Pahnyakin Rising (18 page)

She pointed at Brady.  “Let’s go to the run-supply house.  And you,” she said to Zane, “need to get AJ and Phil.  We’ll wait for you by the north gate with everything we need.”

Dresden and Brady walked through the dark streets until patches of white light from the north gate floodlights consumed the night.  Jamie and Anne waved at Brady and whispered amongst themselves. 

“Why are you taking her in there?” Anne called.  Her blonde hair was in a tangled bun atop her head and her chubby cheeks were red from the coldness.

Brady was two steps from the run-supply’s front door. 

“We’re bringing two back tonight.” He pointed to the gate.  “And we’re coming right back through there.”

Her green eyes glimmered. 

“You’re back for real, aren’t you?” she grinned to Dresden with a lisp that turned all her r’s to w’s. 

“You’re not mad?” asked Dresden in shock.  “Maybe I need to stop coming out during the day.”

She smiled. “Shepherd is destroying this place.  And none of us want to die.  You have more friends here than you think.”

“It hasn’t seemed like it so far,” the teenager frowned.

“Shepherd would have us all thrown to the Rising if he knew what we were doing right now,” Jamie added.  She placed her gun against the closed gate and stepped away. 

The older woman walked with a limp and seemed pained with each step she took.  She noticed Dresden staring at her left leg and stopped.  Jamie lifted her khaki pant leg to her knee, exposing a wobbly circle of red stitches. 

“Happened when the towers went down.  Charlie said I’m lucky to even
have
a leg.”

“Sorry,” Dresden mumbled, embarrassed to even have noticed.

“I told him,” she said in a deep, manly tone, “that I’m not coming off detail.”  She shook her head and her short, curly brown hair wriggled.  “Nope, not after what those things did to me.  Charlie said I’m gonna need to pray that it doesn’t get infected.  If I go down, by god, I’m taking a few more of those bastards down before I go.”

She snapped at Dresden and the girl jumped.  “You can bet on it, you can.”

Dresden remained silent and turned to stare at the run-supply building.  The one-story square house used to belong to Brett Cochran.  She would always remember him as a starry-eyed senior when she was a freshman.  The home’s white-siding was charred and falling off.  All of the windows had been boarded up with thin slivers of mismatched plywood. 

There were six more blocks of houses behind the run-supply home.  Dresden could only see the sides of the homes that lined up along the lighted fence line.

“What’re you gonna do with them?” Anne asked. 

“She’s gonna fight them,” Brady answered excitedly.  “In the morning.”

Dresden sighed and ascended the stairs to the home.  She jiggled the round copper door handle but it would not turn.

“Here,” Anne scrambled to the entrance.  “I’ll unlock it for you.”

She pulled a black-rope necklace from around her stubby neck and inserted her silver key in the lock and twisted it to the left.  Anne pushed the door open and the motion-detection lights to the open living room popped on.  The 20-something-year-old woman grunted as she pulled the key from the lock.

“Take my key,” she insisted, extending the necklace to Dresden.  “You’re gonna use it a lot more than I do, anyway.”

Dresden reached behind her back and blindly grabbed for the key.  She could not take her eyes off the home’s interior. 

The living room was lined with long pine shelves held to the walls with mismatched brackets and brass screws.  Most of the shelves were overloaded with items vital for preservation.  The top shelf was overflowing with batteries.  Canteens and water bottles were piled on top of one another under the boarded-up window on the far side of the room.  To Dresden’s left was a dining room filled with toilet paper, paper towels, and plastic-wrapped containers of baby wipes.  Through the open arch in the dining room she could see the kitchen.  Its counters were covered in canned food and bottled water.  The items in the run-supply warehouse were meticulously organized by function.  Two oversized cardboard boxes to the right of where Dresden was standing held hundreds of flashlights. 

The teenager walked slowly through the house and opened the first white wooden door on her right.  It had been Brett’s room, Dresden was sure.  Its blue walls were still covered with torn Indianapolis Colts posters. 

There was no bed in the room or any other trace that anyone had lived in the home.  Instead, someone had redesigned the room as a walk-in closet.  Clothing was separated by gender and size and stacked in neatly folded piles around the room’s walls.  The room’s traditional closet was so full of shoes that the folding door would not shut.  Dresden tripped over a tactical gear suit strewn on the floor.

“That was Tracey’s,” Anne commented in a low whisper.  “I’m really gonna miss her.  I think she was the best sniper I’ve ever seen.”

“Mm-hmm,” Dresden replied distractedly.

She walked out of the clothing room and walked to the door across the narrow hall.  Dresden opened the door and set sight upon four walls of hanging weapons.  Boxes of ammunition were stacked in the center of the room and along the walls, piled under automatic rifles hanging by straps from thick nails and rusty screws.  There was a pool of knives next to the door on the stained-gray carpet.

“Brady,” she called to the front of the house.  “Come here and load up one of these backpacks with some of this stuff.  I want everyone to have at least two guns and a few knives.  Grab lights for everyone.  If we need to light up a field like a Christmas tree, you’d better make sure we’re ready for that.”

She left the door to the room wide open as she continued down the hall to the last bedroom.  She passed the home’s one bathroom but didn’t stop. 

The last bedroom had thick-plated chain strewn about on one side and extra towers of canned vegetables and fruits on the other.  If not for being so nervous and queasy, she would devour the contents of a few cans of green beans.  She had two cans of outdated Vienna sausages at Dodge’s and suspected she only felt full from eating them because her appetite was suppressed from her brain being in shock.  

“Come in here when you’re done.  You’re going to find some chain that will get the job done right,” she said loudly. 

“’Kay,” he replied eagerly.

Dresden turned around and walked back to the front of the house.  She wiped her sweaty palms on the thighs of her pants and waited impatiently by the front door for Zane and his crew.  Though she had never done this before, she knew it didn’t feel right without Dodge there, but she couldn’t involve him in something so dangerous.  She had no choice but to trust the people around her, despite not knowing them one bit.  She hoped they could be as half as strong as Dodge, half as protective, even half as willing to rally around her to make sure she succeeded. 

The teenager, while standing with her back against the front entrance hall, could understand why she and Dodge married.  He was hard enough on her to push her to succeed, but he was soft enough not to let her do it alone, even when he swore he would not become involved in her wild schemes.  And she was a born-fighter, despite her past reservations. 

She was not made to die here, not without a fight. 

Dresden closed her eyes and prayed, pleaded with the universe, with karma, with every one of the gods she’d ever heard mentioned for her plan to go off without a hitch.  She couldn’t help but to wonder if she was praying to the same force who’d brought her to this time in the first place. 

What a cruel joke that would be.

-19-

AJ and Phil, as Dresden would soon discover, were brothers from Chicago.  The two were attending their mother’s funeral service when the Pahnyakins took out Chicago’s surrounding areas by firing thermobaric missiles from their ships and following up by sending ground troops.  Instead of running away from the sites of the attacks, the two brothers ventured to Downers Grove and then to Wheaton.  They found few survivors, but those they did find joined the two and moved south when a dying semi-driver named Margie said she picked up a radio announcement from another big-rig driver traveling through the Indiana/Kentucky border.  That big-rig driver said there was a camp of thousands of survivors.  Upon this rumor, the men and 15 others traveled in a caravan of cars and trucks that had been abandoned. It took the group eight days to travel, and each day they were faced with ambushes and airstrikes from Pahnyakin forces.  When the group reached Northfield, Kentucky, a suburb of Louisville, their numbers had dropped from 17 to five.

Northfield had been destroyed.  The group passed mangled cars wrapped around teetering trees and smoldering businesses with caved-in green and brown roofs.  Northfield’s dead were left bloodied, bruised, and in pieces in streets or on lawns.   

There were no survivors to be found.

Rather than continue south, the group decided to turn back and instead seek out survivors in Indianapolis.  By the time the group stumbled upon Easton, the group of five was a group of three. 

Phil, the eldest brother, remained uncommunicative as 24-year-od AJ told their story.  Dresden led her own group of five and never looked back at the redheaded brothers with Brillo-pad buzz cuts.

They walked for what Dresden thought was an hour and a half, but Phil swore it had been more likely that the two-mile trek lasted 40 minutes, as if it mattered.  There wasn’t much destruction to be seen north of Easton because there was never anything there.  The five encountered a few rusted trucks with holes eroded in hoods and driver’s side doors.  Dresden rubbed her face with her left hand and shined the beam of her flashlight from side to side to illuminate the way.  She paid special attention to her breathing as to not pant or overexert her heart.  The last thing she needed was the inability to hear what was going on around her because her heart was drumming in her eardrums. 

The more the group walked, the quieter they became.  Dresden could feel the fear in the air, feel the shivers of the boys behind her that hid in the bodies of men. 

She almost felt like giving up.  What would be the shame of throwing in the towel besides a death she began to feel was the answer to all her problems?

To her left, Dresden heard the crunch of dry leaves.  She stopped in the middle of a step and threw her left hand behind her with her palm facing the men. 

“What?”  Brady asked. 

Dresden flicked her wrist in the direction of the sound.  She squinted to better detect movement in a thick patch of trees fifty feet ahead but could only view graying bark.

“Why are we stopping?” he asked more insistently. 

Dresden motioned for the five to continue.  “I thought I heard something.”

She only took four steps forward before she heard the crunch again.  Evidently, the rest of her group heard it, too.  Simultaneously, the four men behind her shined their aluminum-plated flashlights at the brush.  Dresden’s abdomen tightened and the hairs on the back of her neck stood at attention.  Acting on intuition alone, the girl shined her light to her right.

“There’s one in the trees,” Zane whispered.  “Are you ready?”

Dresden straightened her back and inhaled deeply.  It saw her as she saw it, and the two stared each other down as the girl slowly crossed her left hand over her right to take the flashlight.  Without breaking her glare on the green creature 10 yards ahead, she inched her right hand to her weighted pocket and withdrew Dodge’s knife. 

“Did you hear me?” Zane urgently asked.  “There’s one in the trees.  I think it’s a Leader.”

“Split up.  Now,” Dresden ordered.  “It won’t be hard to take them down.  Just assert yourself and they’ll cower.”

“They?” Brady asked.  “Crap.  There’s another one in front of Dresden.”

Phil inched backwards until he was standing next to the teenager. 

“Why did you say they’ll cower?”

“Uh, because they do,” Dresden replied, popping her eyes.

The man’s lips spread and he appeared to be dumbfounded by her words.  He spoke under his breath as to not panic the rest of the party.  “You weren’t out here for a year, were you?”

Chains rattled as Brady pulled a section from his backpack.  He prodded at Dresden’s back.  She grabbed behind her with her right hand and the knife plummeted to the ground. 

“I can explain later, but right now I need your help,” she hissed.

“Who are you?” he demanded lowly.  “Are they right?  Are you one of them now?”

The Imperator directly ahead of her emitted a series of clicks to the other.

“You need to tell me,” Phil threatened.

“Everyone shut up right now,” Dresden ordered. 

She sidestepped to her right until her hip bumped against Phil.  In her mind, she stringed coded letters together and prayed she was deciphering the clicks accurately.