Hard Rain Falling (Walking in the Rain Book 3) (4 page)

“Any luck working with the Reserve components, Colonel?” Vanderpool asked, clearly trying to change the subject.

“Not since Colonel Winscott cleared out on day three after the pulse. And that brings me to something else; something that, frankly, shocked the hell out of me.”

Colonel Hotchkins went on to explain what Nick’s friend shared with him on the eve of the pulse. Again, Vanderpool managed to at least keep the shock off his face but Halloran looked mad enough to shoot somebody.

“So, Sir, you mean to say somebody, somewhere knew this was going to happen and didn’t issue a warning? Like, at least grounding the planes? The freaking planes that crashed and burned half of Oklahoma City.”

Halloran asked his question in nearly a cry of anguish. I wondered who he lost in those flames.

“That’s what some of us suspect, Sergeant. I know it isn’t easy to hear, and I take it nobody knows anything about it back home?”

“Scuttlebutt only, Sir,” confirmed Vanderpool. “If it’s true, that may explain why certain groups are laying low at the moment.”

“Too much to speculate about this evening, men. And Sergeant Halloran, I’m sorry to bring up such an obviously sensitive topic.”

The tough looking sergeant made an effort to compose himself, wiping unashamed tears from his eyes. He looked at the colonel, then at me.

“Really? Somebody knew enough to shut down the nukes but didn’t warn us? Sir,” he said looking straight at the colonel, “if this is true, it could tear the country even further apart. I could never… my house was burned in the fires from those crashes. My wife and daughter were home at the time.”

I knew what he nearly said, or thought I did. He could never take orders from some asshole that let his family die. I couldn’t blame him. There were rumors out there already; but as word spread of the truth, the people responsible could expect a warm reception… in Hell.

“Well, that’s a subject for another day,” Vanderpool interjected, “and now we have other matters to discuss.”

And we did. The Oklahoma National Guard was still trying to get their forces rallied, and the suspicion was that the weapon I’d recovered was part of an armory somewhere that had been raided early on by some opportunistic gang. Unfortunately, Captain Vanderpool informed us that with the computer network down there was little that could be done to trace down the serial number of that M4. And it was hardly the only piece of military armament that had gone missing.

As for the rest, Vanderpool gave us a quick summary of their status—which wasn’t good. I’m sure Colonel Hotchkins got the full briefing earlier, but the snapshot available to the rest of us was bleak. The Oklahoma Guard lost a good deal of repairable transport and gear to the fires in Oklahoma City; so the governor was still scrambling to make bricks without straw.

Thus, the Oklahoma governor engineered a deal with his counterpart in Arkansas, Governor Watkins, to trade some items—unmentioned in our meeting—to the Arkansas Guard for repair and replacement parts that they did manage to save from the flames in exchange for transport.

In particular, Vanderpool was there to pick up parts for a number of Bradley Fighting Vehicles—mainly circuit boards and modules necessary to get them back up and running. He indicated that he and a small staff would be staying behind to work with the colonel while Sergeant Halloran and a small convoy of Hummers would make the trip back to Oklahoma City. And we would be catching a ride.

Well, I didn’t want to go visit OKC. Neither did my friends, but before we could speak, Vanderpool explained the rest of the plan. We would be rolling with the convoy down Interstate 40—the route they’d driven to get here—until reaching the exit for Highway 69. There, we would be met by a contingent of soldiers from the McAlester command who would see to our safety on to the city.

“So, what do they get out of the deal?”

Amy’s question caught the other men in the room off guard. She’d been quiet up until now, and her silence was taken by some, no doubt, as a lack of interest in the “grown up” talk. Of course, they didn’t know her like I did. Amy Landon was smart, darned smart, and I made sure never to forget.

“Well, ah, miss,” Captain Vanderpool temporized, “they will be acting under orders, of course.”

“Yes, but with their manpower shortage and the expenditure of fuel and resources, I would suspect there would be something to sweeten the pot for this Captain Bisley.”

“You are correct, Miss Landon,” Colonel Hotchkins said, a small smile lifting the corners of his lips. I think he was pleasantly surprised by the astute question. “They will be taking possession of eight sets of replacement parts that Master Sergeant Warnecke believes will get at least some of their Bradley Fighting Vehicles back on the road.”

Ah. Some things were coming clear. Our work in getting those beasts back up and running was also a survey of the damage caused by the pulse. I knew the master sergeant kept meticulous notes on what worked and what didn’t while we pulled and replaced certain modules. If he hadn’t written the book before, I’d bet he would be up to writing at least a few chapters now.

I didn’t know how many more Bradleys the Arkansas Guard had in reserve, but if they were willing to let go of even some replacement parts, then the store house for their electronics must have been at least somewhat EMP resistant. I wondered if that was by accident or design. Given the age of these structures, I’m going with divine intervention. Either way, if the Guard thought they would need armored fighting vehicles with 25mm cannons, then Colonel Hotchkins must be thinking the urban masses were almost ready to storm the battlements.

The cold facts could not be disputed. We didn’t have enough food or transportation to support the cities—not Chicago, or St. Louis, or Fort Smith, or Little Rock.

I’m sure the swarms out of Houston and Dallas had already overtaken the sprawling suburban areas around them back in Texas. I worried about the hordes streaming out of Dallas/Ft. Worth. That metro area of several million would overwhelm and consume everything—and everybody—for at least a hundred miles in every direction. My father and his friends had their plans for such an eventuality, but could they hold out in the long term? More than ever, I felt the urgent need to get home.

I had built up some credit with the National Guard units here in Arkansas and I planned to make use of that credit in the little time we had left. As the officers and Sergeant Halloran continued to make plans, I sat and made my own. I caught Amy watching me and offered her a little smile. She could tell the gears were spinning in my head and I felt her hand grasp mine under the table. Tonight, when were back in our bunk, I would share my thoughts with her and see what we could come up with together.

CHAPTER FIVE

Dawn came painfully early this morning as I pushed the plans in my head aside and got busy with the daily ritual. Amy and I had whispered together for over an hour, piecing together and discarding propositions much like the colonel, his executive officer, and the Oklahoma Guard personnel had done in our meeting. In fact, Hotchkins probably would have laughed at hearing some of his own points echoed back by Amy later as she lay next to me in our bed.

Funny, no one seemed shocked that Amy and I now shared a bed; not even little Summer. Of course, both girls slept close enough to us to tell there was no hanky-panky going on; or at least, not much. Since our heart-to-heart conversation at the farm, Amy and I considered ourselves engaged, but we both agreed it would be a long engagement.

Though she was still a few weeks shy of fifteen, Amy’s height made her look older while her delicate blonde features made her actually appear younger. With her long, slender good looks and no makeup, she still reminded me of a Tolkien elf as reimagined by Peter Jackson. She was hard for me to resist, and we did make out and do some other things together, but we both felt that going any further at this time would be risky.

Frankly, we had no contraceptives and the chance that she might get pregnant was a scary proposition. Yes, we were horny teens, but we also had a little common sense between us as well as the knowledge of how babies got made. Before the lights went out, I’d had plans that did not include a shotgun wedding or children before I was out of my teens. Post pulse, my concerns were more basic and I could not stand the thought of leaving Amy pregnant and on the road alone if I should pull a stupid and get killed.

Amy must have shared some little bit of our discussions on this matter early on with Lori, who gave me a meaningful, congratulatory nod one morning soon after we’d arrived in at Fort Chaffee. When I asked Amy about it later, she just said Lori was happy I wasn’t trying to pressure her into having sex.

“God, that sounds so much like an ‘After School Special’,” I’d commented.

“What’s that?”

“Something my dad used to joke about. I saw some clips from some shows on YouTube. Pretty lame, but apparently TV programs used to be aimed at teaching kids things they needed to know. That’s how, pre-internet, the teens of my dad and mom’s generation learned about sex and stuff,” I replied.

“Wait. They didn’t have internet porn or anything?” Amy asked, incredulous.

“Yeah, I know” was all I could reply. They practically lived in caves back then.

All of that was beside the point today, as I went out and took my usual job working with the mechanics. No surprise, I saw not only Master Sergeant Warnecke, but also Sergeant Halloran and a few more men dressed in the slightly different camo pattern of the Oklahoma Guard.

“Luke, I understand you met Sergeant Halloran last night,” Warnecke stated without preamble.

“Yes, Master Sergeant, I did,” I replied.

“Well, we’ve got a shit ton of work to do today. Seems we are cross-loading some spares to our brothers and sisters over in OKC. We’ll be mostly over in the warehouses today, so I hope you brought your water bottle.”

Since water production was limited, the base maintenance personnel had snubbed off water service to all buildings not currently inhabited or slated for future use. That included any of the warehouses already plumbed for water lines; most places I worked didn’t have that luxury anyway.

“Got two,” was all I said to the master sergeant before following him out from the shade of the main building and starting the hike to the first set of warehouses. Each of us, including Warnecke and Halloran, pushed flatbed dollies usually used inside the shop. The way Warnecke proceeded followed a series of sidewalks so progress was unimpeded.

I hung back and let the two senior sergeants take the lead, but I listened as they chatted about trivial matters. Sergeant Halloran seemed less, maybe, uptight than he did the night before after talking about his dead family. Murdered, one might say, by either the incompetence or lack of compassion inherent in our political system—though I doubt he would have described matters quite so bluntly even now.

Instead, I walked next to a red headed PFC who only looked a little older than me; or a little older than I used to look. Amy was right about many things, and one was that these days I looked older than my age. When I looked in the mirror, I saw faint lines, little cracks, etched the flesh around my eyes. Squint lines, I’ve heard them called. Between that and the dark tan roughening the features of my face and the neutral, flat expression I cultivated, others were usually fooled into thinking I was in my late teens or early twenties, at least.

“So, what’s your story?” the young man walking at my side began.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re armed, but not in uniform; unless that denim on denim look is some new issue. You know your way around here and that master sergeant doesn’t seem like he gives you any shit. I’ve seen lots of civilian workers, but none armed. So, you a cop?”

I laughed at that one, and shook my head.

“Please, I didn’t mean to be offensive,” I said quickly, but the kid… young man didn’t seem like I’d hurt his feelings. “I just realized I would suck at working undercover. No, not a cop. I’m just a civilian, a refugee looking to get home like a lot of other folks. The captain I was friendly with in the Guard here knew I was too paranoid to give up my weapons, so he cooked up this deal to get me and my friends hired as security contractors. And no, not prior service; all my combat experience has been since the lights went out.”

The young man seemed to be thinking about something and didn’t speak for a minute.

“You’re the one Halloran was talking about last night when he got back. The kid. I mean, like Billy the Kid… the gunslinger. You went into that school and got those girls out. And killed like twenty guys doing it.”

I shook my head, and then gave him my best innocent grin. “William Bonney, by all accounts, was an asshole. My name’s Luke. What’s yours?”

I stuck out my hand to shake, and the other guy didn’t hesitate before following suit. He seemed genuinely friendly, with an open personality that seemed out of place in these times. He was quick to make his own introductions.

“Jason Grady, Private First Class. But my friends call me Jay. And it took me a second to figure out that first part. Billy the Kid, right? How do you know that much about him?”

“I don’t remember a ton, really. My dad bought me a book about the gunfighters of the Old West when I was a kid. I enjoyed reading the stories and didn’t realize until later, the author’s point that most of the stories we know about the settlement of the west are wrong; especially when it came to the so-called gunfighters of the era. “

“Seriously? How did he manage to back that up?”

Jay seemed genuinely interested so I spent the rest of the walk describing how the author—darn it if I could remember his name—looked at original source documents such as court records and newspaper articles published at the time. Much of his research showed that many of the so-called shootouts and face to face confrontations written about in the popular press of the time were either inaccurate or outright fabrications meant to sell books.

“So who was the fastest gun in the West?” Jay asked as we drew near to our destination.

I shrugged. “That’s pretty subjective, without the modern equipment we have today. I imagine it was probably some Texas Ranger or marshal they never made a movie about. You ever see any Cowboy Action Shooting competitions?”

Jay looked at me with a look of incomprehension before answering. “You mean those dress up things? No, just saw ‘em on TV.”

“Those guys take it pretty seriously; getting in character and all that. They have contests at those deals, real speed and accuracy tests using chronographs to gauge speed and, of course, measured for accuracy shooting. Anyway, that’s what I saw at the ones my dad took me to see. Now, those guys are freaky fast.”

“I didn’t know people really did that. Have you ever competed?”

“No,” I lied. “We just went for the concessions and to see the Old West shows. My dad is the history buff. I just had a little of his interest rub off on me.”

“Well, I hope you know I didn’t mean any offense with that Billy the Kid crack. It’s just, you know, those girls are from down South but still Oklahomans, and we Okies have to take care of our own. Folks were real pleased to hear the girls were still alive and all. Even though things are so bad, it was a bright spot in what has been a really shitty few months.”

Jay seemed pretty serious, and I assured him I’d taken no offense. Cautiously, I asked him how his family was doing, and I was pleased to find out his mother and younger brother were safely housed on base with a slew of other dependents.

“How about you? Are your folks really down in Texas? The sergeant said you walked all the way from Chicago to get to Ft. Smith.”

“Yeah, and I hope they still are on the ranch. They should be okay. We have a horse and cattle operation in Northeast Texas.”

“What were you doing in Chicago? Are you really sixteen? That just don’t sound right.”

“I was trying to earn some scholarship money for college so I talked my parents into letting me go. And yes, I’m really sixteen. I’ll be seventeen in December, though.”

Now it was Jay’s turn to laugh. “Yeah, three months away. Pretty soon you’ll be an old man like me. I joined up for the enlistment bonus and the tuition assistance for college myself. I’m nineteen.”

After that, we stopped talking for a long time as Warnecke and Halloran worked us like rented mules in the hot confines of the warehouse. Every box had a number and every number meant something, but somehow over the years some of the codes had changed. Plus, boxes tended to migrate from their rightful slot over the years as sloppy mechanics, or their helpers, would move things around. Warnecke had made this assertion like it was a personal insult.

The boxes and crates were not heavy, but the building was dark and jammed packed with materials; so much so that I was beginning to understand why Warnecke was willing to pick parts from the boneyard. The master sergeant had a flashlight so we could examine the labels but to our dismay, one of the cages had been completely filled with a bunch of different, unrelated parts packages. I thought the old guy might have a stroke on the spot when he discovered this travesty.

After four hours of sweaty, back straining labor, Warnecke pronounced us done for the moment. He’d arranged the packages into complete rebuild kits designed to address the systems issues previously identified. I counted twenty-five discrete piles, and he said sixteen would be going back to Oklahoma City and eight to McAlester.

“What’s the extra one for?” one of the other Oklahoma enlisted men asked. He was in his mid-twenties and had a corporal’s stripes on his sleeve.

“That one is my demonstration unit, guys,” Master Sergeant Warnecke said. “Now we go back to the big barn and see if these actually do the job. You all didn’t think I was going to send you off without checking everything first, did you?”

I wanted to groan but the other men just nodded along, so I did the same. That was the grown up thing to do. We rolled our flatbed dollies back to the sprawling repair facility, making several trips to ferry everything back. Inside one of the repair bays, we found another dead Bradley had been jockeyed into position by the M88 Hercules Armored Recovery Vehicle. These behemoths routinely hauled 70 ton Abrams tanks from the field, so the 28 ton Bradley was a walk in the park. That was the gospel according to Saint Warnecke, who was my tutor in all things ginormous and armored.

Sergeant Halloran proved to be an experienced Bradley crewman, if not heavy equipment mechanic, and he quickly jumped in to assist the master sergeant in removing metal access plates. Other than horsing the heavy plates out of the way and standing ready to run and grab tools, the rest of us just hung back to stay out of their light.

The corporal, Towson, wanted to quiz me like Private Grady did earlier, and since I was going to traveling with these guys in a few days, I gave him short but complete answers. He, too, wanted to know how things were out there, and I could tell he was hoping to hear about how the ‘Recovery’ was progressing.

I’d heard that term repeated several times, the Recovery, like some central authority was out there stringing new electrical wires and systematically fixing the water plants somewhere. It was like wishing on a falling star, or whispering a prayer in the night. I stressed that I’d only seen a snapshot of the middle of the country, but what I saw wasn’t good. My message was clear: we would need to bootstrap ourselves into whatever recovery was possible. I hated always being Debbie Downer and wanted to talk about what they had seen.

“OKC is a cinder, man. Oh, some parts escaped the fires but probably three quarters of the city suffered at least some damage from the crashes. Too many flight paths ran right over the city.”

“Yeah, out towards O’Hare was bad. Fortunately it was raining in Chicago on the day, but still, there were so many planes on approach when it happened. I didn’t understand at first.” I stopped talking then, remembering how the streets had shuddered with each impact like a mini-earthquake. The idea that my teacher thought there was any way help was coming after a week of fires and looting never ceased to amaze me.