The day after: An apocalyptic morning (121 page)

              "Turning left to 270 again," Skip said.

              They flew parallel to the roadway for another five miles, Jack constantly scanning back and forth, searching for the telltale glow of body heat. He saw nothing. Once inside that five-mile zone Skip turned back to the north, not going any closer to Auburn. They were only about four miles east of the eastern guard positions and they figured that the Auburn force, had it left that day, would already be well past this point no Micker how slowly they'd marched. They crossed the freeway and made a check around the base of the large hill that had collapsed over the freeway, causing the mudfall. This check was just in case the Auburnites had elected to bypass to the north instead of the easier route to the south. They hadn't. This route was just as empty as the southern route.

              "No armies out there tonight," Jack said gratefully once they'd come back to their original position.

              "I guess Anna and Jean's escape really did throw their schedule off," Skip said, picking up his airspeed a little. "They're now three days behind."

              "Maybe they won't come at all," Jack said with a shrug.

              "They'll come," Skip said. "That's the thing about people like that. Once they decide to do something like that, they follow through."

              "I can always hope, can't I?"

              "That's true. You can always do that. Why don't we do a little more target practice on the way back?"

              "You bet," Jack replied with a grin. He liked playing with his new toy that Steve had installed for him.

              "Let me know when you find a target and we'll do some runs on it."

              It took less than five minutes before Jack spotted an abandoned car on the side of the interstate below. "Okay," he said, "I've got a car about a mile ahead. Let's set up."

              "You're the boss," Skip told him, pulling into a hover.

              While they held in place, Jack opened up a compartment and pulled out a banana clip. Inside of this clip were thirty rounds of 5.56 millimeter bullets, every third one of which was a tracer. Between their two seats, sticking half in and half out of a hole that Steve had cut in the chassis of the helicopter, was an automatic M-16 rifle, mounted upside down on the telescope tripod mount so it could spin back and forth, up and down. Using the scant ambient light from the cockpit instruments, Jack put the magazine into the weapon and jacked the first round into the chamber. He flipped off the safety and made sure that the weapon was set on full automatic fire.

              "Locked and loaded," he reported, swinging the weapon back and forth and then making a small adjustment to the mounting tension. He kept his finger well clear of the trigger for the time being.

              "Okay," Skip said, taking another deep breath. "Bring me in."

              What they were practicing was a very dangerous tactic but one they needed to perfect. Jack, as the gunner and as the eyes of the helicopter, was basically in charge of the machine. Skip's hands and feet controlled the motions but, since he was effectively blind, Jack's voice controlled Skip's hands and feet.

              "Drop down," Jack said, "and we'll circle around to the left to get into position. There's a ridge just to the north of the target that rises about sixty feet over the roadway. Stay above 500 AGL and you'll be well clear of it and the higher ridge to the northwest of it."

              "Copy," Skip said, reducing altitude much faster than he really felt comfortable with but doing it anyway. He watched the radar altimeter - which gave a readout of his altitude above the ground as opposed to above sea level - as he dropped. He pulled up and back into a hover when it reached 550 feet.

              "Okay," Jack told him, watching his target with one eye and the ridgeline with the other. Using short, concise commands he guided Skip around in a large circle and back towards the highway until they were about half a mile away from the car and heading right at it.

              "How we doing?" Skip asked after a long silence.

              "Right on track," Jack said. "Target area is at twelve o'clock, half a mile away. We're ready to make the firing run. After the run, come off target ninety degrees to the left and you'll be clear of obstacles."

              "Got it," Skip told him, putting on the speed.

              Jack let his finger inch onto the trigger of the weapon as his eyes remained glued to the FLIR. He made a few adjustments to the rifle's attitude until he thought it was pointed approximately at the car, which was growing bigger and bigger on the display. "Looking good," he said almost absently. "Looking good. Almost in range. Slow up a bit."

              "Slowing to twenty knots," Skip told him.

              "In range," Jack said. "Opening fire." He squeezed the trigger and the gun began to buck as it sprayed a stream of bullets from the barrel. The sound of the gunshots were muted, both because of the headsets they wore and because the barrel was outside of the vehicle. On the display Jack saw the white streaks of the tracers arcing outward. They were impacting in front of and to the left of the car. Without releasing the trigger, he adjusted the angle of the rifle, turning the tracers to where he wanted them. He raked back and forth and was able to see the windows of the car explode, the tires flatten, and neat rows of holes appear in the body. "On target," he said excitedly. He continued to hold the trigger down until the last shell was ejected below them and the action locked open on an empty chamber.

              "Banking hard left," Skip said once the last round was fired. He came off target and immediately began to climb and put on speed.

              "I got it on target in less than a second that time," Jack said once they were back up to cruising altitude. "Probably didn't waste more than ten rounds or so."

              "You're getting a lot better," Skip said. Although he would take a look at the videotape back in Garden Hill, he had no doubt that his young friend was telling the truth. Jack was not prone to exaggeration. "How many more clips do we have loaded?"

              "Three more."

              "Let's make another run," Skip suggested. "A simulated follow-up attack. We'll spin around to the south this time and hit the same target."

              It took them another ten minutes to set up and get back around to a firing position from the south. This time Jack blasted apart the other side of the car without wasting more than six or seven rounds. That was a far cry from when they first started practicing and it would take him two entire magazines of ammunition before he could hit a target the size of a tractor-trailer rig.

              "Those Auburn fucks are gonna hate your ass," Skip told him after hearing the results of the last run.

              "Good," Jack told him.

              Early the next morning, just after first light, the Placer County Militia of Auburn was once more assembled on the lawn of the football field. They were divided into three different companies of four platoons apiece, all of them loaded with heavy packs of food and extra ammunition, all of them with rifles on their backs. They stood at attention in neat, military rows, listening as Colonel Barnes, their commander, gave his traditional departure speech.

              Barnes outdid himself with patriotic and militaristic fervor, ranting on for nearly fifteen minutes about God and conquest and unification and the need to secure air superiority for further conquest. He told his troops that he was proud of them - as proud as a father was of his sons. He told them that they would prevail on this most important mission and that the rewards would be great. He seemed almost near tears at several points as his voice went up and down with his emotional outpouring.

              So wrapped up in his speech was he that he didn't notice several disturbing things that had never happened before. Instead of listening with rapt and even hypnotic attention as they usually did, a good many of his troops were making sour faces, or snickering, or whispering comments to each other just below the auditory level. A few made obscene gestures for the benefit of their friends. Sergeant Stinson actually went so far as to make a jerking off motion with his hand during the God and conquest sequence.

              The cheer that went up at the end of the speech was unenthusiastic at best.

              "Lieutenant Covington," Bracken barked to his newest platoon commander.

              "Yes, sir," Covington said, straightening up and looking sharp.

              "Your platoon has the point. Lead us out."

              "Yes, sir," he replied. "Sergeant Markwell!"

              "Yes, sir," Turbo, a newly promoted sergeant replied.

              "Your squad is on point."

              "Yes, sir," he said.

              The attack force assembled smartly into marching formation and the order was given. As one, four hundred feet began to march, heading east. Within thirty minutes, they had all passed through the sandbag maze that Jean and Anna had once navigated through and were on their way.

              Jessica did not see them go. She was in the middle of hanging a huge load of wet towels up on the improvised clothesline deep in the bowels of the high school. No more than ten minutes after their departure however, the word was brought to her by two of her closest associates.

              Alice and Susan were two young women that had recently been added to the cleaning staff of the high school to replace the two escapees, Jean and Anna. In addition to the change in job assignment, they had also both changed husbands. Since Bracken had been left wifeless by the escape and murder of his previous harem, Barnes had pressured two of the lower-ranking militia members to each "donate" a wife to the field commander. Nor had Bracken and Barnes been satisfied with the simple donation in and of itself. Alice and Susan both had been the pick of the litter of each man's three women. In this case the resentment towards Barnes and his underling had gone in both directions. The two young corporals had both been angry at having their best bitches stolen from them and the two young women had been angry at this further proof that they were nothing but property. Jessica didn't give a damn what the two corporals thought or felt, but the insult to Alice and Susan had helped her recruit them into her inner circle of cohorts.

              "They're on their way," Alice, a redhead who had once been a hair stylist in Auburn's most fashionable salon, told Jessica.

              "Good," Jessica said, allowing a little smile to touch her face. "And did all four hundred march out?"

              "We counted every last one," confirmed Susan, a longhaired brunette. She had once been a bureaucrat in the county administration building. "They made it easy to do that in those neat lines they were in."

              "And the weapons?" Jessica asked.

              "Just like they said," Alice told her. "Most of them had regular hunting rifles. We can't tell the difference in the assault rifles, but it looks like they really did leave all of the automatic weapons here."

              "Just waiting for someone to take possession of them," Jessica said. "I've got close to two hundred women in on this now."

              "Two hundred?" Susan asked, wondering if she was exaggerating.

              She wasn't. The uprising that she was trying to ignite would not have been possible two weeks before. But since the group punishment of everyone and the murder of three women because of Jean and Anna's escape, resentment of the men in town that had been only simmering before had boiled over. The realization that anyone, no Micker how loyal or obedient to her husband, could be killed or beaten independent of her own actions had had a powerful effect on the Auburn women. Suddenly much of the petty fighting for favoritism and special treatment seemed a joke. The women, instead of competing against each other, began to see themselves as a group, as an oppressed entity, as an us against a powerful them. Jessica had fanned these flames to the very best of her abilities by doing what she was absolutely best at: talking and gossiping. Whenever a group of women gathered somewhere, she was there, whispering things to them, riling them up. Whenever someone expressed doubt about what she was saying, she quickly turned the fury of the group against them, shaming them or even threatening them back into line. "Two hundred," she confirmed. "And that's not all. I've got at least one of my girls in the household of every man that is remaining behind. This will insure our success. Those bastards will never know what hit them. I only wish Stinson was one of the men staying here so I could have the pleasure of cutting his fucking throat myself."

              "You've been a busy little bee, haven't you?" Alice asked.

              "It's what I do," Jessica told her. "We'll let the attack force get two days out of town, just to make sure they don't come back unexpectedly, and then, on the third night, while everyone but the guards on post are asleep..." she gave a predatory grin, "We strike."

              Alice and Susan both shuddered a little, a mixture of excitement and fear. "Are you sure everyone will follow through with it?" Alice asked.