Enduring Armageddon (11 page)

I’d made a habit of keeping a few changes of clothes, heavy-duty twine, water purification tablets, flashlights, lighters, a first aid kit and as much food as I could fit into a couple of large backpacks that I’d picked up from one of our many raids. My thoughts were if anything bad ever happened, then we’d be able to grab them and go. Well, this was bad. A man had just been murdered by every man, woman and child in this town in some sort of sick wasteland gang initiation that was masqueraded as justice.

I tried to rationalize it as I stuffed more clothes around the handgun and boxes of ammunition that I’d concealed in my backpack. Maybe that was how the world we lived in now operated. Allan couldn’t afford to allow failures and unnecessary expenditures of our resources as the stronghold of Virden challenged for supremacy in the region. If Allan hadn’t done what he did to D’Andre, then people may have viewed him as weak and he’d lose his tenuous grip on his position of power. Virden was extremely small compared to Springfield, but Allan’s plan had been to let them kill each other off before we tried to move in. Our geographical location near Springfield, but sandwiched between the radioactive hulks of St. Louis and Chicago meant that there would have to be a showdown between the two communities soon and we needed a strong, ruthless leader to guide us through the fights ahead.

I tried to rationalize it, but I couldn’t. I understood his decision to remove D’Andre from a leadership position, but I couldn’t abide the murder. I hated that Allan had forced me to take part in the travesty at the square. I hated Allan because he’d made innocent people like Rebecca and the town’s children take part in the ritualistic killing. This town was rapidly becoming one of the places that I’d warned Becca we needed to avoid as we moved further south.

After a few minutes of double-checking the kitchen cupboard and bedroom dressers for useful items I went in to get Rebecca out of the tub and bundled into her traveling clothes. Her posture spoke volumes about the mental strain she was under. She sat perfectly still with her back hunched over so far that the tips of her nipples were resting in the water and she stared straight ahead at the drain lever. I was heartbroken at the thought of the psychological damage that had been done to her.

I slowly walked over to her so that I wouldn’t scare her and placed my hand on her shoulder. Her skin was cold to the touch and she was covered in goose bumps. “What the hell?” I muttered as I let my hand slip down to test the water temperature. It was as cold as ice.

“Jesus, Rebecca!” I said a little louder than I meant to and depressed the drain lever to flush the water from around her body. She flinched away at my outburst but then came back to herself and focused her eyes on me.

“Are we ready to go?” she asked with a slight shiver as her body tried to warm itself.

“Yeah, babe, we are,” I said and helped her to her feet. I held her hand when she stepped out of the tub and wrapped a towel around her. “Are you alright? I mean, about what happened?” I was reaching here. I could talk to clients all day long about their family, recreational habits, goals and money questions, but I was no good at the touchy-feely stuff.

“I’m alright. I think I’m just really weirded out by everything, you know? I mean, we’ve been really lucky. We haven’t seen anything like this and we’ve been sheltered from the reality of our situation,” she said.

I shook my head in agreement, but inwardly I thought that for me, personally, that statement couldn’t have been further from the truth. I’d killed men and women during our gathering missions. I’d killed more people contaminated with the radiation sickness than I could ever count, including one with my bare hands. I’ve been punched, kicked, and mentally abused during all of the trips that I’d taken to further Allan’s goal of being the most prosperous community in what was left of southern Illinois. I’d watched a diseased creature batter itself to death on a security gate as it tried to get to me and kill me. I’d seen my share of depravity so far. What Rebecca meant was that
she’d
been sheltered from the worst of things.

Outwardly I told her that she was right, that things had been slowly deteriorating over the last month, but that wasn’t true. Almost from the moment that the bombs fell and our government ceased to function, people had begun to change. It was absolutely insane how quickly society had broken down. Thousands of years of evolution took over and it rapidly devolved into kill or be killed. I hoped that our society wasn’t broken beyond repair.

I rubbed her still-cold skin with the towel that I’d wrapped around her and hugged her close. Finally, her shell shock wore off and she was able to cry. She sobbed into my shoulder for several minutes until the pain and disgust was out of her system. She finally pulled away and looked me in the eyes. “I’m ready to leave this place. It’s evil and we need to go,” she said as she set her jaw in determination.

“Okay. We just need to get you dried off and dressed. Then we can go over the place one more time. I’m pretty sure that I got everything, but I want you to double-check and make sure that we’re not leaving anything that we’ll need and then we can go,” I said as I ran my fingers through her wet hair.

“Sure, give me a few minutes to dry my hair.” She smiled at me and hugged me again. “I’m sorry about freaking out like that. It’s just that…never mind. I don’t want to think about it anymore. Let’s just get away from here.”

We were ready to go in less than twenty minutes from the time we’d finished talking. Rebecca had on the previous tenant’s ski clothing, which was extremely warm, but it was bright blue. We remedied it by giving her a long grey overcoat. It would restrict her movement, but she’d stay warm and be able to blend into the ashy-colored snow easier. I wore my standard camouflaged hunting coveralls that I wore on missions and the zero-degree rated hiking boots that I’d also picked up during my trip to the camping supply store.

Even though I’d asserted that we’d have no problems leaving, we chose to skirt the town’s main roads that had been cleared by work crews and made our way down a secondary street towards the gate. The walk was harder because the snow lay thick and wet, but others had forged a rough path sometime recently, so it wasn’t as hard as it could have been.
Or as difficult as our journey outside the walls would be
, I reminded myself.

The gate had several people lined up to exit, most wearing backpacks like ours. As we edged our way closer, we heard several people talking about the murder. It seemed like we weren’t the only ones who were fed up with Virden and were willing to risk life outside of the town’s walls.

The guards checked everyone closely, but they didn’t stop them from leaving. There was only one more family ahead of us when disaster struck. The family consisted of a man and a woman who held two children of indeterminate age closely to her. They had a large wagon loaded with food and what appeared to be toiletries. The guards began to give them a hard time about the food and decided to confiscate it since it belonged to the town.

“Hey, that’s my food!” the man bellowed behind his surgical mask. “That food was in our pantry, not from the community supply. I’ve lived here for twenty years! You people come in here and think you can run things, this is bullshit! We’re leaving with our food.”

“I’m sorry, sir. We have orders to keep people from taking too much of the town’s supply,” one of the gate guards said. I knew the guy a little bit from all the coming and going that the gathering squad does and he seems like a nice enough kind of guy. “Allan is gracious enough to allow you to take enough food and water to last your family for a week or so, but anything else is community property and should stay with the community.”

“Fuck you! This is my property. I bought it. Your people didn’t bring it in here. I’m leaving with my property. All of it,” the man said. I thought I recognized him from the food lines, but I couldn’t be sure. He tried to push his way forward and was shoved backwards hard enough to cause him to lose his footing.

He cried out as he fell and grasped at his wife’s coat to keep from falling. As he did so, he inadvertently pulled it off of her. We all gasped and jumped back as we realized that she had a sawed-off shotgun under the coat. She leveled it at the guard who’d pushed her husband and fired a blast directly into his stomach. At this close of a range he was knocked backwards four feet by the pressure. She pumped the handle and fired into the back of a second guard who’d turned to run.

Rebecca and I dove behind the rear bumper of a car that was sitting near the wall. I heard the shotgun pump another round into the chamber but the woman didn’t fire the third round. A warm, gritty substance splashed across our clothing before we even realized what had happened. I blanched when I saw little flecks of bone and brain matter stuck to Becca’s coat and I pulled her down deeper into the snow behind the vehicle.

The man began to scream obscenities towards everyone in town and a large-caliber handgun began to fire wildly in all directions. A round pinged off of the car before the firing stopped suddenly. I pressed myself as flat into the snow as possible and whispered to Rebecca, “Sniper. On the wall. Stay down.”

We lay in the snow for several minutes before one of the guards tapped us on the shoulder and said we could get up. The scene that greeted us was of sheer madness. The man and woman had both been shot in the head, which would explain why they’d suddenly stopped firing. Blood was sprayed out from each of their bodies back towards the car where we’d been hiding which meant the sniper was somewhere in front of us. A large section of the snow was trampled down by men from the guard crews who’d dragged away the bodies of the two dead guards.

The strangest part about the entire scene was the children. They stood silently looking around with wide eyes. Each of them was handcuffed to a chain leading to the woman. I began to piece it together that these children weren’t the offspring of this couple and the man really had intended to leave town with
all
of his property. Holy fuck, we’d regressed centuries in a little over four months.

The guard who’d told us that everything was clear looked us over and asked if we were taking any of the community’s property when we left the town.

“No, I see how that ends,” I said as I pointed towards the couple’s remains.

“Hmpf,” he snorted. “Slavers. We’ve heard about them, but this was our first run-in with them. I’m sure we’ll find the parents of these two with their throats slit in some alley somewhere,” he said as he pointed at the children, whom I could now see were a boy and girl of about twelve.

“Wait, this is happening a lot out there?” Rebecca asked as she pointed towards the gate.

“Oh yeah, all the time, especially kids. They torture and murder the parents, then take the kids for themselves or to trade them,” the guard said as if it were common knowledge. “What, second-guessing your decision to leave? Once you go, Allan won’t see it in his heart to let you back in.”

“I don’t know about that,” a familiar voice said from behind me. I turned in time to see Allan striding the last few feet from the main street to the gate area. “It depends on what a person can offer to Virden. These folks may be allowed back in one day, if they survive.”

“Yes, sir. I was just trying to warn them that once they leave, it’s mostly permanent…sir,” the guard said.

“No problem, what’s your name, son?”

“Randy, sir.”

“Don’t worry about it Randy. We’ll take everyone on a case-by-case basis. How many people have chosen to leave?” Allan asked.

“I was in the warm-up tent, sir. Peter and Josef were on the gate detail,” Randy said as he gestured towards the dead gate guards over near the wall. “But I’m pretty sure we’ve had about sixty people leave so far.”

“Alright, let these people here go,” Allan said. Then he raised his hand and asked, “Unless you no longer want to go? You’ve seen just a small bit of the violence outside of these walls…”

“Holy shit, boss!” My stomach sank. Even though it was distorted by his mask, I recognized Justin’s voice. “It’s Chuck and his wife!”

Allan did a physical double-take as reevaluated me. “Chuck Broussard, is that you?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I replied as I tried to avoid looking him in the eyes.

“Terrible business with what happened to that traitor, but it had to be done, Chuck. Are you planning on leaving us?”

“Yes sir. We don’t agree with the way Virden is headed,” I said as I finally looked him in the eyes.

“You don’t agree?” He let out a hard laugh. “You don’t agree with an ordered society with rules and punishments for people who violate their responsibilities to that society? Chuck, outside of these precious walls there is chaos. You’ve seen it. You’ve bathed in the blood of our enemies and reveled in it…but has your woman? Has she seen the horrors outside these walls?”

“What is this, the Middle Ages? I’m not his ‘woman’, I’m his wife. Where do you get off thinking that you can call me…” she was cut off by a lightning-quick backhand from Justin.

“Don’t you ever speak to him that way!” he yelled.

I lunged at the slimy bastard but was grabbed by someone from behind. “Whoa. Stop it. Everyone calm down!” Allan said as he held up his hands in a placating gesture. “I speak of a society that we can be proud of and this is how you act? Are we no better than the animals outside of these walls?”

“Rebecca and I are. But as long as you surround yourself with people like him, then you might as well be one of the scavengers out there,” I growled.

“Now, Chuck, that’s taking it a little far. Justin is a necessary part of our life here in the formerly great state of Illinois. He serves a purpose, just as you do.”

“Did, Allan. We’re done. We’re leaving Virden.”

“Leaving? Where do you think you’d go?”

“West,” I lied. “To Kansas. We have family that owns a farm out there. We were on our way when we stumbled upon Virden. It’s time for us to continue on.”

“Family man. I respect that, Chuck,” Allan replied. “I respect it, but I can’t help but feel that you’re abandoning Virden because of what happened today at the square. It had to be done.”