Enduring Armageddon (13 page)

“Sure thing man, I’m already leaving…but I’m taking these with me so you bastards don’t try to cheat,” he said holding up his cards.

“Why the hell would I cheat you, I’m already winning!” Nick countered at Jesse’s retreating form.

Before too long Jesse returned and Phil’s team began their steady slog northwards towards Justin and his men. We sat in silence watching as the reserve force slowly disappeared into the distance. “I bet there’s more people left in Springfield than we planned for,” Jesse spoke suddenly to break the silence.

“Why do you say that?” I asked him.

“Because it’s a freakin’ huge city! There’s no way they’re all gone,” Sam blurted out.

Jesse looked at her, obviously annoyed at the teenager’s constant chatter. “I don’t know man, just a feeling that I’ve got,” he said. “It
does
seem strange that except for a few people here and there, the entire city is abandoned, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, it does,” I admitted. True, the teams hadn’t run into too many people and a lot of bodies, but there was no way that the entire city wiped itself out. “Do you think they’re expecting us?” I asked.

“Probably. I mean, over a hundred people left the other day, including Jillian. She definitely hates us and would sell us out in an instant.”

I hadn’t thought about the people who’d left. In my mind, the only logical answer was to go south where the weather wouldn’t be so bad, but most people didn’t know anything about a nuclear winter. I only knew about the scientist’s hypothesis from the TV program I’d seen, so it would probably be natural for
a lot
of those people to move on to another settlement in the area, like Springfield.

“Should we pull back?” I asked. Even though I was in charge of this operation, Jesse had actually served in the military and been in a real combat unit in Iraq. He had the experience and the training that I didn’t have. I was only in charge because of a series of weird circumstances and the whim of a madman.

“I don’t know. We just started facing real opposition, but we should probably give it a little while for the situation to develop and then make a decision about retreating. I
do
know that if we went back to Virden now, then this whole thing would have been a colossal waste of fuel and the ammunition that we’ve already fired. And we both know how Allan feels about wasting resources,” Jesse said with a pointed look.

“Yeah, I know,” I muttered. I was stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place. If we pulled out without getting any supplies and left the defenders of Springfield intact, then I was done for. However, if we kept pushing forward and got almost everyone killed, then I was probably a goner as well. I hated that Allan put me in this position. Rebecca and I should be making our way southward right now.

“Alright,” I sighed. “Let’s see what Justin can do up there for now. If things get too hairy, we’ll pull back and make an alternate plan with the leaders who’ve been on the ground.”

“You know, we could move forward and assess the situation ourselves,” Jesse said.

I thought about it for a minute as I watched the snow fall softly against the city’s skyline. I wondered if Jesse was advising me as a soldier or as a thrill-seeker when he suggested that we move up. I could see the benefits of both sides of the equation. I could stay here and continue to supervise the fight or I could move up and see what the truth on the ground was. I chose to see what was happening at the front.

“Yeah, alright. Let’s drive the command truck into the city a ways, then we’ll get out and walk the rest of the way,” I said.

“Alright! You heard the man, Nick. Let’s move this thing up a couple of miles,” Jesse said excitedly as he slapped our driver on the shoulder. Sam gave me a thumbs up and placed her pistol on her lap.

Nick started up the SUV while I made a call over the walkie talkie to tell the truck drivers that Jesse and I were moving up but the semi trucks were to remain in place where we had them parked. I got a couple of acknowledgements on the radio, but not too many so I figured that most of the people in the other trucks were probably asleep.

We inched forward from the field until we felt our tires pull onto the hard pavement under the snow and we drove north slowly. We’d gone less than a quarter of a mile before we ran into Phil’s group struggling through the snow. We passed them slowly and I waved at Phil. He waved back and continued his own personal fight in the walk north towards the sounds of gunfire.

* * *

At first we were in a semi-residential area along the highway. There were businesses along the road itself, but neighborhoods peeked out from behind them. The going was fairly low stress because of the stand-off distance, but we quickly moved past the point where the divided highway ended and the city neighborhoods closed around the road. I began to get the distinct feeling that we were driving into a trap.

Maybe it was just the closeness of the dark, vacant houses that made me feel that way, or maybe it was the dead, naked bodies piled up alongside the road. Maybe it was the chatter on the radio from other teams saying that they were coming under more intense fire the closer that they got to downtown. The only thing that kept me from grabbing the radio and calling an all-out retreat was the knowledge that Allan would have me put to death for such a failure.

We continued to drive slowly forward, against my better judgment. When we arrived at the corner of Sixth and Grand I decided to stop so we could walk the rest of the way in to where Justin was taking fire. There were several burnt-out buildings with parking lots alongside the road so we pulled into one of them and bundled up for the cold afternoon. Before I got out I chambered a round into my rifle and said a quick prayer to the god who no longer cared about this world.

As soon as I opened the door, I could hear quite a bit of firing coming from the north and even a few ricochets bouncing off the hard surfaces around us. We were about six blocks from where Justin had called in his report earlier, but I hadn’t heard him say anything since our exchange when I let him know that I was sending Phil’s team forward to help him out. I ducked behind the SUV’s door and tried several times to reach him on the radio, but couldn’t get any response from the sadistic team leader.

I changed the radio channel a few times calling several other team leaders to the east and west of where we were now but no one had heard anything from Justin because they had their radios on their individual frequencies. Most of the teams were involved in minor firefights that pretty much kept them pinned down from the downtown area to the north as well. My internal radar began to pick up that something wasn’t right again. I tried to contact Justin a few more times on the radio, but still got nothing in return.

I waved for my little group to move north and we left the relative safety of the vehicle’s bulk. Luckily, the wind blowing through the narrow streets had made the snow much shallower in this part of town. We slogged through the snow as quickly as we could for the first couple of blocks, but slowed down as we came to where businesses began to occupy former houses and we could see the high-rise buildings that Justin mentioned off in the distance.

Less than a block to the north, a large brick building stretched from one side of the road to the other. A glass walkway used to connect the two halves of the structure, but it was nothing more than a shattered mass of jagged edges now. There were fresh blood smears on the snow leading in various directions from the pile of glass and concrete in the street where the walkway used to cross. I tried to peer down into the alleys on either side of the road where some of the blood trails led, but the late afternoon gloom was too dark for me to see anything.

“Hey!” someone whispered loudly from beside a blue two-story Victorian house that was situated next to the larger building. My small group whirled towards the voice with our weapons out, ready to defend ourselves.

“Fuck, stop it! I’m from Virden, get over here under cover,” the person hissed. We lowered our guns and trotted quickly to the side yard where the person was lying. He wore the red armband that identified him as being from Virden. More importantly, he wore a belt tightly cinched over his thigh to cut off the blood flow from his missing foot.

“What the hell happened?” I asked him with concern.

“They fucking blew the walkway when we walked under it,” he said as he jerked his thumb back in the direction of the building we’d noticed walking in. “All that glass came down right on top of us and fucked everyone up. A big piece came down and chopped off my foot.”

“Jesus, where’s everyone else?” Jesse asked.

“Fuck if I know, man. They started shooting at us as soon as they blew the walkway, picking off the survivors. A bunch of us moved to wherever we could go to be out of the line of sight from those buildings back there. Most of the guys that were hiding here with me took off about twenty or thirty minutes ago. I can’t really walk, so the bastards left me.”

“Where’s Justin?” I demanded. We should have known about this. The location was a brilliant area for a booby trap, but the voice in my head shouted at me that the entire city was probably rigged to catch invaders off guard. We needed to pull back and figure out what to do.

“I think he bit it, man. The last time I saw him, he was leading us through that tunnel and then the world exploded. He’s probably buried under a ton of glass,” the injured man said.

I motioned Nick and Sam over. “See what you can do for him,” I ordered. Nick had taken first aid in high school and was a volunteer firefighter before all this went down, so he had a pretty good idea of what to do in an amputation situation. Other than wrapping up the stump and hoping the guy didn’t die, I wasn’t sure what we could do for him though.

To Jesse I said, “We’re gonna move up, see what we can see.” He nodded and gave me the thumbs up. I could tell that the son of a bitch had a huge smile on his face underneath his mask. Of course, Allan’s stooge followed along with Jesse and me instead of helping out with the injured man.

We crept along slowly in a half-crouch until we came to the space between the buildings. On the left was a stairwell that was recessed into the wall so we sprinted as best we could across the street to the opening. There were several bodies lying amid the debris of the walkway and I keyed my handset microphone. The answering static told me that Justin’s walkie-talkie was somewhere under all this shit.

I leaned out a little from the stairwell and keyed it again. The sound was coming from only a few feet away. I lay down and crawled along the ground towards where I’d heard the static response. Glass mingled with the windblown snow to form a dangerously camouflaged surface and for the first time since the weather had turned cold I was truly thankful about the heavy clothing I had to wear instead of simply tolerant of it.

I pushed the talk button on my radio again and immediately to my right I heard Justin’s handheld. Then I saw the antenna sticking up from the snow. We couldn’t afford to let the defenders of the city get one of our radios or else they’d be able to hear everything we were doing so I reached out and pulled on the little piece of rubber sticking out from the back of the radio. It was wedged in the snow and debris, so I tugged a little harder and was rewarded by the radio coming free. Unfortunately Justin’s arm was attached to it. He must have been holding it when his arm was severed at the elbow.

I slowly pried the semi-stiff fingers from around the radio and tossed the appendage away. The radio went into my pocket and I crept forward a little more. Then I saw Justin. His mask was off and lay in the rubble beside him. His eyes were open, staring upwards towards the sky above and his mouth was slack. I hated the dude, but that was a pretty shitty way to go.

I crawled back to the stairwell and pulled out Justin’s radio. “Here you go,” I said as I handed Jesse the little walkie-talkie. “Justin’s dead. I need you to take his radio and start contacting the other teams. Let them know that the city is probably booby trapped.”

“Are you pulling out then?” Allan’s spy asked me. I didn’t even know the asshole’s name and I hated him for being a mole in my group.

“No. We keep pressing forward.”
Fuck you Allan!
I screamed in my head. “We haven’t found any useful food supplies or equipment caches and we have to bring something back with us besides bad news.”

“Alright,” was all Jesse said before he started switching channels on the radio and making calls to the teams on their individual radio networks. I leaned heavily against the side of the stairwell. My head hurt and I was so tired, maybe if I just closed my eyes for a moment then it would make things seem better…

I awoke to my shoulder being shaken roughly. “Get up, man!” Jessed yelled. “We gotta go!”

“Wha? Huh?” I mumbled as I came to. I looked around and realized that it was well into dusk and full nightfall was probably less than thirty minutes away. Jesse pulled on my jacket sleeve and I felt my weight shift as he began to drag me out of the stairwell.

“Hold on!” I whispered harshly. “I’m awake. What the fuck is going on?”

“Once it started getting dark, the fuckers came out of hiding all over the city. The radio was going crazy with all the chatter as everyone came up to the command frequency to talk and ask for reinforcements. I saw a couple of those dudes sneaking around, so I had to turn our radios off. Sam came up here and told me that she saw a couple of them behind us as well.”

The massive amounts of gunfire in the distance combined with Jesse’s words and the realization that Springfield really
was
a trap hit me fully. I was done with this place. I switched on my radio and turned the volume as low as it would go. “This is Chuck,” I whispered into the microphone. “Everyone fall back to the trucks. This place is nothing but a trap, we need to regroup at the trucks and figure out what we’re going to do.”

“That’s cute, Chuck,” a voice I recognized drifted out of the speaker. “Don’t worry about your trucks on the south side of town at the highway split, we’ve already confiscated those. You’re going to die and pay for what you’ve done to this town—and for past transgressions. I’ll hunt you down until the day that you die. Do you hear me?”