant fuck. You’re staying here and leading the mission against Springfield. I don’t give a shit what you do after that.” He gestured to Justin and said, “Take his wife. You think I’m a bad guy, Chuck? Well okay, be that way. She stays with me until after the mission.”

I lunged at Justin as he grabbed my wife’s arm, but was caught from behind again. Allan used the moment to his advantage and sucker-punched me in the gut. The men holding me let me fall to the ground. I looked up in hatred at the bastard who’d shown his true colors and said, “If anything happens to her, I’ll make sure you end up dead.”

Allan crouched down beside me. “Don’t worry, Chuck. She’ll be safe. I’ll keep my boys off of her. After the successful completion of the mission to destroy the scourge of Springfield, you can go. Virden will be assured of being the most powerful stronghold in the area and then no one will fuck with us.

“I want the mission to attack Springfield to happen in two days,” he continued. “I want all their defenses smashed and the defenders either dead or scattered. But if you fail me, you
will
die. And your wife will pray that she was dead.”

* * *

After days of intense planning, the mission to raid Springfield finally reared its ugly head. They were our nearest competitor in the region and Allan decided that it was time to take them down and stabilize his base of power. I had a bad feeling about the mission. Jesse did too and he’d voiced his opinion about it to Allan. All that ended up happening was that Trisha was taken hostage too. The bright shining beacon of Virden was quickly turning into a stinking turd.

Including the roughly doubled pre-apocalypse population, Virden had about nine or ten thousand people but Springfield was a legitimate city with more than two hundred thousand residents in the pre-war metro area. We’d taken on smaller towns and kicked a lot of ass, but this was going too far. Even with the strike force of almost three thousand people that we organized for the mission, the numbers were against us. My gathering squad was a little over four hundred people within that larger strike force. I knew the capabilities of my group, but I had no idea about the extra twenty-five hundred men and women that Allan added to my command for the mission.

I was totally out of my element commanding that many people, especially as we prepared to go into what could potentially be a large battle. It turns out that there were other gathering squads in Virden that I didn’t know anything about. I knew about the construction material gatherers, but where the hell did the rest of these people come from? We also had construction and road clearing crews, gate guards, warehouse stock specialists and Allan’s private army of thugs that were included in the all-or-nothing bid to take total control of the region.

We held meetings twice a day to plan the mission. Sam, the young girl who’d been our guide when we first arrived in Virden, was only a teenager but her intimate knowledge of her home town was invaluable while we planned our attack. It was roughly thirty-three miles to the city and we were going to take every semi and truck that we had to where Interstate-55 met up with I-72 and then disembark the trucks and walk the rest of the way in. Our objective was the Illinois State Capitol building where Sam said the local warlord had set up headquarters by the time that she left. Once we took the capitol we’d fan out and attack targets of opportunity within the city.

The plan was madness, sheer and utter madness. There was no reason to attack the city, maybe there would be in the future when resources began to be depleted, but not now. They hadn’t shown any aggressiveness towards us and we had enough non-perishable food to last almost a year with rationing, but it was Allan’s demand to wipe out the other city. He constantly berated the organizers of the mission about surprise and audacity, which were two key traits to some of the most pivotal moments in our nation’s history: George Washington crossing the Delaware River on Christmas, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, even the bold nuclear strike out of nowhere that brought us to our current situation. All of them succeeded because they were unexpected and unconventional. Allan told us that the defenders of Springfield were confident that they were safe based on their population size alone.

We glossed over what happened after our grand, daring and heroic raid was a success. We planned to load the trucks with as much food and supplies as we could carry and then commandeer some city buses to get about half of our force back. The remainder would have to get working vehicles from wherever they could find them and make their way back on their own. I didn’t like all the vehicle traffic on the roads, but we couldn’t do anything about it.

I was able to see Rebecca for a few minutes on the morning of the attack. She’d been well taken care of after the initial move to Allan’s house. It was good to see her and I vowed to make it through this mission so we could get her out of that place and then get out of the madness of Illinois. Becca was solid as a rock and even in her semi-incarcerated state, she asked that I keep Sam safe instead of worrying about herself.

Now, as we stuttered and slid our way through the snow-covered terrain my thoughts were focused on our mission and achieving both Allan’s objective of neutralizing Springfield and my own personal objective of surviving the fight that we were hurtling headlong towards. Jesse sat in the back seat along with Sam and one guy from Allan’s bunch, probably put there to keep an eye on us. Somewhere in the column, Justin was riding along as well. I’d already decided that if the opportunity presented itself, I’d shoot him and rid the world of that bastard once and for all.

We hit a particularly hard-packed bit of snow and the front of the truck jumped up several inches which threw us up into the ceiling and then slammed our asses hard back into the seats when we came down. The men groaned and laughed at the driver like we were headed to a camping trip in the old world, not towards a major battle for supremacy in the region. I would miss the camaraderie of the group that I’d come to trust with my life, but I couldn’t abide Allan or his way of enforcing his laws.

We arrived at the outskirts of Springfield around noon. We hadn’t encountered anyone and it didn’t appear as if any vehicles had disturbed the snow where we came north along the interstate. Was Allan correct that they’d killed each other off up here in the big city? I stepped down from the cab of the truck into knee-deep snow and wondered how we were actually going to achieve our goal. I mean, on the surface, without any sane or rational thoughts applied, it seemed pretty easy: Enter the city, kill as many people as possible, take their shit and then go home. But how did we do it without being overwhelmed in the process?

I called the team leaders to me for a quick brief before we spread out and went into the city. As I waited I tightened the four-inch wide strip of red cloth that was tied over my bicep. That marking was the only way to tell if the people you saw in the distance, through driving snow, were from Virden or not. Our instructions were to kill every person we encountered who didn’t have an armband, so it was best not to let the damn thing come untied.

Each team leader commanded a group of about 125 people and once all twenty of them were present, I gave my final orders, which were really just a re-hashing of the plan we’d all helped prepare over the last couple of days. “Alright folks, this is it,” I said through the distortion caused by my mask. “From here on out, you’ll basically be on your own. We’re moving south to north and you know Allan’s orders are to kill or chase off everyone you see.

“Keep in contact over your radios,” I continued as I pointed to the walkie-talkie handset clipped to my shirt near my clavicle. I had my worries about the range of the civilian radios, but it couldn’t be helped. “If you can’t get in touch with anyone on the radio, send a runner back to the vehicles here and we’ll get the information sorted out.” We’d worked out a street boundary system for each of the teams so we could help to avoid friendly fire but I knew that we would have casualties caused by our own forces who were advancing in the same direction just a few streets apart.

“One of the most important things we need is for you to call up the information about warehouses or grocery stores,” I remarked. “We only know the location of three, and that’s based on someone’s best recollection.” We had one old man in Virden who’d lived in the capitol for his entire life until he retired ten years ago and moved out of the city and Sam who had really only been around the downtown area as a kid. It was shoddy intelligence at best, but it’s all that we had.

“Continue moving north until we reach the Veteran’s Parkway, except for you Brenda. Since you’re on the west side of the Parkway, go north until you reach Jefferson Street. I’ll be here at the command center with the semi trucks and an extra team that we can move to support anyone who needs any extra help.”

I paused, not sure if I wanted to impart my next bit of information, but I figured that it couldn’t hurt, so I said, “I don’t know if you could see from where you sat on the ride over here, but we were on basically virgin snow after we hit Interstate 55. That tells me that no one has been out running around south of the city. We don’t know the situation here, but Allan believes that the residents have probably killed each other off in large numbers.” I knew using Allan’s name would help to add legitimacy to anything I said with these people. “Even if they haven’t, there’s very little chance that the people here will be working together, so we’ll take out the defenders a block at a time.”
I hope.

After asking for questions we released the team leaders back to their groups and then waited the hour that it took everyone except Brenda’s team to get into position. She had the farthest to travel, but the area she was responsible for was only single-family residential neighborhoods, so we’d decided it was okay to start the operation before her team was able to get into position.

We began to take fire and lose personnel almost immediately after we crossed Interstate 72. I guess that was the defenders’ boundary line between hiding and fighting when an invader crossed into the city. After a furious ten minute back-and-forth between the attackers and the defenders, the firing from the city died down and we were able to actually begin our movement into the town.

I lounged in the front seat of my truck and listened to the radio communications between the team leaders and played cards with Jesse and Nick, my truck’s driver. Between hands Jesse amused himself by pulling the slide of his nickel-plated pistol back and catching the ejected round before it hit the floorboard while Sam sat in the back seat and complained about not being allowed to join the attack. I kept her with me since I’d promised Rebecca to keep her safe. Most of our force had already made it about a third of the way into the city with little or no resistance from the remaining residents. As Allan predicted, there was plenty of evidence that there had been massive fights in the area because of the large amount of dead bodies lying around. There were also a lot of buildings that were recently burned down, which hadn’t happened due to the nuclear blasts this far south.

With such a low level of resistance, I began to think that we’d pull this mission off, but I hoped that the food supplies hadn’t been burned as well and that we’d be able to salvage something from this place. The mission was beginning to stink of Carlinville and we weren’t finding anything but random survivors, some of whom fought for their meager possessions. Even though I’d been ordered to come here by Allan, I was pretty sure that if the mission was a failure and a waste of resources then I’d end up like D’Andre up on that stage in Virden.

I was losing to Nick in a game of spades when the radio crackled to life again. “Hey boss, this is Justin. We’re taking extremely heavy fire from downtown, I think we’re gonna need those reinforcements you have with you.”

I dropped my cards and grabbed the radio. “Okay, give me a minute,” I said as I fumbled with the map on the dashboard. I ran my finger from area where we currently sat to where Justin’s name was penciled in just to the left of Interstate 55. I followed his area of responsibility northward along Sixth Street towards downtown. I keyed the radio again and asked, “Justin, what cross-streets are right in front of you?”

“Um…” he hesitated and then said, “We just passed Lawrence Avenue. Once we came in clear view of the taller buildings downtown we started getting a lot of rifle fire. We need the team you’ve got in reserve to come down here and help us out.”

Shit. They hadn’t even made it to downtown yet and I was already going to lose my reserve force. “Alright, I’ll let them know to follow Sixth Street north for about two-and-a-half miles. It’s gonna take them a while to get up to you though,” I said.

“Got it, we’ll keep low. Once they get here, we’ll push forward and take out those assholes that are shooting at us.”

“Alright, keep me updated on the situation,” I said over the radio. I looked back at Jesse, who was tightening the straps on his mask, and said, “Go tell Phil to get his team moving.”