Gone to Ground (9 page)

12

Damn it ,
Captain Rickards thought as he stood in the street surveying the burning buildings in front of him.
Damn it all to hell!

Rickards spun on his heel look
ing for the man in charge of responding to this fire. He spied his target over by one of the large engines, talking on a radio to his crew. Barely controlling his temper Rickards stalked over to the vehicle.

“What the hell is going on here,” he demanded.

The man on the radio, fully dressed in turn out gear, didn’t pause his conversation. He simply turned away from the Rickards and thrust out his arm, palm facing back toward the captain, in a well known but little liked signal. Rickards stood there, fury building as he waited for the fire chief to get off the radio.

Finally, after several minutes, and just when Rickards was ready to grab the man and spin him back in his direction, snatch the radio, throw it on the ground and stomp it into many tiny pieces, the man said “over” and turned to face Rickards.

“What can I do for you, captain,” snapped the man, eyeing him up and down, taking in his Enforcers’ uniform and obviously not swooning from an overload of respect. The name penned in black permanent marker on his turn out coat said F. Stevens.

“I asked what was going on here,” Rickards barked back, gesturing at the line of burning homes behind him.

“Central Control labeled these buildings for annihilation.”

“So close to the APZ? Why? What the hell is Central Control thinking?”

“Apparently it was reported that these homes were being used to hoard food, clothes and other items needed by the community. Orders came through from Central Control that each of these neighborhoods were to be cleared then torched. All recovered goods are over there waiting for transport into the APZ.”

Rickards looked in the direction Stevens indicated, noting for the first time the tractor trailers being loaded with food and other goods needed desperately by the community. It appeared that the fire department had made quite a haul.

“Why wasn’t our annihilation team notified if the buildings were going to be fired?” Rickards demanded, looking back to Stevens.

“I don’t know why Central Control made the decisions they did,” Stevens snapped. “They didn’t call and ask my opinion. They probably chose us because the annihilation teams are being used for areas further outside the APZ, and controlling spread isn’t as important there as it is here. I’m sorry if your team wasn’t notified, but we’re just following orders.” Rickards thought he didn’t sound very sorry.

The radio trilled and a voice broke through the static asking Stevens a question. He turned away from Rickards as he addressed the issue raised by the anonymous speaker on the other end. After signing off he turned back to Rickards.

“If there isn’t anything else, I’ve got to get back to work here.”

“What am I supposed to tell the people in the APZ? These buildings were supposed to be the last to go, after all the other areas were demolished. Now people are going to start getting suspicious. I’ve already got people asking when they’re going to be allowed to return to their homes. I’ll have an uprising on my hands.”

“You follow protocol as laid down by Central Control. That’s what you do. If people ask about smoke from annihilation sites in the distance, you use the wildfire explanation, right? Here you’ve got the choice between wanton destruction by ghosts, electrical malfunction, disease reservoir, whatever.” Exasperated at Rickards’ angry expression and obvious disapproval, Stevens snapped, “It doesn’t really matter, does it. All of these buildings will eventually be destroyed back to the boundaries. The government of this country and all the others are committed to maintaining a smaller footprint. Eminent domain had been happening for quite a while now for other purposes, this is just a new one. With this move, it’s just developed a different focus.

“Now, if that’s all, I’ve got work to do.” With that Stevens turned away and holding the radio to his mouth began calling his team and asking for updates.

Furious over the abrupt dismissal from Stevens, and the rapid turn of events, Rickards stormed back to his vehicle, one of the few gasoline powered trucks still allowed on the roads. With the refineries shut down, and oil imports at a halt, the only people allowed to use combustion engines were the ones approved by Central Control as necessary to the forward movement of the government’s agenda. Even then electric vehicles were preferred, since they could be powered by renewable resources such as solar, wind and hydroelectric. The problem was there were still too few of those vehicles available. Gradually, as the remaining population began to accept this radical shift in lifestyle, people would be retrained, the factories would be retooled and reopened, and more vehicles would be produced that met the government’s standards. For now, though they were stuck with the older technology.

Central Control had told all the Enforcers and other agencies in power positions to expect resistance, and to police their own forces diligently. The official stance was that people had become entrenched in the wasteful lifestyles of the past seven or eight decades, and they were not going to embrace a more frugal existence with open arms. However, the recent radical reduction in the world population, combined with the growing evidence of drastic world climate changes, and the subsequent disasters that were resulting from it, gave the governments of the world the rare opportunity to take the reins and make changes with less upheaval and backlash than might normally occur in more settled times.

Less upheaval,
Rickards snorted at the thought.
It wasn’t that there was
less
upheaval, it was that there was so
much
upheaval, from a natural source, clearly identifiable, that a little extra thrown in on top by the world’s governments was hardly noticeable.

Traveling back to his office in the APZ, Rickards considered this change, and how people were handling it. At the time of the final disaster, the population of the United States had been somewhere over 330 million, and the population of the world well over six billion. Center of Disease Control estimates said that, over all, only about ten percent of the pre disaster population remained, leaving the population of the United States only about thirty-three million, which in anyone’s book was still a hell of a lot of people.

The funny thing, if anything in this situation could be funny, was that some states had been hit much harder than other states. The flooding in the south and east had apparently created a perfect reservoir for disease spread, and the heavily populated cities, with people living in close contact with one another, facilitated contagion, in spite of quarantine.

The rural areas were not immune, however, especially once people started trying to escape the disease by avoiding quarantine barriers and heading out into the country, carrying the virus with them as they went.
The damn black death all over again,
he thought, remembering what he’d learned in school about how people tried to outrun the plague in the 1300s, often carrying it with them and infecting new villages and populations along the way.

His APZ was one of the smaller ones, housing only about eight thousand people, gathered from the surrounding areas of Nevada, California and Arizona. Central Control had chosen many of the larger cities, such as Phoenix and Laughlin for formation of the APZs with the idea that these areas sported more apartment style housing and had a greater stockpile of goods necessary to maintain the people until production could be restarted.

A grim smile crossed his lips. At least unemployment wouldn’t be a problem for awhile. Everyone would be needed to get this new enterprise off the ground.

Another interesting thing, he thought, was how some countries had adapted more easily to concentration. Some people in the world were already accustomed to a stronger governmental role in their lives. This tended to work for them, since the citizens were more likely to look toward the government to tell them what to do in times of emergency.

However, in the United States, home of so many independent minds, but which had also dealt with so few natural or man made disasters on its own soil until recently, the demoralization and confusion had been especially severe. That allowed the authorities to step in and present a plan with few people questioning them. Problem was that now some were starting to emerge from that swamp of confusion and seem interested in taking their lives back. The government had other plans for that, ones developed in highest secrecy with other governments across the planet. Even people like Rickards weren’t sure about the extent of the plans; were only informed of the roles they needed to play at that time, and warned that confidentiality must be maintained at all costs.

God, he wished he knew where O’Reilly was. There was a loose cannon if ever there was one. Much of the information O’Reilly had put into his file, when he’d bothered to fill in the spaces at all, was of no help. Rickards’ men had been diligently searching out O’Reilly’s history, trying to determine where he might go. Unfortunately, a crippled network system that was only gradually returning to normal meant they weren’t having much luck tracking him down.

He’s got to be found
, thought Rickards,
He’s got to be found, brought in and kept silent.
Whatever happens, he can’t be allowed to tell what he knows.

13

The sun was high on the western cliff wall, still leaving the rest of the canyon pasture in shade when O’Reilly finished saddling his string of horses for his foray to the nearest ranch in search of supplies. He’d considered waiting until evening to
head out, in hopes of avoiding any seekers that might be around, but he decided that Maggie was right, and the odds of encountering seekers or Enforcers out here on these little ranch roads was not high. Still, the exposure made him nervous.

Nonsense
he shook his head
If they’ve figured out where I’ve gone, and have sent out the seekers, they’ll find me whether I’m in the canyon or not.
Once again he hoped he’d hidden his tracks well enough when he left the APZ. If he was extremely lucky, he thought, the authorities believed that he’d headed for the wilderness in the Sierra Nevadas, or up into the remote areas of Wyoming and Montana. He’d thought about it. A person could stay lost a long time in those rugged mountains and deep forests, but the winters would be brutal, and besides, Hideaway was home territory. He smiled.
Home field advantage
. He sure hoped so.

He heard the creak of the house door opening and turned to see Maggie heading toward him carrying a saddlebag and a canteen. That was another thing, he thought. Now he had two other people dependent on him. He turned back to his horse, shaking his head as a grimace crossed his face. That wasn’t in the plan, though he’d grudgingly changed the plan when he found Maggie and Mark already in residence. Now they were tied together, and there was no getting around it.

He figured in the short term they could live on food they harvested themselves, as well as those staples they were able to gather from the ranches and camps in the area. The problem was that those things wouldn’t last forever and eventually they would either have to be able to learn to do without, or they would have to take the same action most ghosts were driven to; that is stealing from the APZs.

Well,
he thought
, We’ll deal with that when it’s time. Hopefully the nearest ranches and camps will be fully provisioned, and hopefully the annihilation teams will ignore these small, out of the way places for a while longer since they’re so far, and since there are no clear maps indicating where they are.

O’Reilly knew the annihilation teams were ordered to go to small towns and subdivisions and destroy the buildings in those areas, after taking all useable goods. So many places were left empty, however, that at least the teams he was familiar with were concentrating on larger groups of houses. Most were not actively looking for small homesteads far away from civilization, unless they got word that a group of ghosts were holed up there. That didn’t happen often, either, since the majority of the ghosts made their livings off the APZ supply trains, and didn’t want to move too far away from where they could get their groceries.

He heard Maggie’s footsteps as she approached, and he turned to watch her, this tall, slender, golden blond woman. She wasn’t beautiful, he guessed, not like the models you see in the magazines, but she caught the eye. Even out here, completely out of her element, she walked with a subconscious aura of confidence.

No,
he thought,
not beautiful, but she sure stuck in your mind, haunting you when she wasn’t there to torment you in person. Those huge green eyes looking deep inside and seeing all your secrets.
Not that he’d ever be attracted to someone like that, no way, no how. She was about as prickly as a porcupine, without the cuddly personality, though watching her with Mark was a joy. It was like looking though a window and seeing a whole new person inside.

“Hey,” Maggie called out, while still about ten feet away, breaking him out of his reverie. “I brought you some of that venison jerky for the trip. And here, the last of the coffee in this canteen. I hope you appreciate the sacrifice since I figure I might go into caffeine withdrawal before you return and Mark will be forced to check me into rehab.” She grinned up at him as she approached closer and he smiled in return. “You ready to head out?”

“Yeah, everything’s all set,” he affirmed. “Now don’t forget what we talked about last night. I’ll be gone today and tomorrow, maybe the next day depending on what I find.”

“I remember,” Maggie nodded. She paused, then, unable to resist, added sarcastically, “And if you don’t get back within three days, I’m to take Mark and everything we can carry and head for the caves and stay there for at least a week until we’re sure no one has back tracked you. I still don’t think that’s necessary. I figure it’s more likely that you’ll get lost and I’ll need to come out looking for you.”

“Just do it, Maggie, okay? Humor me.”
Why did she always get so edgy when talking about this stuff?

“Okay, we’ll do it. I just think you’re worrying a bit too much.”

“Fine, I’m worrying, just don’t forget.” O’Reilly untied his lead horse, turned him away from the hitching rail, and swung on board. “Hand me that rope will you?” He gestured toward the lead rope on the first of his pack horses. He was taking his original three, plus the two strongest of Maggie’s four. He figured with five horses, even with her two still sore footed and probably unable to carry as much as the others, he should be able to bring back enough supplies to last them for awhile. Assuming he found any.

Maggie untied the pack horse, and handed the rope up to O’Reilly who then dallied it around his saddle horn. He nudged his horse in the sides with his spurs, and his small pack train started off, heading for the two-rut trail leading down the canyon and calling back over his should, “I’ll see you in a couple of days.”

“Drive careful,” came Maggie’s reply, surprising a laugh out of him and lightening his mood as he headed away from Hideaway.

It took five hours of hot, sweaty riding, but finally O’Reilly began to see increasing signs of habitation. He’d headed for the S Lazy V headquarters, instead of the remote ranch house Maggie had in mind when she came up with the chicken collecting idea. That house was easily a day and a half’s ride with a pack train. The S Lazy V was closer, though not as close as Eagle Camp, and he was familiar with the route. He’d go to Eagle Camp another day, he decided. Just now he didn’t feel he could deal with any more visitations from the past.

The journey to the caves had stirred up many memories he’d have preferred to leave buried, but it couldn’t be helped. Yesterday, with Mark’s and Maggie’s assistance, he’d shifted as many supplies as they could spare into the small cave in preparation for its possible use, even though Maggie obviously still wasn’t totally sold on the idea. Mark, on the other hand, was all for creating a secret hideaway.

The land out of the canyon varied between dried grasses, clumps of yucca and the occasional thick standing of shaggy bark and alligator juniper. At times the land rolled gently, then suddenly, without warning, a rock escarpment would thrust it way out of the surrounding hills. As he drew closer to the S Lazy V headquarters, the two-rut track he’d been following joined another track and then another, each appearing more and more like a real road. In the distance he could see the tops of the large elms that grew around the barns and outbuildings of the ranch, and then the top of the barn itself. There were no signs of human activity and he breathed a sigh of relief, tempered by a pang of sorrow. As much as he didn’t want to try to explain his presence on the ranch, he also felt grief that Tompkins, the man who’d given his dad a job, his parents a place to live, and he and his brother the best place to grow up he could imagine, was gone. This ranch had been in Tompkins’ family for five generations, and the odds of that continuing on to the sixth were slim indeed.

As O’Reilly drew closer to the cluster of buildings, a small herd of horses ran up out of a pasture on his right, their tails high in the air, snorting. Sun glinted off their red, brown and yellow coats, white markings flashing brightly. This band was made up of about ten mares, their foals, and one of the ranch’s stallions. If he remembered right, there would be at least one more group in another pasture, further to the east.

Looking toward the barn he dreaded seeing other horses, and maybe cattle, lying dead in the pens that surrounded the compound. When he didn’t see any sign of carcasses, or the buzzards that would feed off of them, he felt a knot of tension loosen. He hadn’t realized how much apprehension he’d built up knowing that any animals that had been left in the pens and corrals would have long since run out of food and water if they hadn’t been able to escape. Apparently whoever had been living here at the headquarters had freed the horses and any cattle before either dying or heading into the APZs. He didn’t know which to hope for, though he knew which was most likely.

He glanced up toward a small hill a short distance from the compound. That was the family’s cemetery. It was there that Tompkins’ ancestors were laid to rest, and it was there that Tompkins would want to be if he had died. O’Reilly didn’t think he wanted to go up to see if there was a new headstone, or several. He was tired of dealing with death.

Riding into the barnyard he was met with silence, broken only by the sounds of birds and the gentle rustle of the wind in the elms. No horses nickered, no cattle lowed, no dogs barked. Dismounting, he tied Ace, his gelding, to the nearby hitching post, then proceeded to disconnect his pack train, tying each of these horses in their turn to the long log rail. He figured if necessary, he could collect some of the other horses from the pasture to act as pack animals for the trip home, that is if he could find saddles, or pack saddles for them. Any extra horses brought back could then be turned out in the upper pastures and caught and used as needed.

He unsaddled Ace first, then removed pack saddles from three of the other five horses, two horses having come equipped with only halters. Finally, he turned the animals out one at a time into the large turn-out attached to the barn. Checking the water tank and finding it low, he turned the faucet, hoping that it was still connected to the windmill system as it was when he was a kid. When the fresh water gushed out, splashing into the tank, he blew out a relieved breath. At least he wouldn’t have to haul water.

The eerie silence played on his mind and he determined to get what he needed and get out of this place as quickly as possible. Silence was much easier to take out in the middle of the rangeland, where silence was expected. Here it was like a sliver in your hand, a constant irritation, never completely leaving you alone.

He walked into the large open barn, noticing the alfalfa hay stacked inside.

Plenty of feed,
he thought,
No way to get it to the animals unless we move up here and that’s not going to happen any time soon.
He shook his head. The abundance was something to keep in mind for the future, though, should next winter become severe enough to drive them out of the canyon.

Using his pocket knife, he opened a bale of hay and tossed several green leafy flakes over the half wall of the run in connected to the pen where his horses were milling around. After drinking their fill, they wandered into the barn at the sound of the hay thumping into the feeder. There was some jockeying for position as they determined who was the boss, then they settled down to eat. Leaning on the half wall, O’Reilly watched them a few minutes, loath to begin what he was here to do. He found himself wishing that Maggie and Mark were with him and wondered what they were up to back in Hideaway.

Damn,
he thought,
not two months ago in the APZ I was wishing I could get away from people. I wanted to be done with them, their bickering and complaining, and the scheming of those people in charge. Now here I am, missing one of the most irritating women I’ve ever met
and a know nothing kid.
There is something seriously wrong with me. Got to be.

Finally, taking a deep breath and shoring up his resolve he turned away from the quietly eating horses and into the dark, dusty shadows of the barn. Walking into the tack room he found saddles, bridles and pack saddles. Again good. He’d brought several of the horses with only halters, hoping to find proper pack saddles and panniers in the barn. He was glad he wouldn’t wind up improvising packs on the way home. Coming without the proper equipment was a gamble, but one that had paid off. Hopefully the rest of his bets would pay off as well.

Once he determined that all the tack he needed was in the tack room, he walked back out into the sunlit barnyard and headed for the chicken coop on the far side of the hard packed dirt yard, near some small outbuildings. He could see that the door was open allowing the birds free run. Luckily for him, however, some of the chickens had stayed close to home, pecking around in the dust, clucking and squawking to themselves. It was a miracle, he thought, that the entire flock hadn’t fallen prey to coyotes and hawks.

A sobering thought flitted though his mind, reminding him that maybe the reason the chickens had survived was because there was so much abundant food elsewhere; horses and cattle trapped without water, humans who didn’t make it to medical help in time. These predators weren’t picky. Quickly quashing those mental images, he turned his mind toward the problem of conducting a chicken roundup.

If he could find some grain and scatter it back in the coop, he thought, he would be able to capture enough of the stupid birds to take back to the Hideaway. He grimaced at the thought of the five hour ride with a basket of complaining chickens tied to a horse behind him and briefly considered telling Maggie that there hadn’t been any fowl in sight, not a one. He didn’t like chickens much, but Maggie was right when she said that the eggs and meat would be a welcomed and valuable addition to their diet.

Of course,
he figured
, probably after the ride home I’ll never want to eat a chicken or touch an egg again.
Actually, he thought, he might get fed up and feed them all to the coyotes before he ever got home. Maybe he should look for ear plugs when he was in one of the houses. That, or spices for fixing roast chicken.