The day after: An apocalyptic morning (18 page)

              The top of the rise was a gently rounded plateau full of loose boulders and protruding rocks of all shapes and sizes, some of them more than ten feet in diameter. Skip was the first one to the top and he pulled himself between two large rocks at the summit, his eyes looking outward to what lay beyond.

              "The bridge," he whispered to himself, his eyes taking in the sight of it. It was a single span, steel arch bridge that stretched about three-quarters of a mile from one side of the canyon to the other. The support structure of the bridge had been built beneath the roadway, a solid steel curvature that was fastened to the canyon walls at both ends. The steel was painted forest green. It was just over a half a mile in front of him, its outline a little indistinct through the haze of rain. As the two hunters had told them the day before, a mess of automobiles clogged the bridge at both ends, snarling the roadway.

              Beyond the bridge on the far side of the canyon, the roadway passed between two low hills and disappeared. Skip knew that the main part of the town of Garden Hill itself was just on the other side of those hills, out of sight. He also knew that there had once been expensive houses lining the upstream rim of the canyon. Those houses were no longer there. The changed shape of the hillside where they had been told him that either erosion from the rain or the earthquake had carried them into the canyon itself.

              On Skip's side of the canyon the topography was a little different. The roadway climbed upward, away from the near end of the bridge at nearly the steepest grade that the law had allowed, twisting through holes that had been blasted in the steep cliffs around them. The view from the top of the rise on this side was actually quite commanding and Skip immediately began to wonder why the people that were controlling access to the bridge below hadn't occupied it. He filed that thought away for later examination.

              "Keep down as you come up here," he told Christine and Jack, who were just now scrambling up next to him. "The bridge is down there and we're probably close enough to be spotted by the people that are guarding it if we silhouette ourselves."

              "We're at the bridge?" Christine asked excitedly, crawling on her hands and knees until she was next to him. She looked out over the landscape. "Finally."

              "It's still there," Jack said, coming up next to him on his right. "You were right, Skip."

              While the two younger members of the team took in the sights around them, Skip reached into his pack and pulled out the hunting rifle that had been in it ever since the shootout with the bikers. He put it to his shoulder and looked through the telescopic sight at the bridge, bringing the view closer. He trained the crosshairs on the near end of the bridge, where two Ford Expeditions and a Chevy Suburban had been placed, their tires flattened to keep them from being moved. Through the magnification he was able to see multiple bullet holes in the vehicles as well as two rotting corpses of men on the roadway of the bridge.

              "It looks like these people mean business," he said, moving the sight from one end to the other. "There are two bodies down there. They must be the people that didn't heed the warning shots."

              "We're not gonna be able to get across then?" Jack asked.

              "Well," he said, training his sight over the rest of the bridge and examining every visible portion of it, "we're not gonna be able to just walk right over it, that's for sure."

              "So what are we gonna do?" Christine wanted to know.

              "We're gonna scope this place out for a bit," he said, noting that there was a maintenance catwalk just below the roadway. It looked to be about two feet wide and hung about six feet under the center of the span. "We'll see how things work around here, see if we can observe any of the people on the other side, and then we'll decide what to do from there."

              "Do you think there's a way?" she asked.

              "Maybe," he said, training his sight on the hillsides across the canyon now, trying to spot their guards. "I can already tell that these Garden Hill people are not as smart as they think they are. If they were, they would be sitting up here on this hill right now and we never would have been able to get this close. This is the optimum place to guard the canyon approaches from."

              Neither one of them said anything to this, bowing to his superior grasp of tactics.

              He was not able to spot their guards or anything that resembled a guard position. He put the rifle back in his pack and looked at his two companions. "Let's go back down," he told them. "We'll try to find a place to camp down there and we'll keep a watch on this place until sunset."

              Christine stayed down at the campsite to guard it while Skip and Jack climbed back up onto the rise after dinner. There was about 45 minutes to an hour left of daylight and Skip wanted to see what, if anything, the townspeople did to protect the approaches to the bridge once the light was gone from the sky. Surely they wouldn't just leave it unprotected at night, would they?

              They didn't. Skip, seeing what they did, actually was impressed with their cleverness.

              It was about twenty minutes before dark, the light fading fast, when he spotted two people emerging from around the hill. They walked down the roadway, both of them carrying rifles over their shoulders, heading towards the bridge.

              "I got two people coming our way," Skip told Jack quietly. He put his hunting rifle to his shoulder once again, peering through the scope to get a better look at them. Since they were nearly a mile away from him and since there was a sheet of rain impeding the view, the magnification did not help all that much. Still he was able to make out that one was a male and one was a female and that they were wearing black rain slickers. "A man and a woman," he said. "They both have backpacks and rifles. I bet they're heading for those two SUVs that are blocking their end of the bridge."

              "You think they guard it from there?" Jack asked, his sharp eyes taking in the tiny figures as they walked down the road.

              "I think they do," Skip confirmed. "You see how they're right next to each other and facing outward. That's pretty smart. I bet they got those engines gassed up and they keep the batteries charged. If anyone tries to cross the bridge at night, they can turn on the headlights and spotlight the whole roadway in front of them. If they stay behind the cars, they can shoot with impunity since their targets will be blinded."

              "That is pretty smart," Jack agreed.

              What was even smarter was what they did next. The female guard opened up the left SUV and took two objects out of it. Skip could not quite make out what they were, only that they were something black, about the size of a paperback book, and wrapped in clear plastic. While the male guard took up a position behind the opened door of the SUV, the female, still carrying the mysterious objects, began to walk out onto the bridge itself.

              "What're they doing?" Jack asked.

              "I'm not sure," Skip replied, continuing to watch. "It looks like they're putting something on the bridge."

              "Land mines?"

              "I don't think so. Land mines are kinda hard to come by in a yuppie town like Garden Hill." He chuckled a little. "They probably could've got some in Stockton though."

              Jack, finally figuring out that he'd made a joke, dutifully laughed.

              When the woman reached the far end of the bridge Skip was finally able to identify what she was carrying. "They're video cameras," he said. "What the hell?"

              As he watched, she removed them from their plastic wrappers and placed them in the backs of the two vehicles that were positioned on Skip's end of the bridge, one camera in the back of each vehicle, facing outward, towards the entrance to the bridge. It appeared as though they were resting on some sort of mounting device that had been fashioned. Once they were in place, she picked up cables from the inside of the vehicles and plugged them into the backs of the cameras in two places.

              "Son of a bitch," Skip said in wonder, taking his scope off of the woman and training it onto the back of the SUVs. Sure enough, barely visible unless you knew to look for it, was a black cable stretching out the back of each one. The two cables, which probably each consisted of an individual power supply cord and a coaxial cable twined together, joined each other and stretched back across the bridge towards the far end where they snaked into the guard post SUVs. "I bet you those cameras are the kind with night vision on them," he told Jack. "They keep them trained on the front of the bridge all night long on that setting and monitor them from the other end on small television sets."

              "Won't the batteries die?" Jack asked.

              "No, they have a power cord running to their SUVs. They probably have the cameras and the monitors plugged into the cigarette lighters and they start their engines every now and then and run them just long enough to keep the batteries charged up. Impressive. They must've stripped that whole town of coaxial cable and extension cords to do it. Either that or the local Radio Shack managed to survive the comet."

              "So there's no way across the bridge then?"

              "Well now, I didn't say that," Skip said. "They're smart but they've left a few holes in their defenses."

              "What do you mean?"

              "I'll tell you once I've thought it all the way through," he said, watching as the woman raised a walkie-talkie of some sort to her lips and spoke into it. Back at the other end of the bridge her companion, who also had a walkie-talkie, said something back to her. She nodded and then started back across the bridge.

              Skip lowered the rifle and eased backwards a little. "Let's get back down," he said. "We'll get some sleep and then do some more surveillance in the morning."

              Skip and Jack both climbed back up at first light and resumed their positions. They arrived just in time to see the dismantling of the cameras and the pullback of the bridge guards. Skip, peering through his telescopic scope, noted that the guards were not the same ones that had put up the operation the night before. These two were both females. That meant that they had enough people to work in shifts. It also meant that they had some sort of organized group functioning. That was just what was needed if the human race was going to survive another year: organization.

              "We need to become a part of that group," Skip said, speaking mostly to himself, but loud enough for Jack to hear.

              "What?" Jack asked. "I thought we were just trying to get across the bridge."

              "We are," he said. "We're trying to get to Garden Hill. And it looks like Garden Hill has made itself into an enclave. They've pulled together, organized, and they are defending their borders from outsiders. If they can keep themselves organized and fed, they'll live long enough to see the sun again. If they live that long, they'll be one of the groups whose children and grandchildren will rebuild. We need to make ourselves a part of that."

              "But how?" Jack asked. "It don't look they want any more people in there."

              "No, it doesn't, does it? So we'll just have to convince them that they need us."

              "Why would they need us?"

              He smiled a little. "They need us," he said. "I'm just going to have to show them how much."

              "I don't like it," Christine said when they discussed the plan that afternoon. "They'll kill you."

              "I don't think so," he replied. "I've watched them all day and I'm convinced that they don't just kill people for the hell of it. Five times people walked up to that bridge and tried to cross it. Every time they just fired down into the cars near the front until the people decided to go somewhere else. They just want to keep people out."

              "But those are people that are just walking across the bridge openly. What's going to happen when they find you?"

              "If I do it right," he said, "they won't find me until I'm already well across. At that point the example I'm trying to make for them will be well-established."

              Christine was not convinced. "We don't really need to be a part of this town," she said. "We can do just fine by ourselves. We have so far."

              "We can't," he told her firmly. "We've done okay so far because we have a food supply and good weapons and we keep a sharp eye out. Our food supply is running out though and we don't have any way of getting more. Our luck will eventually run out as well if we stay out here. Eventually some desperate group of hunters is going to bag one or more of us. Our best chance of survival is to join a larger group that holds a defendable piece of ground. This is it, Christine. We have to convince them to let us in."

              She was struggling not to cry. "What if you don't come back, Skip?" she asked him. "What happens to us then?"

              "Then you carry on," he told her. "You do the best you can without me. You guys are fighters now. You're a bad-ass, ass-kicking team. But I will come back. I don't think I'm wrong about these people. They're not sadists. They're just ordinary people. Even if they reject me, they'll let me back out again. I'm sure of it."