The day after: An apocalyptic morning (53 page)

              That he had been away from his home at the time of impact was somewhat of an irony, an amusing one even depending upon who you talked to. John had been a survivalist, a man who had prepared all of his adult life for the impending collapse of civilization. His cabin had been built ten years before on a carefully chosen five-acre plot. Beneath it had been a bomb shelter capable of housing him for more than a month in the event of nuclear fallout blowing over from the Sacramento area. He had considered minimum stock of food and water supplies to be a thousand cans of various meats and vegetables and sixty gallons of fresh drinking water. He had had more than twenty guns of varying caliber and size, and enough ammo to fight off a battalion of infantry. And he had not been home when the comet had hit.

              By the time he and his ragtag group of city hunters had made their way back to his cabin they had found it occupied by another group of hunters. From the dead and rotting bodies scattered around out front and the multiple bullet holes in all of the windows and in much of the wall surface, it was apparent that the cabin had been the scene of many vicious gunfights. How many times it had changed hands before John made it back there, he would never know since none of the hunters inside survived his group's attack to retake it. When they made their way inside and took stock of what was left they found less than a hundred cans of food and less than two hundred rounds of ammunition. The booze that he had stockpiled carefully over the course of several years had all been gone as had his stock of dried deer jerky.

              But, as much of a blow as losing his food and ammo had been, at least he was back in possession of the cabin itself. He had quickly organized his hunting group into a fairly efficient security force capable, under his direction, of holding off any more such attacks and even, eventually, of carrying out raids of their own. Though John did not particularly like having to attack others for food and needed supplies, he did not shy away from doing it. Nor did his team members when it was explained to them that it was either do that or die. They had forged out into the surrounding mountainside day after day, attacking bands of other hunters or raiding houses that were still standing and occupied. Though this portion of the mountains was not heavily populated, there had been people living there. One by one, day-by-day, John and his men had picked the area clean. Along the way they had met up with another group of eight hunters and a guide, a man that John had known and respected, if not exactly liked, for quite some time. That man was Bill Blades, the man next to him on the hill. When it had come down to a choice between fighting each other or merging their efforts, they had wisely chosen the latter option.

              Bill too had been out with a group of hunters, though in a different section of the mountains, when the impact had occurred. Unlike John however, Bill had not lived in the mountains, instead choosing the flatlands outside of Loomis down in the valley to call home. As such he was glad to take the second-in-command slot when John offered it in exchange for stable shelter. Bill, like Skip and company, had discovered that sleeping outside every night was not terribly fun.

              Since joining forces the group of seventeen had been the terror of every small group of survivors within thirty square miles. They had ranged further and further from the cabin that they used as base, attacking any group smaller or less formidable looking then themselves, and taking whatever supplies, no Micker how small, they happened to have. Though they had managed to keep themselves fairly well fed up until now, things had finally reached the point where there simply wasn't anyone else to attack. All of the spare food in all of the standing houses had been consumed. All of the hunters and other folks in the woods without a means to acquire more food had died of starvation. That was what finally forced them to Garden Hill.

              The group had known about the survivors of Garden Hill for quite some time of course. It could hardly escape their attention that a large group of people was sequestered inside the walls of the fancy subdivision. The problem with trying to attack Garden Hill was that there were just too many people in there to make such an attack worth risking. Or at least that had been the argument used when there had still been other, less protected pickings to go after. But now, with their rations down to less than a week's worth and nothing else in sight, John and Bill had made the decision that it was time to give it a go.

              They had watched the town for a day or two, trying to learn the routines within it before they made a move. Unfortunately they had watched from the edge of the hilly ground in front of the north wall instead of climbing the hill that they were now on. After noting that those who approached the wall were driven off with gunshots, they had probed the defenses using their own people, deliberately approaching the wall at various points to both identify the guard positions and to try to find holes in the coverage.

              They had thought that they'd found such a hole. Two times in two consecutive days one of the group had been able to walk right up to the northern wall on the western side of it. There had been no gunshots, no challenge, no apparent detection of any kind. Though they had marveled that the Garden Hill people would be so dumb as to leave this section open, they had counted it as a blessing and made plans to exploit it. And then things had gone wrong.

              They had sent Ken Staten - a CPA from Santa Rosa who had turned into quite a mountain man since the comet - to the wall to try to get inside. The plan had been for Ken to hide along the wall until dark and then to slip inside and do a quick recon of their community center defenses. He was then supposed to slip back out again before sunrise and report what he had found so that they could plan a full-scale attack for the next night. But Ken had been seen somehow as he had been crouched in his hiding place and the rest of the group had watched from the hills three hundred yards away. A man, the man that they were now looking at walking towards the wall, and a woman, both armed with assault rifles, had appeared less than ten minutes after Ken had positioned himself and they had shot him dead where he stood. It had been much too quick and they had moved much too carefully to have been a routine patrol of the outside perimeter. Besides, there had been no previous patrols of the outside that they'd seen. Someone had spotted him. Somewhere was a guard position that they had not seen. Where was it? And why hadn't it spotted the earlier probes? They could have no way of knowing that their earlier probes had not been spotted because the guards that had been responsible for spotting them had either been having sex or just plain not looking.

              "Look at that," John said, watching as Skip entered a two-story house near the northwest corner of the wall. "He's going in there. Do you think that's the guard position?"

              Both men watched the house intently for a few minutes. Now that attention had been called to the structure, they noticed that the upstairs window was open and unscreened. Looking closer they were able to make out shadows of several people inside, moving about and conversing with each other.

              "Son of a bitch," Bill said, continuing to watch. "That is a guard position. That has to be where they spotted Ken from. He wasn't more than a hundred yards or so from it when he made his move."

              "I think you're right," John agreed sadly. "I wonder if there's any more."

              "Why don't we watch 'em for another day or so and try to find out."

              John thought this over. "We'll do it for one more day," he finally said. "We'll get someone up here from first light to dusk. But we have to hit them pretty soon if we're gonna do it. We don't have enough food left to be fucking around watching them for days. They look pretty soft as long as we can get in and take them by surprise."

              "Hit 'em at breakfast?" Bill suggested. "Most of 'em will be in the community center where we can keep 'em under control."

              John nodded thoughtfully. "I like it," he said. "If those two guard positions on the north are all there is for this side - and I suspect that they are - it'll be easy to take them out. Sneak inside at night when they can't see us and divide into two groups. We can synchronize our watches and hit both of those northern guard positions at exactly the same time with Raid-bombs before they can call for help. Then we'll be able to get to the community center in force without being detected. If we can get the whole group there intact without them knowing about us, we can take it without firing a shot. Get a couple of those big-ass trucks that they drive here and load up as much food as we can carry. Then we scoot the hell out of there."

              "What about the women?" Bill asked. "There's a lot of 'em in that town. It's been a long time since we've had any women."

              John smiled. "I don't think they'll miss 'em if we take one woman for each of us. I don't think they'd miss 'em at all."

              They continued to watch.

              On the west side of the subdivision, across the highway and about two miles north of the bridge, was a hill that Skip had also pegged as an ideal guard position. Hill 1519 it was called on Skip's maps and it commanded an impressive view of the entire western wall and a good portion of the northern. Had the three men atop it been members of the Garden Hill guard force and facing to the west, they would have been able to spot anyone approaching the town from that direction before they could get closer than half a mile away. But the three men were not looking west, towards the town approaches, they were looking east, towards the town. They too had noted Skip's entrance into the guard position. They also noted it when he came back out fifteen minutes later.

              "There he is," Stu said, peering with his own pair of binoculars. "He's coming back out."

              "I see him," Lieutenant Bracken replied, staring through his own set of binoculars as the man began heading south down the street outside the house. He took a good look and then handed the glasses to the man next to him, a man that Skip, Christine, and Jack had once given two cans of turkey chili to. "Take a look," he told him. "Is that the guy?"

              He took the binoculars nervously and peered through them, trying to get a good look at the man's face as it moved slowly away. Hill 1519 was much closer to Skip than the other hill and therefore his view was much better than John and Bill's had been. "That's him," he said confidently. "That's the guy that gave us the food. He cut his beard off but I'd recognize that face anywhere."

              "Are you sure?" Bracken said. "Tell me if you're not."

              "I'm sure," he said. "He was the one with those two kids."

              "And they had M-16 rifles with them?" Stu asked. "You're sure about that?"

              "Well I guess I am," he said, irritated. "When someone points a fuckin' rifle like that at you it's something you kinda tend to remember."

              "Then that's the guy," Stu said. "That's the motherfucker that took out four of my guys. It has to be. No other way that group would've had three M-16 rifles unless they took them from my guys."

              Bracken wasn't completely sure that they weren't mistaken, but he kept his opinion to himself on that Micker. "I thought you said he'd be smart," he told Stu. "This defense they got set up around here sure don't look very smart to me. In fact, it looks pretty fuckin' pathetic. They should sittin' on this hill right here."

              Stu had to admit that he had a point. "You ain't shittin, boss," he said. "Keeping your lookouts inside the wall is a good way to get buttfucked. Maybe he ain't as smart as I thought. Maybe he just got lucky with my guys."

              "Maybe," Bracken said. "In any case, he's just making our job easier. It should be a pretty easy to take this town when the time comes."

              "Why don't we just do it now?" Stu asked. "We have a platoon here. Shouldn't be too hard to do."

              Bracken considered this for a few moments. "No," he finally said. "We're in no hurry. We stick with the plan. We'll watch them for a few days and see how they operate. Then we'll go back to Auburn and bring a whole company when its time to attack. That's how you win battles; with numerical superiority and superior planning. There's no sense rushing and taking casualties. Remember how we took Colfax? Not a single man hurt."

              "I suppose," Stu said, watching as Skip disappeared behind a house. "But the sooner that man is gone, the better for all of us. Remember, he's dangerous."

              Part 7

              Just across the road from the main gate of the Garden Hill subdivision was the hilly, wooded area where the community gathered most of its firewood. Many of the trees here had been knocked down by the high winds that had occurred the first few days after the impact. Every day a work crew of five or six people, mostly women but always with an armed man to guard them, spent a few hours hacking away at these trees with chainsaws and axes. Though the women had protested vehemently at first that such a thing was "man's work", they quickly warmed to the idea when it was realized that the average shift of a wood gatherer was only about three hours in length.

              About an hour after the meeting in the community center broke up, while Skip was marching from guard post to guard post to check on the state of his people, this day's crew was in full operation. A Dodge Ram pickup that had once belonged to Brenda's husband was parked with it's nose facing back towards the gate and chunks of pine were being loaded into the back of it, piece by piece after they were cut. There were five women today pulling the duty, all of them town women, and one man, who sat behind the truck and kept an eye on things. Jessica was also out there, a rare appearance since she made it a point to never venture outside the walls.