The day after: An apocalyptic morning (132 page)

              "Get them inside," Jessica said. "Search them thoroughly and then tie them up. Keep them under guard downstairs and kill them if they so much as twitch."

              "Gladly," Carla said, stepping up to Schuyler, who was being jerked to his feet by four women. She walked up to him and spat in his face. "Just give me a reason, fuckface," she told him. "I'd love to be the one to cut your fuckin throat."

              While Schuyler and Dewey were being tied and gagged and hauled off to a downstairs storage area, Maddie and Janice, the other automatic weapon bearer, took up position where the guards had been. They were both wearing bulky clothing that was quite similar to what had been worn by the two guards. They had taken possession of the guards' baseball caps and rain slickers and had tucked their hair underneath. They stood at attention, one of the portable radios in their possession, and waited. From a distance, they looked exactly like Schuyler and Dewey.

              Meanwhile Jessica was leading a group of five women up the stairs towards the sleeping quarters of Barnes himself. She had her gun out now and the safety off. Walking next to her, holding the other gun, was Alice, the women who had been recently "donated" to Bracken to replace his lost wives. They had flashlights but they kept them turned off, finding their way by means of the ambient lighting leaking in from the spotlights outside. Soon they were outside the closed door.

              "You ready?" Jessica whispered to her team.

              They agreed that they were.

              "Then let's do it."

              Alice went first. She opened the door and immediately reached for the light switch on the wall - knowing where it was because she was the woman responsible for cleaning this room. She flicked it up and the overhead fluorescents - powered by the generator outside - flared to life, illuminating the former vice principal's office that had been converted to a luxury bedroom.

              Barnes was lying in a large oak bed with a canopy over the top of it. Silk sheets and a down comforter covered his body as well as the bodies of two of his four wives (the other two wives were in a separate bedroom at the moment - there wasn't room for all of them in the bed). All three of them blinked in confusion at the sudden change in lighting. Barnes attempted to sit up.

              "Don't you fucking move, asshole," Alice told him, leveling her gun at him.

              The two wives both screamed at the sight of firearms being pointed at them.

              "You two stay where you are," Jessica said. "Nobody moves!"

              "What the hell is the meaning of this?" Barnes asked, glaring at them, as of yet more outraged than scared.

              "This is what's known as a hostile takeover," Alice said, stepping closer. "If you move, you're dead."

              "Are you out of your fucking minds?" Barnes asked toughly. "You'll burn for this!"

              "Someone's gonna burn," Jessica said. "But I don't think it's gonna be us." She directed her gaze at the two wives. "Get out of that bed. Keep your hands up in the air."

              "What are you doing?" Tiffany, the buxom blonde that was Barnes' favorite wife asked tearfully. "You can't do this."

              "We are doing this," Jessica told her. "We'll have the entire town by sunrise. Now get out of the bed and lie down on the floor."

              One by one the two women, both of whom were naked, were proned out on the floor on either side of the bed. Barnes watched all this without expression, his eyes looking for any advantage he could take. He said nothing.

              "Now you, Barnes," Jessica told him. "Keep your hands up and come to the foot of the bed. I know you have a gun hidden in here somewhere, but don't even think about going for it."

              "You're making a very bad mistake," Barnes said, emerging naked from his bed, his hands up, his wilted penis shrunken between his legs.

              "It wouldn't be the first time," Jessica said. "Now move."

              Barnes was tied and gagged (still naked - his captures saw no need to allow him to dress) and placed in the same room with Schuyler and Dewey. Alice and her pistol stood guard outside of the room with the assistance of two other women. They kept the portable radio that had been found in Barnes' room with them to monitor any developments with the guard force.

              Tiffany and Candice, the two naked wives, were allowed to put clothes on and they were led to a separate storage room where they too were locked up and guarded. They would be dealt with later.

              Meanwhile Jessica and the rest of the women made their way to the weapons storage room on the bottom floor of the administrative building. This room had once been the teacher's cafeteria. It had two entrances, both of which had been installed with steel security doors to which Barnes had the only key. A quick search of his desk in the principal's office revealed the ring to which it was attached. Less than five minutes of trying different keys in the lock was required before the mechanism clicked and the door swung open.

              Though most of the storage racks in the room were currently empty, not all of them were. The vast majority of the town's weapons were either out on the march with the attack team or in the hands of the various guards in town. But of the weapons that were left in there, many of them were fully automatic M-16s, AK-47, or other, more exotic varieties. Barnes had held these weapons in reserve in case of an attack on the town while the troops were away. In all, there were more than thirty available right here in the room for the use and enjoyment by the rebellious women. Nor was that all. Though all of the semi-automatic weapons and most of the hunting rifles were gone, there were still more than twenty shotguns and nearly a hundred pistols. The ammunition supply was also in pretty good shape. Thanks to reloading equipment and a dedicated team of loaders, nearly half of these shelves were full of every needed variety.

              "Get everyone who knows how to use a gun armed up," ordered Gail Haxton, one of the other women with military experience.

              As it happened, most of the women in the group of sixty knew how to shoot. They were foothill and mountain women in their previous lives and had been taught to shoot by their fathers, husbands, brothers, or boyfriends. They filed in one by one and armed themselves up, most of them taking the automatic rifles (even though most had never fired one before), the rest taking shotguns or the few remaining hunting rifles. They found backpacks and loaded up with extra ammunition. They loaded shells into magazines and internal chambers. Everyone grabbed a pistol as well.

              In addition to the weapons and the ammunition, there were fifteen of the portable radios that the guards used and more than enough fresh batteries to power them. Gail distributed these as well, dividing her women into several groups.

              "Okay," Gail said, once everyone was armed, divided up, and a chain of command was established. "I think we're ready to rock."

              Schuyler, the senior guard that had been on duty at the front of the high school, had his gag removed by Alice and a pistol placed against the side of his head.

              "All right," she said, before he had a chance to say anything. "This is the deal. At 4:00 AM and 5:00 AM, the interior guard positions and the perimeter guards are all going to check in with you to make sure everything is okay."

              Schuyler's eyes widened a little as she told him this. She had not been asking it as a question, she had been stating it as a fact. How the hell had she known that? Women were not supposed to know what the operating procedures of the guard positions were.

              "When they do," Alice continued, "you're going to answer that all is well. Those will be your exact words - all is well - you will not say the trouble phrase. In case you forgot, that phrase is: everything is in order. Do you understand me?"

              Schuyler actually gasped. She knew the trouble phase as well! How? How did they know so much? Had the men really been that careless around these women? Had they?

              "If you do not do exactly as I say and say the proper phrase in the proper tone of voice, I will kill you. Do not think for a moment that I don't have it in me. On the contrary, it would give me immense pleasure to do so. If, on the other hand, you do do as I say, you will live. You will remain a prisoner until the revolt is over with, but you will live. Do you understand?"

              "You won't get away with this," Schuyler said. "You can't."

              "I'm not interested in your predictions of our success," Alice told him. "What I am interested in is whether or not you understood what I said. Answer me or I'll kill you right now and then have this conversation with Dewey over there."

              "I understand," he said immediately.

              "And what will say when the routine check occurs?"

              "All is well."

              "Very good." She smiled a little, borrowing a term that was popular among the men of Auburn when talking to one of the "bitches". "You're a smart little piece. Keep it up, and you'll go far around here. Maybe we'll even let you clean up the high school someday."

              The 4:00 AM and the 5:00 AM radio checks went as they normally did. Sergeant Poole, who was in charge of the interior patrol, called in at the top of these hours and heard that all was well from all four of the manned guard positions as well as the high school guards. At 5:45 AM, he and his troops were just a quarter mile from the high school, still without the slightest idea that things had taken a drastic change in their town.

              "Interior to admin," said Poole wearily into his radio. "We're heading in."

              There was a longer than usual pause, almost long enough that Poole was about to retransmit his message, thinking it hadn't been received. But finally, Schuyler's voice replied to him. "10-4 interior. All is well."

              As the group of five headed towards their base of operations, Poole looked at his men. "Did Schuyler sound a little strange to you guys?" he asked.

              "He always sounds strange to me," Corporal Winters said grumpily.

              "Yeah," Sergeant Frank agreed, shifting his rifle on his back a little. "He's been standing out there for twelve hours. I'd sound strange too."

              They continued their short walk, no one else mentioning the strange lilt to Schuyler's voice. He had given the proper code phrase after all. What could be wrong?

              When they were within sight of the main entrance, close enough to see the two figures that they presumed where Schuyler and Dewey standing in front, a sudden noise to their right made all of them jump. It was the sound of footsteps, many of them, moving over the wet pavement from the deep shadows. They swung their flashlights instinctively in that direction and illuminated a group of ten women, all of them pointing assault weapons or shotguns at them. The men began to reach for their weapons as adrenaline flooded through them.

              "Don't do it," said Jessica, the bitch from Garden Hill. She was in the front of the line of women. "If you try to bring those weapons down, you'll be shot to pieces."

              While they digested this piece of information, flashlights suddenly lit them up from the other side, revealing yet another group of women armed with guns. And that was not all. From behind them, another group lit them up.

              "You're surrounded completely," Jessica told them. "Now drop those weapons to the ground and move away from them."

              The five-man group looked helplessly at the two guards in front of the high school. They were now trotting towards the scene of the ambush, flashlights and weapons in their own hands. The women surrounding them did not seem to be paying any attention to this. The reason why became clear a moment later when they came closer. They were not the guards at all but two more women dressed to look like the guards.

              "Put the guns down slowly," Jessica repeated. "Don't reach for your radios or anything else. You do as we say, and you'll live."

              Left without anything else to do - and all of them figuring that this was some ill-planned rebellion that would quickly be quelled - they dropped their weapons to the pavement.

              "Now the sidearms," Maddie, coming close enough to take over the situation, told them. "Do it real carefully. Believe me, we'd love to smoke some of you. We're just itching for a reason."

              They dropped their sidearms as well.

              "Now start walking towards the high school," Maddie ordered, keeping her weapon trained on them. "Walk slowly and don't make any sudden moves."

              "You won't get away with this," Poole told her, repeating the most often-heard sentiment muttered by the surviving men that day.

              "We already have," Maddie told her. "Now march."

              Once the interior patrol was tied and gagged inside the storage room with the rest of the surviving men, the only free people with penises were those that were manning the external guard posts. There were eight of them on duty, spread throughout four different positions in teams of two - about half of what was normal when the full militia was in town. Each team was equipped with a radio and each man was equipped with an automatic weapon. In addition, considerable stocks of ammunition were stored at each post. And the guards would be expecting their relief to arrive in less than ten minutes.