The day after: An apocalyptic morning (92 page)

              "It all looked pretty pointless to me," Jessica told them. "He took them outside the walls and had them shoot at a bunch of targets with all of the guns. He had them taking them apart and putting them back together. Then he had them rolling around in the mud in groups and running all over the place. He even had them attack the grocery store."

              "And did he say what the purpose of all this was?" Bracken asked next, although he already had a pretty good idea.

              "These were going to be the people that manned those guard positions. He wanted only people that he had trained in his little bunkers. As if it takes training to watch for stragglers."

              "And he got enough people trained up to do this?"

              "Oh yes," she confirmed, nodding. "Sixteen of them went through and they were about to get sixteen more when I had to leave."

              "So he may have as many as forty of them trained up by now?" Stu asked. "Is that right?"

              She shrugged. "I suppose."

              The two men looked at each other fearfully. "Do you know what this means?" Bracken asked the convict turned squad leader.

              "They would've murdered us," Stu replied quietly. "They've changed around their entire defensive arrangement from what we expected. They've posted trained guards in bunkers on the premium high ground, exactly the thing we wondered why they hadn't done before. If we would've come walking in there all nice and pretty in a line..."

              "They would've cut us to pieces in the first five minutes," Bracken said. "They don't have overlapping fields of fire, not quite, but each one of those hills commands the area below it. The gunners on top could've let us march in until we were unable to retreat and then pinned us in place until reinforcements took up position across from us. Then they would've chopped us up like hamburger."

              "Jesus," Stu said.

              "What are you talking about?" Jessica suddenly asked. "Are you saying that you were going to attack Garden Hill?"

              "We were going to incorporate your people and resources into our town," Bracken said. "By force if necessary. This information you gave us has just saved us from being massacred if they elected to resist us."

              "What do you mean?" she asked. "Incorporate? Massacred?"

              "We are unifying the California region under our command and our laws," Bracken told her. "We have already taken Colfax, Meadow Vista, Grass Valley, and several other towns, bringing the inhabitants to live in Auburn. Your town was next on our list."

              Jessica listened to this carefully. "So you intend to take over Garden Hill?"

              "We're unifying the entire region," Bracken explained. "It is something that has to be done if civilization is ever going to return. For now we're taking everyone to Auburn and building up our militia and our food supplies. Our goal is to unify without actually having to fight anyone, just by overwhelming force."

              "Overwhelming force?" she said doubtfully.

              "By convincing the towns we unify that resistance is pointless. We thought we had a decent chance of that in Garden Hill with the size of the force we have here."

              "But you don't think that anymore?" she asked, starting to like the idea of the town that had cast her out being conquered. And if she was in a position of authority in Auburn, as she had every intention of achieving, then she would be set up to enact a little revenge on a few members of that town.

              "It would seem," Bracken said, "that things have changed in Garden Hill since we performed our reconnaissance."

              "I don't understand," she said. "Do you mean that these defenses that he put up are better than what we had before?"

              "What you had before was a joke," Bracken told her. "Good for keeping out isolated wanderers but not much else. Had they remained in effect we would have taken that town in less than an hour, probably without taking a single casualty. But now..." he shook his head. "Now he has a classic defense arrangement in place. Things have suddenly become a little more difficult and dangerous."

              "So you're not going to do it?" she asked.

              "I didn't say that," he replied. "We'll just need to see if we can come up with another plan. We'll need your help if you're willing." Of course he could have just beaten the information he wanted out of her but he had already pegged her personality. Stroking her ego would be the more effective way of getting intelligence from her. "You were one of the ruling members of that society. You have access to the information we need to help unify that place. So what do you say?"

              "I'll give you any help you need," she said immediately, a smile on her face.

              Bracken smiled back, ignoring the contemptuous look he was getting from Stu for treating a woman the way he was. "What other improvements to the security system did this Skip person make since the attack on the town? Try to tell me everything."

              "Well, aside from putting those people through the so-called training program he had and digging those bunkers, he hasn't done much else. He put up some signs warning people away from the area and fiddled with the trucks that were parked on the bridge a little. He and that child he's living with have also been making everyone in town go through some sort of shooting class."

              "You mean in addition to the people he is training as guards?"

              "That's right," she confirmed. "Skip and Paul ordered that everyone in town fourteen and older, whether they pull guard duty or not, learn to shoot."

              Bracken and Stu shared another look, reluctant respect for this man Skip showing in their eyes. With such a small population of men in the town, teaching the bitches to shoot only made sense. Of course bitches would not be able to take the place of a man behind the sights of a weapon, but they could still pour fire down on an attacking force if they were concentrated in high enough numbers.

              "What else?" Bracken wanted to know. "He's had plenty of time to whip up some other surprises for us. Tell us everything."

              "That was about it by the time I left," Jessica said. "He had plans for a lot of things. For instance, he wanted to rig up ammunition carrying buckets to help get extra bullets to the guards on the hill and he wanted to try to dismantle the entire catwalk beneath the bridge to try and keep anyone from using it."

              "But he hadn't done those things yet?"

              "No," she said. "He was too busy trying to get his hands on that stupid helicopter to do any of that."

              There was complete silence for a moment as Bracken and Stu digested what they had just heard.

              "Did you say helicopter?" Bracken finally sputtered.

              Bracken and the commanding officers of his platoons were sitting in a circle beside the road, all of them smoking or chewing as they discussed this new information and what it meant to their mission. Stu, though he wasn't a commanding officer, was with them at Bracken's request. Though Stu was overly aggressive and sometimes reckless, he did have a keen military mind and was the better of nearly all of those higher in rank than he. Jessica had been spirited off towards the rear of the formation, near the guard positions. She was being watched carefully by a small squad and fed from the homemade MRE's the company carried.

              "I think we can still succeed in this attack," Stu was saying, taking advantage of Bracken's order to speak freely, without military courtesy. "Granted, we'll have to sit down and have a brain session on the best way of countering these new defenses they have, but the fact remains that we have more automatic weapons, better training, better discipline, and more men."

              Two of the lieutenants agreed with this reasoning and vocalized this to Bracken, both interjecting a few points of their own to further the argument.

              "There are only twenty men in that town," one said. "Twenty. We have a hundred and sixty. It doesn't Micker how good their defensive bunkers are, simple math will tell you who is going to win."

              "They also have nearly two hundred women," Bracken put in. "Now I'll allow that women can't possibly fight with the same effectiveness as men can, but this Skip character has been training them and he is a former member of the 3rd ACR if I understand that bitch correctly. You can train monkeys to put up a semi-effective defense if a competent leader commands them. Women are a little smarter than monkeys and this Skip sounds like he knows what he's doing. Now I'm sure that we would take this town if we attacked it, don't get me wrong, but at what cost? How many casualties would we take trying to bully our way through those hills to that wall?"

              "And then there's the helicopter," put in one of the other lieutenant's, one that tended to think like Bracken. "Don't forget about that."

              "Exactly," Bracken said. "I think the helicopter is the deciding factor here. That chopper takes away any element of surprise we could hope to maintain once contact is made with the defenders. It rules out the use of a diversionary force to draw their attention away from the main attack. Once the first shot is fired, he will go up in that thing and circle around, out of weapon's range from the ground, and radio our troop concentrations and locations to the bunkers and to the people inside the wall. He will be able to direct the entire battle from three thousand feet in the air where he'll have a panoramic view of everything. If he puts a gunner with an automatic weapon in that chopper, he'll be able to swoop in and make harassing attacks on any groups of our soldiers that are pinned down or hiding behind cover. In short, that eye in the sky gives those Garden Hill defenders a tremendous advantage."

              "Not enough of one though," Stu insisted.

              "Enough of one to make the entire mission pointless," Bracken replied. "Sure, we'll probably take the town if we attack it. Sheer numbers almost guarantee that. But what will we take? We would have to kill almost every defender in order to gain entry to the town. And that means many of the women will be dead. Every position we fight our way through will take out too many of our own men. Remember our doctrine, guys? We don't have enough soldiers to be throwing them away in battles of attrition. Our way is to hit with overwhelming force and either convince the defenders to surrender, or take them quickly with minimal casualties. These people will fight us and they will fight us hard. We may have as much as a forty percent casualty rate and that, I'm afraid, is completely unacceptable."

              "So what are you saying?" Stu wanted to know.

              "I'm saying that we have lost that overwhelming force advantage we strive for. We need to abort this mission and go back to Auburn. We're going to need a hell of a lot more than one hundred and sixty men to take this town painlessly. A hell of a lot more."

              Had the Placer County Militia's attack force been a democracy, they might very well have gone on to take up the fight. But it wasn't a democracy; it was a dictatorship under the direction of Bracken. Bracken's word was the word of God in that force and God ordered that the entire group turn around immediately and begin heading home. By the time night fell, they were nearly ten miles west of where they had picked up Jessica.

              It was 5:10 and nearly dark when Christine heard the voice come over the command radio she was monitoring from inside of the community center.

              "Position 4 to base," came John Marshall's voice. He was one of the two guards on duty at the hill on the south side of the canyon. "Are you still there, Christine?"

              "I'm here," she said, fighting to keep her voice neutral. "Do you have them?"

              "That's affirm," he said. "I have our aircraft approaching low from the west along the canyon. Looks like the last bunch made it back safe."

              "Copy that, John," Christine replied. "Thanks for the update."

              This last return of the helicopter marked the end of a very busy and productive day for the residents of Garden Hill. Starting as soon as it was light enough to fly by that morning, the fuel transfer operation had continued. With everyone in the rhythm they had managed to transport all of the remaining fuel from the Cameron Park tank to the Garden Hill water truck where it was being stored. It had taken a total of six cycles of transport, dumping, and refueling but now, combined with the take from the previous day's missions, Garden Hill had 2750 gallons of fuel in its possession.

              She picked up the portable radio she had that was set to the helicopter's frequency. With a smile she keyed it up. "Aircraft approaching Garden Hill," she said into it, "please identify yourself."

              "It's me, baby," Skip's voice returned. "Strung out and sore and with my ass completely asleep from sitting in this vibrating chair too long. I have just enough light to land normally."

              "Good to hear that, Skip," she said. "The password, if you will?"

              "Poultry," he said, giving the agreed upon signal that everything was normal. Had he been under duress of some kind he would have said "waterfowl".