The day after: An apocalyptic morning (10 page)

              Christine, noting Skip's sudden halt in movement, looked over her shoulder to see what he was looking at. She too froze in place, so surprised that it took her a few moments to realize that her breasts were exposed to Jack's eyes. When she did realize this she slowly reached down and pulled the sleeping bag tighter against her chest.

              How long did the moment last? Skip was not sure. It seemed an eternity that the three of them all stared at each other. Skip tried to read Jack's face and found it impossible. There was no expression to be read. It was as if he was looking at a baseball card or a pinecone.

              "Morning," Jack finally said, his tone strangely normal.

              "Uh... good morning," Skip answered slowly. Christine said nothing.

              "Did you guys sleep good?" he said next. "I know I did. I think I'm starting to get used to sleeping on rocks."

              "Really?" Skip asked, feeling a little like he was in the Twilight Zone. What was happening here? Wasn't Jack upset?

              "Yep," he said, nodding. "Would you guys mind turning around so I can get dressed? I gotta pee."

              "Uh... sure," replied Skip.

              "Yeah... okay," echoed Christine. Both of them dutifully rolled over to the other side, hastily moving as far apart as they could in the process. Skip had a sudden worry that this was how Jack was going to kill him; by having him turn his back to him. He listened for the clacking of a gun being picked up. It didn't come, only the sound of Jack's clothes jingling.

              "Man," Jack told them as he dressed, "I really hate putting these wet clothes on in the morning. Talk about cold."

              Neither Skip nor Christine had any sort of answer to offer him. It took him the better part of five minutes to get fully dressed.

              "Okay, I'm done," he said.

              They both turned to look at him again. He was carefully threading his belt through the pistol holster, positioning it neatly on his right hip at exactly the angle that Skip always did. He gave it a pat and then picked up his rifle. "I'll set out the cans from dinner last night so they can fill," he said as he wormed his way out the side. "We're starting to get low on water in the canteens again."

              "Uh... sure. Good idea," Skip told him, staring after him as he disappeared in the rain. He then turned to Christine. "Did that just happen?"

              "That was kind of weird, wasn't it?" she agreed. "I mean, we were totally busted. There's no way he didn't see us."

              "It was like he didn't even care," Skip said, shaking his head in wonder.

              Christine shrugged a little. "Well," she suggested, after a moment's thought on the Micker, "maybe he doesn't."

              "What?"

              "Well, think about it. Why should he care? I'm his older sister, not his girlfriend or his daughter or anything. My dad or my mom probably wouldn't have liked finding us very much, but Jack is younger than I am."

              Skip rubbed his temples a little, massaging at a tension headache. "Too much to think about right now," he mumbled, sitting up and grabbing for his own clothes.

              "Skip," Christine said softly, putting her hand on his bare shoulder.

              He looked over at her, knowing what she was going to say, desperately wanting to avoid it.

              "What about us?" she asked. "Don't you think we should talk about it?"

              "There's nothing to talk about," he said firmly. "I shouldn't have done that. I took advantage of you last night and it was wrong."

              "I don't feel like you took advantage of me," she said. "I wanted it as much as you did."

              "That's beside the point."

              "No it's not!" she insisted. "Don't you like me, Skip?"

              "Yes, Christine," he sighed. "I like you a lot. I like you too much. You're a very beautiful, very smart girl and I am very attracted to you. That's what the problem is. You're too young to be having sex with a thirty-five year old man."

              "Says who?" she asked him.

              "Says me! What I did goes against everything I believe in."

              "Everything you believe in is gone now," she said quietly. "You told us that yourself. It's a completely different world now with completely different rules. We could die at any time. Isn't it more likely that we're going to be dead in a month than that we're still alive?"

              " Christine," he said, "I hardly think..."

              "Isn't it?" she interrupted forcefully.

              "Yes," he admitted. "I suppose it is."

              "Then why shouldn't we enjoy a little affection while we're still alive?" she asked him. "Who is it harming? It's not harming me. No one is going to come and put you in jail for it. Why shouldn't we do it?"

              "Why shouldn't we go and kill people who have food if we need it?" he countered. "Why shouldn't I have raped you at gunpoint the other day instead of protecting you? We can't just go changing our morality because there's no one to enforce it anymore. Don't you see that? That's what those bikers are doing. They are what happens when people just start doing whatever they feel like doing."

              "You're not like those bikers Skip," she told him, almost angrily. "You're nothing like them. And having sex with me when I wanted it and you wanted it is not the same as raping someone and killing their parents. Can't you see that?"

              "It's not the same," he said, "but it's a step in that direction. Don't you see?"

              She had no answer for him. Before they could continue the discussion any further, they heard the sound of Jack returning. "Why don't you turn around so I can get dressed?" he asked. "I want to try and put some miles behind us today."

              With a disappointed look she rolled over to the other side, turning her back to him.

              The town of Foresthill had once occupied about two square miles of real estate alongside of a simple two-lane road that ran from Auburn up into the high Sierra. It had once had a thriving population of six hundred, a mix of blue-collar types that worked in the nearby lumber mill and wealthy yuppies who commuted sixty miles to Sacramento to work. But that had been before the comet. Now, three quarters of the business section and half of the old residential section had been washed away by mudslides moving down the mountain. After wiping out the main part of Foresthill the mud had continued downward, eventually burying the Todd Valley section - where the majority of the yuppies had lived in tract houses on subdivided land - more than thirty feet deep. Now all that was left were a few crumbling old farmhouses, a bait shop, a useless gas station, and a church. The population had been reduced to a mere 83 people who were taking shelter in the church and living off of the canned foods that they had managed to scavenge together.

              Most of these survivors were women and very small children. Since the comet had struck during the late morning hours on a workday, the majority of the men had been at work and the majority of the school-age kids had been in school. Those that had been at jobs in Sacramento had suffered the fate that everyone else in the valley had. Those that had been at the mill, which was virtually the only employer in town, had been trapped in the building when it had collapsed in the earthquake and then buried for all time when the first of the mudslides had swept through an hour later. Those that had been in school had been thirty miles away in Auburn, since Foresthill did not have a school of its own, and their fates were unknown.

              Still, a few men were in the group. Some had taken the day off on that fateful morning. A few had worked somewhere in town that hadn't been touched; such as the gas station or the bait shop. The pastor of the church was among them, his place of employment spared; miraculously he liked to think. And of course there was more than one that had been simply "between jobs", as they would have put it. In all, of the 83 surviving residents of Foresthill, there were 49 women, 20 young children, and 14 men.

              That was before the convicts came to town.

              They were twenty-seven strong, including six women, and they had been camped on the outskirts of the town for two days, performing a careful reconnaissance of the area through binoculars and rifles scopes that had been taken from the El Dorado Sheriff's Department. They had noted that everyone in Foresthill seemed to be staying in the church, a sturdy wooden building near the center of the remaining township. The security measures that the townspeople employed were a joke but the leader of the convicts, a man named Stuart Covington, who had, once upon a long time ago, been a United States Marine Corps infantryman, thought it best to be sure of what they were dealing with before they moved in. It was discovered that the Foresthill residents posted guards armed with rifles and pistols on the outside of the church - always men - but that they did not send out patrols of the surrounding area. Nor did they have anybody posted in a high place to keep an eye out on the approaches. It was a rare event indeed for anyone to leave the church at all.

              "What do you think Stu?" asked Mark Wisington, Stu's former cellmate in the EDCCC and his unofficial second in command of the motley group.

              Stu, who was staring at the church building through binoculars, answered without taking them from his eyes. "It should be pretty easy," he said. "Take down the guards out front and pin the rest of them inside. I wanna capture the women if we can get them to come out peacefully, but if they won't, we'll have to shoot some of those tear gas rounds in."

              "If we play it right," Mark opined, "they'll come out."

              "Exactly." He lowered the binoculars and edged backwards a little. "We'll move on them in one hour. You take half of the group around the back, I'll take the other half from here. My group should be able to close to within fifty yards or so before we're spotted if we use that gas station building for cover. You'll be able to get even closer if you use the trees. Keep low and keep your guys quiet."

              "What about our bitches?"

              "We'll have Turbo hang back and keep an eye on them. They won't be any trouble."

              Mark nodded, putting his own set of glasses to his eyes and taking a quick look. The guard out front was about forty years old. He was dressed in a black rain slicker and was smoking a cigarette. He had an old bolt-action rifle slung over his back. He was not even walking around. He was seated in a damn chair. "I hope they still have some of those cigarettes when we take them," Mark said wistfully.

              "Yeah," Stu agreed. "The one fuckin thing we didn't think to grab when we blew town."

              "Still no M-16s spotted with the guards?"

              "Nope. Just those old hunting rifles. I don't think they even have that many of those. Some fuckin frontier town this turned out to be. It would seem that if our friend is still on the loose somewhere, he isn't here. I never thought he would be once I saw their security. A man smart enough to take out four of our guys and walk away without a scratch would be a little smarter than this."

              "I hope we find him someday," Mark said, lowering his glasses again. "I really hope we do. I got a little payback I'd like to give him for Joker."

              "Be careful what you wish for," Stu told him. "You just might get it. But for what its worth, I hope we find him too. He's dangerous. A man like that will be able to organize others. Organization is our enemy."

              "It's a small world now. We'll find him eventually. And when we do, I wanna kill him slow."

              Stu said nothing in reply to this. He had his own thoughts and feelings on the subject of their friend, the man who had ambushed four of their number while they'd been making a raid and had deprived them of both weapons and needed supplies. He did not hate the man. He feared and respected him. If he ever had the chance he would take him out as quickly as possible from as far away as possible.

              "I'm gonna gather up my group and start filling them in on the plan," Mark said after a moment. "We'll be ready to move when you give the word."

              "Right," Stu answered. "We're gonna party hard tonight."

              Right on schedule, the two groups, divided into ten apiece, made their move. Most of them carried M-16s - they had scored sixteen of the weapons from the EDCCC originally but had lost three to their friend - and those that didn't carried scoped rifles or shotguns. They managed to box in the church building and close with it before the guards in the front and back spotted them. When they were spotted, the reaction by the guards was simply to stand and stare. No alarm was raised, no warning shots were offered. This sealed the fate of the townspeople.

              Stu took the honor of firing the first shot. He sighted on the front guard from forty yards and squeezed off a single round, striking him in the chest. The guard crumpled to the ground and Stu waved his men forward. From the back of the building Mark, who was much closer to his guard, took him out with a pistol shot to the head. This group did not have to move forward. They were already optimally positioned to cover the rear.