Get Out of Denver (Denver Burning Book 1) (7 page)

They crossed the freeway using a stalled semi-truck for a moment of cover, then jogged across a long stretch of open field. McLean kept his head on a swivel, checking ahead, then behind, then all around for signs of movement. He had no way of knowing where a sniper or other observer might be hiding. He’d seen no sign of any with his binoculars, but he kept himself ready to change direction at a moment’s notice if they heard the report of a rifle.

A low hill rose ahead with a house on its crest. They followed a crumbling asphalt road around it and across a field on the far side. With the hill behind them they weren’t quite as exposed to view from the town, so McLean stopped worrying so much about snipers and concentrated on the subdivision ahead. It looked calm and intact.

As they neared the outer street of the subdivision, however, a rumbling noise broke the morning stillness. It was the sound of loud truck engines, which they hadn’t heard for what seemed like days now. It wasn’t coming from inside the subdivision, but from somewhere to the north. McLean couldn’t see any vehicles moving, but the sound was growing steadily louder and clearer, so he pushed the two women ahead of him toward a ditch in front of a landscaping wall where they all three lay on their bellies in the bark chips and shrubs.

Down the freeway from the direction of I-70 a military convoy of trucks was rolling steadily toward them. As they came into view, McLean trained his binoculars on them. It was a small convoy, somewhat ragtag in appearance, obviously cobbled together from whatever trucks had survived the EMP. McLean knew that the military had hardened some of its equipment against EMP in the past, and it seemed that at least some of it was still working, perhaps dredged up from underground storage bunkers after the second burst.

In the lead, a bulldozer was pushing stopped cars out of the way, sliding them off the side of the road and leaving them piled in the median. Behind it came six trucks of various sizes and shapes, some troop transports and some cargo haulers. They were going slow, and around them were clustered about a hundred soldiers on foot. It looked like an Army company, or what was left of one, perhaps National Guard. They had their battle rifles and full kit, and they marched tightly next to the vehicles. There weren’t enough vehicles to transport them all, so McLean surmised that they had moved in leap-frogging turns throughout the night.

“Oh my gosh, is that the Army?” Shauna asked, getting to her knees. “Thank goodness! Maybe they know where my boyfriend is!”

“Wait!” McLean said, but Shauna had already stood up.

“Let’s go talk to them! They’re here to save everybody,” Shauna told the others, relief flooding her voice. Without waiting, she trotted off toward the convoy.

McLean put a hand on Carrie’s ankle where she lay in front of him on the ground. “Don’t go. Please don’t go. We don’t know why those soldiers are here or what they’re going to do. Even if they’re here to help, we don’t want to be caught in the middle if a firefight breaks out. Let’s just watch.”

Carrie nodded. “Shauna! Shauna, come back!” she called, but Shauna ignored her and continued toward the road. Several people from the subdivision had also heard the convoy and come out to watch, and she was joined by two of them who were obviously as desperate as she was for news and assistance.

The convoy stopped near the interchange between the north-south and east-west freeways. McLean could now see markings clearly on the side of some of the trucks that said

‘3rd Btn. Army Reserve’, which he knew was based in Grand Junction. More people were coming out from the populated areas, including refugees that had been hiding in culverts and vehicles across the area. They all approached the convoy, arms outstretched for aid. Shauna was among the first to get there.

“Halt and stay where you are,” the voice of a soldier riding on the sideboard of the lead truck boomed out. He held a bullhorn that echoed all the way to where McLean and Carrie lay. He spoke with the authority of a commanding officer. The soldiers near the bulldozer were now pointing their rifles at the gathering crowd of refugees, and some of them were holding up one hand in a halting gesture. “Do not approach the trucks. We have no food or water to give out,” the officer continued.

Most of the people slowed their advance toward the troops, but one man staggered onward anyway. “I need a phone!” he shouted, voice cracking. “You have to help me make a phone call, it’s very important.”

“Stay back!” the officer shouted into his bullhorn. “Halt, or we will fire!” The man stopped, shocked into silence. “One of you, not this man, will approach slowly and with your hands in the air,” the officer commanded. “I want to know what’s going on in the city, whether there are any functioning military units in the area. If any of the rest of you move, you’ll be shot. Do I make myself clear?”

Shauna raised her hands and walked toward the officer at the same time as several others. The officer shouted at them and one soldier fired his rifle into the air over the heads of a cluster of refugees. The rest stopped but Shauna continued forward waving her hands and pleading with the soldiers. They made her drop her flimsy backpack, which only had a flashlight and a couple of granola bars in it, and then allowed her near the bulldozer where two soldiers roughly frisked her. Finally she was allowed to speak to the officer.

“Why are they being so threatening?” Carrie asked. “Why don’t they help those people?”

McLean shook his head. “Who knows what they’ve been through in Grand Junction, or on the way here. As far as they know, anybody from here could be a terrorist. I’d be cautious too.”

“Can I see?” Carrie asked, and McLean handed her the binoculars. Shauna was animatedly speaking to the officer, pointing first toward Denver, than across the fields toward McLean and Carrie’s position. The officer looked in their direction, then said something to Shauna.

At that moment a woman standing in the median behind one of the trucks pointed at its open back. “What’s in those boxes? Are those medical supplies? My son is hurt, I need those!” The other people started edging closer, clamoring to be let through.

Another shot rang out, but it didn’t come from the soldiers this time. It was the loud crack of a high-powered, large-caliber rifle. Out of the corner of his eye, McLean caught a muzzle flash in the second-story window of a house on the edge of the city. He didn’t see anybody go down near the convoy and assumed the bullet had hit a truck or the ground. But it was enough to elicit a massive reaction from the soldiers.

They opened fire in all directions, unloading on the refugees, the nearby houses, and the vehicles surrounding them. Taking cover behind the bulldozer and the trucks, they continued sporadic fire as the civilians scattered and dropped to the ground, screaming and crying out in pain and fear.

About half of the soldiers formed up behind the bulldozer and left the road, heading directly toward the subdivision where the shot had come from. They double-timed it, weapons out and on overwatch. The rest, sticking to the cover of their vehicles, rounded up Shauna and the woman who thought she’d seen medical supplies, and shoved them to the ground by the officer’s truck. Soldiers stood with rifles pointed at their backs until they were handcuffed, and then they were hauled into the back of the truck.

“Carrie, we gotta go,” McLean said. “If they find us up here with binoculars and a gun, they’ll shoot us too.”

Carrie, frowning in consternation and concern for her roommate, nodded and followed as McLean crawled around to the concealment of the low wall and then into the foothill subdivision’s streets. Hidden from view among the houses, they stood up and sprinted through the neighborhood toward the hills.

After a minute of flat-out running they got away from the houses into a draw filled with scrub oak. The draw and the dirt road above it parallelled the two-lane highway that curved around a small mountain community labeled Indian Hills on McLean’s map.

“McLean, do you think Shauna’s going to be okay?” Carrie asked. “They aren’t going to kill her, are they?”

“I don’t think the soldiers will. But if they get into a real firefight with whoever touched off that little massacre back there, she’ll be in the middle of it again. She seems to have a knack for that.”

“Yeah, she really does,” Carrie admitted. “What was she thinking?”

“Well, she likes soldiers, I guess. Wanted to find her boyfriend. There’s nothing we can do for her now. She made her choice and she’s where she wanted to be. Heck, maybe they’ll even find her boyfriend for her. After she’s no longer useful as an informant.”

Carrie sighed. “I just wish she hadn’t exercised such poor judgment. We’re apparently in the middle of a war zone, and she goes running off toward the soldiers. We’re dropping one by one! First David died, now Shauna’s gone. I just don’t know how to even make sense of everything that’s happening to us.”

“It’s pretty overwhelming,” McLean agreed. “But I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. We’ve been living on borrowed time these past several years. I just feel bad for those caught really unprepared, like the clientele of the rescue mission.”

“No, they’re the last ones to worry about,” Carrie said. “They’ve been living in crisis for years. They’re probably going to weather this better than anybody. No luxuries to lose in a fire, no money to be robbed of. No reason for anyone to shoot them.”

“Well, I still wouldn’t trade places with them. At home I have plenty of food, shelter, and equipment, and we’ll be safe there for the foreseeable future.” He looked over at Carrie. “How are you doing? Do you need a rest or a drink?”

“I’m okay,” Carrie said. “I think the adrenaline’s mostly left my system now, as much as it’s ever going to again. Thank you. Where are we headed, exactly?”

“There’s a valley west of here, thirteen miles past Indian Hills. I have a friend there who owns a little horse ranch. We can stay there tonight, and I’m hoping to either meet up with or at least get news of my other friends. From there, we’ll plan our route westward to my ranch, another fifty to seventy miles, depending on the path we take.”

He looked Carrie in the eyes and then continued. “It’ll be a hard trek. It’s going to take a few days. But I promise we’ll get there, and once we do we’ll be a lot safer than anyone in Denver. Will you stick with me and trust my judgment?”

“Yes,” Carrie said.

McLean handed her his backup gun, a 9mm Beretta in a hard shell holster, with two clips. “I hope you won’t have to use this, but there are some bad people out there, as we’ve seen. Have you ever shot a pistol before?”

Carrie took the gun and removed it from the holster. She checked the safety and slowly, cautiously removed the clip and put it back in. Then she strapped the gun to her leg. “Not for a long time,” she finally answered. “But if we’re attacked again, I bet it will all come back to me in a hurry.”

McLean nodded. “You’re gonna be all right. We’ll shoot a few practice rounds when we get deeper into the mountains. For now, just make sure you don’t shoot me, that’s all I ask.”

“I promise.”

The sun was getting high and hot, so McLean took a moment to break out a small bottle of sunscreen from his pack. Once they were lathered up, he shouldered his bag and started to move out.

“Wait,” Carrie said, stopping McLean with a hand on his arm. “I haven’t really thanked you yet for all you’ve done. You didn’t have to come back for me at the rescue mission yesterday, but you did and I’m really grateful. And I know you’ve taken a lot of risks you didn’t like, some of which almost got us killed. I’m sorry for that, and I’m very glad to be with you now.”

McLean smiled. The words were music to his ears. He had no right to be happy during full societal meltdown, but right at that moment he felt great. If he was going to share the road with anyone on doomsday, Carrie Alton was the one he’d most like to travel with.

They set off and kept their silence for an hour after that. They both needed some space in which to try to process everything they had gone through, and McLean needed to think through exactly how they were going to get across fifteen miles of semi-populated foothills and then fifty more of rugged mountain wilderness.

They came to the crest of a rise that overlooked a small valley between hills, with a single cabin-style home in it. McLean stopped and took a bearing with his compass. He had scouted the whole area previously, but hadn’t actually hiked much of it on foot because the best routes cut through private property. Sighting a draw between two hills ahead that was as close to due west as he needed, he led Carrie down the hillside and across a field.

“So McLean, are you, like, a mountain man?” Carrie asked, finally breaking their silence. “I know you ranch and hunt. But that bag of tricks you’re carrying never ceases to produce exactly the gear we need. Compass, binoculars, guns. You seem ready for anything.”

McLean took a small sip of water from his camelbak before answering. “I’m just the kind of guy that likes to be prepared for anything. I lost all trust in worldly institutions several years back. Looking around at the way things were going, I decided no one was going to fix things, so I needed to get ready for hard times myself. I got back into hunting, started up my little ranch, and made some friends that think along the same lines. We’ve teamed up to put away supplies and equipment at my ranch, learn self-sufficiency skills, and plan for an uncertain future. That future’s here now, and so far I’m really glad I did all those things. This bug-out bag is part of that preparation.”

Carrie gave him a teasing look. “I get it. I’ve seen those shows with the doomsday people. You don’t have a bomb shelter and a stockpile of machine guns at your ranch, do you, McLean?”

He raised his eyebrows. “No, I don’t. But after what we’ve been through so far, I kind of wish I did. Don’t you?”

Carrie grimaced. “Yeah, maybe. Sorry, I shouldn’t criticize.”

“It’s okay. A little light-heartedness will actually help us get through this. That’s part of the reason I felt so good about bringing you along. I need someone to keep me from getting too gloomy.”

They smiled at each other, and then continued walking through the tall grass and scrub oak.

On the other side of a small hill there was a house. They were practically in its backyard, although it wasn’t fenced at all. McLean swore under his breath, wishing he’d scoped out the route in more detail on Google Earth beforehand. He didn’t see anybody, so they skirted the corner of the yard and got out to a long gravel driveway that connected the house to a cracked, weathered old road that wound out of the area and up another hill. Only then did the homeowner show himself.

“What are you two doing on my property?” a voice called out, and McLean turned to see a man in the front doorway of the home. His right arm was still inside the house, and McLean had to assume it was holding a weapon. He eased his shotgun barrel toward the ground and held up his other hand to show that he wasn’t threatening.

“Just passing through, on our way into the mountains,” he explained, keeping his eyes on the man’s face. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize there was even a house here, or we would have gone around. I promise we don’t mean any harm.”

“Then why are you carrying that gun?”

“This is just for self-defense,” McLean said, edging to his left slightly so he was in front of Carrie. “Some crazy things are going on in the city. A man’s got to be cautious.”

“Tell me about it,” the man said, relaxing his stance but remaining in his doorway. “Just before my phone went dead yesterday, I got a breaking news update about a terrorist attack on the east coast. Looks like they hit us here, too.”

McLean nodded. Whether or not it was accurate, the possibility that the country’s population and government centers in the east had been hit was an easy and plausible explanation.

“I saw a plane go down in the mountains north of here,” the man said. “I could still see smoke earlier this morning, but nobody seems to be investigating it. Maybe we should go check it out. Might be some survivors, or something we could salvage.”

This man, who had been challenging and hostile a moment before, was now making conversation and suggesting alliances. Stress and ignorance affected people strangely, McLean noted. Without his smartphone, this guy was completely in the dark, and he was grasping for control over his surroundings.

“No thanks,” he replied. “Nothing we can do to help an aircraft that fell from thirty thousand feet. We’re going to keep moving. And if you’ll take a suggestion, I’d stay inside from now on. Don’t answer the door. There’s going to be a whole line of refugees streaming out of the city soon, and they might come looking for assistance at houses like yours. You’ll have to decide for yourself who to help, but keep in mind that there’s looting going on in Denver, and disease will start spreading within a few days. Good luck.”

Beckoning to Carrie, he led the way across the gravel drive and up the road that climbed to the top of another hill. The man in the house didn’t say anything more. Perhaps he was put off by what McLean had said, or frightened, but McLean didn’t care. He had a feeling the guy would either be gone or dead by the end of the week. He’d bought himself an extra couple of days by living outside the city’s population center, but he wasn’t nearly far enough to avoid what was coming. McLean just hoped his own ranch was far enough out in the mountains.

As they left the road and wound up a deer trail through a more heavily forested patch in the hills, Carrie spoke up. “I didn’t even think of disease. It’s going to be bad down there, isn’t it? No electricity for the hospitals, the clinics, the pharmacies. What will people do?”

McLean shook his head. “No running water and no plumbing, that’s the worst part. That’s all powered by the electrical grid. The sewage and garbage will pile up in the streets, animals will start spreading infections, and food will start rotting, which will make people sicker and spread disease that much faster. But don’t worry, we’ll outrun it.”

Carrie looked at McLean with an expression he couldn’t quite read, somewhere between admiration and suspicion. “You’ve thought all this through, haven’t you? Every detail.”

He nodded. “It’s been kind of a hobby of mine. Kind of an all-consuming hobby. Maybe even a way of life, I guess.”

“And now you’re vindicated.”

“Well, yes.”

“I hope you feel satisfied with yourself!”

McLean stopped, shocked at the animosity in Carrie’s tone. She stopped too, breathing heavily from the climb, and glared at him.

“I didn’t want this to happen any more than you did,” he told her. “I just foresaw it.”

“But you’re not even bothered! People are dying down there,
my friends
are dying down there. Our country’s under some kind of attack, and all you want to do is run and hide at your getaway place. Some of us are losing everything, McLean! Watching our whole lives go down the drain. And it hurts.” She started to cry, and they both stood there for a horrible minute as tears streamed down her cheeks.

The hill they had summited was high enough to provide a glimpse of Denver through a gap in the trees. A haze of smoke hung over the valley, and they could see the interstate, scattered with stalled cars. McLean scratched his chin, wondering if he’d done something wrong, and what he could say now.

Then Carrie dropped her water bottle and hugged him, burying her face in his chest as she sobbed. He gingerly put his arms around her. That seemed to be the right move, because she gradually calmed down. McLean steered her over to a boulder nearby and they sat together.

Finally Carrie pulled away from him and wiped her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s a lot to deal with. All those people down there, hurting and afraid and in trouble.”

“It’s a terrible thing,” McLean agreed. “Not to mention your apartment, your job, everything you’ve worked for. It’s got to be hard for you.”

“No, I don’t care about any of that,” Carrie said. “Things don’t matter. But
people…
what about my parents? Is this happening in Washington, too?”

McLean put a hand on her shoulder. “Your parents are probably just fine. We have no reason to suspect anything bad is happening to them, so let’s not add those fears and worries to the ones we already have.”

Carrie shuddered, letting the last of her stress-induced outburst leave her body. “You’re right. I’m sorry I grouched at you. We can keep going.”

McLean stood up and handed Carrie her water bottle. “There’s nothing to apologize about, Carrie. You make a good point. I wish I could be a hero and stop all this, or turn it back. I feel horrible about the whole situation. But I’ve spent a lot of time thinking it through, and in the end I just feel helpless every time. So I’ve tried my best to at least make sure that I and the people I care about will be safe and secure.”

Carrie gave him another hug and then led the way over the hilltop and into the next low valley.

Throughout the afternoon they hiked, leaving the mountain communities behind and cutting through wilderness toward the horse ranch McLean’s friend owned. They encountered an old railroad track from the early twentieth century which hadn’t been used for fifty years, a landmark McLean had been looking for, and they traveled on it for the rest of the day, making good time. It kept them away from the roads, followed a fairly straight line through the mountains to the west, and stayed on easy terrain by design. Wherever a train could go, a person could go much easier than scrambling up and down rocks and hills and bushwhacking through the trees. It also avoided most of the houses and cabin communities that peppered the hills above Denver.