World of Ashes (57 page)

             
“
Ethan, you need to get to the FOB. I have something to show you. Take it easy down the hill though, there might be ice.
” Lee hung the phone up. Ethan looked into the main lobby and saw Mary arguing with her counterpart, Jenny Kopland, the third man elected, Douglas Baker, was sitting in the middle practically crying like he always did. She’d never notice him leaving for a while.

             
They’d gotten an early winter snow storm, something to do with massively fucked up weather patterns worldwide now. Somehow Ethan managed to get halfway down the steep hill on Highway 185 before the cruiser’s rear tires broke loose and he went broadside the rest of the way down sideways. At the bottom the Police Charger hit a barrier filled with water that had turned to ice. The car skidded straight forward again, leaving Ethan facing two Soldiers standing at a guard shack, bewilderment and amusement on their faces.

             
He rolled the window down, “Might you have any Grey Pupon?”

             
The guards were cold and tired and probably didn’t think it was nearly as funny as Ethan did, at least until he put the patrol car in a ditch within sight of the checkpoint not ten seconds later. He could hear them laughing from afar. The car just slid right in, no warning or control. Ethan had to walk back to the shack and wait for a truck with chains on its tires to make it to them. Lee was already on it, but refused to speak about what was happening until they were in a private office in the FOB. True, this office was just a hotel room that had been converted for Lee’s administrative uses, but it worked.

             
“Did you finally make contact with Texas?” Ethan asked, warming his hands by a cast-iron Franklin stove Lee had recently cooked breakfast on. Sure there was a chow hall, but nobody cooks an omelet like yourself.

             
“Not exactly. No actual communication, but we received an upload of satellite telemetry from the communications laptop.” Lee pointed to a printout of what had been on the computer. It was an infrared map of the tri-state area.

             
“Are those Zims?” Ethan pointed immediately to a mass of white dots in Colorado and Kansas. Like a herd of bison from centuries past this migration stretched the plains.

             
“Hardly.” Lee pointed to a concentration of Zims in the ruins of St. Louis. “That’s a Zim’s heat signature. Basically, it doesn’t have one because it’s just an infected corpse. Those, the white dots, are the living.”             

             
“Jesus. There’s got to be-“

             
“Fifty million at last count.” Lee had covered his bases. “This map doesn’t cover Wyoming, but I would theorize these people are from the Federal Government’s colony in Cheyenne.”

             
“So they’re recolonizing?”

             
“Looks like it.”

             
“What’s their estimated time of arrival?”

             
“Weeks on the outside… maybe. This isn’t time-lapse, Ethan. We don’t know if it was taken this morning or if it’s a month old.” Lee sighed, “Either way, they’re going to be on our doorstep in no time… And we still don’t know what happened to Texas. We should have been able to make contact with the forward units building the power lines by now.” Lee shook his head. “We’ve neither seen nor heard from so much as a single refugee about them. Before you ask, we can’t put any birds in the air right now either. The airfield has detected active radar over us and we don’t know who’s sending it. The source also isn’t fixed, so there’s no triangulating it. Probably an orbiting aircraft. I can’t risk a chopper or small plane if the Air Force is still enforcing the no-fly zone.”

             
“We have to find out what happened. We need to fly back down there.” Ethan couldn’t believe he was suggesting such a thing.

             
“No.” Lee circled a concentrated masse of heat signatures. “This is a military unit. I can tell just by looking at the way their camp is set up. In this photo they are just West of Oklahoma City. In no time they could be here. We aren’t heavily armed enough to handle this if they turn hostile. These large signatures here are tanks and armored vehicles. They’re also pulling artillery behind them, and probably attack-choppers too.”

             
“Fort Leonard Wood.” Ethan’s heart sank. Even though he’d lived in Missouri all his life, and had gone to Basic Combat Training at Ft. Leonard Wood, “Home of the MP Corps,” Ethan avoided the place like he avoided all other military facilities. “It’ll be a hotbed of hostile survivors and zombies alike, but there’s enough armor laying around out there to give us a fighting chance. If there’s holdouts we might be able to trade gold or supplies for vehicles, but we should be prepared to fight them for what we need.”

             
“That’s going to be a tough sell, Lil Bro.” Lee hadn’t called Ethan ‘Lil Bro’ since middle school when they began to grow apart. There was something different about Lee today, and it wasn’t because he finally had a real threat to deal with. He was seeking Ethan’s approval, being nice for no reason. “But I came to the same conclusion this morning. As did my officers.”

             
“Well, I’ll get Allen’s ass in gear. He’s still got another six months on his contract.”

             
“Actually… I was hoping you could let Allen stand in as Sheriff for a little while and you accept a temporary commission of Captain until I get back.”

             
Ethan didn’t skip a beat. “No.”

             
“Are you serious?”

             
“Deadly. I’m not going to do that, Lee. Appoint someone else. Apparently these people want me to keep beating up drunks and telling off Liberals and shooting Zims in the face. They elected me, despite the fact I never actually ran, to be Sheriff. I’m going with you, and Allen will have to step up as Deputy Sheriff, but he can handle it. I know the area, before and after the Apocalypse. Besides, I want my fucking car back.”

             
“You are unbelievable.” Lee smiled and shook his head. “You really won’t put a military uniform back on, will you?”

             
“Not now, not ever.”

             
“I guess I should respect that more. Alright. Get packed. We need to hurry.”

Mar
y barely noticed Ethan leaving. She was being swamped by the responsibility of running an entire town as Jenny Kopland became more of a bothersome bureaucrat and Kenly’s cancer got worse. The dog would notice Ethan was gone at least. There was some sarcasm about gallivanting off on another crusade, but Mary’s supporters were fully behind bolstering defenses, especially after the report on the incident at the airfield with MS13 became public. Kopland’s team of college age Commies found the report in a locker that was accidentally left “unlocked.” They had tried to use it against Kenly, but there really wasn’t any fault to be had. The only thing Ethan wasn’t looking forward to was the trip down Interstate-44. The danger wouldn’t bother him half as much as the time it would take to get there. It was planned to take a week to drive what used to take two hours with a long bathroom break. Road blocks and hostiles were considered likely to cause massive delays, or stop them altogether.

             
The convoy of ten up-armored trucks rolled toward the town of Bourbon at the crack of dawn on a frosty morning that saw the town evinced in a purple shade. Salvage teams had reported the town of Bourbon empty, the attack on the biker gang had gotten the point across that Sullivan now owned the territory lock stock and barrel. The Zims in the area were frozen solid and would be for several months. Most of the small town had been destroyed by the weather, campers or meth cooks who blessedly blew themselves up or got too stupid to lock their doors at night. A select few buildings made of stone still seemed untouched, most of them standing since the turn of the last century. Their windows were all broken out, but there was no sign of recent inhabitation. The easiest sign to spot, besides smoke from campfires and footprints in the snow were piles of recent trash. There were none.

             
The five ton truck with the snowplow in front made short work of most of the cars in front of the convoy, the driver seemed to take an especial pride in demolishing Chevy Volts, Toyota electric cars and Smart Cars. He was the one who lent Ethan and Mary his ’71 Hemi Cuda for their honeymoon. A fun man to be around, he kept the trip entertaining. The first time they had to stop was just past the town of St. James. People were there, but seemed the survivalist types and ran from the convoy rather than approach it. Every vehicle was marked 1
st
Cavalry Co. Sullivan U.S.A. and had an American and Missouri flag stenciled on their hoods and sides. However, a flag didn’t mean much in this day and age, not with so many highwaymen with the means and will to impersonate officials. It wasn’t unlike the Pirates of Old, flying a friendly flag until it was too late for their prey to flee.

The ruins of burned
embattlements, structures crafted into makeshift castles and forts could be seen all over the countryside through the leafless trees. As the convoy neared Cuba, (No Castro), thick snow lay ahead and Lee ordered a bivouac for the night. There weren’t many troops on the mission, and those brought along were mechanics and heavy equipment operators, not infantrymen. Some civilians were paid to come along as well, those who had similar skills. The goal was armor, and they’d need those who could get it running again in a hurry.

             
They ate MRE’s, ordered not to start any cooking fires, and sat silently within the ruined walls of an old truck stop that now more resembled an even cheaper version of the fort from the movie
Mad Max.
Lee and Ethan settled into the front of an LMTV, a flat nosed transport truck, and rested as best they could. Ethan made himself comfortable in the center seat, wrapped in a red and black plaid comforter he’d had since they were children.

             
“Ethan, can I ask you something?” Lee broke the silence as a feral dog howled in the distance. The moonlight made it bright enough to read and Ethan availed himself of the opportunity.

             
Ethan closed his copy of
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers
and raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“Your gun isn’t next to you is it?”

              “Is yours?” Ethan countered.

             
“Very funny… I don’t want to beat around the bush, so I’ll just say it. I’m going to ask Paula to marry me.”

             
The statement didn’t stun Ethan as much as it should have. His face turned red and Lee prepared himself to either be OC sprayed, stabbed, or even shot. After a moment Ethan opened the book again and continued reading. “I kinda figured. It’s not like you’ve been hanging around the house for
my
company, though for a minute I just thought you really liked Bogey.”

             
Lee smiled and shook his head. “That’s really not the answer I expected from you.”

             
“I’ll shoot you later. Right now I just really want my car back.”

             
“You weren’t joking, huh? A near twenty year old GM junk heap, and that’s what you care about? You know there’s no chance in hell it’s even going to run, and that’s largely assuming the Army didn’t have it hauled off. They do that on lemon lots.”

             
Ethan had to close the book again. “She’s not twenty years old… And she sure as hell isn’t a lemon.”

             
Lee raised an eyebrow, “Ethan… I don’t know how to sugar coat this, because you’d probably eat that too, but
it’s
a Pontiac, not a Ferrari. I can find you one just like it in someone’s garage that will still work. Hell, you had one blown out from under you not even a year ago. Your car didn’t even work right
before
the Apocalypse! The electric system was wired by a Drunken German Gynecologist that got lost in a GM factory one night, the paint was had more shopping cart dents and contact scrapes from other people’s doors than its original color, someone keyed it on both sides and carved a swastika over the gas lid because you couldn’t keep your political opinions to yourself, the heads-up display hadn’t worked in over a year, the radio was stolen twice, the steering wheel controls for the radio haven’t worked since high school… Hell, it leaked every fluid but gas and got worse millage than a deuce and a half. I’m not trying to be mean here, well, not too mean, but what the fuck is your fascination with that car? Is it just because Grandpa gave it to you? I get that, but…”

             
“It’s
my
car, Lee.” Ethan was glad it was dark enough to hide the hate swelling in his eyes. Not for his brother, but for what the car meant to him and the people who’d tried to take it away. “After all the things the Army stole from me, my life, my sanity, my money, my every worldly possession destroyed… My fucking Seventeen Year Old ‘GM Junk Heap’ was all I had left… I want it back. It’s all I had, man. I had to hide her off post for months. My CO tried to force me to sell it for $300 to a junk yard… some drunkard in the barracks stole it once, wrecked it into a fire hydrant with me passed out in the back seat… Shit. I don’t know… The car just seems like a part of me that I’m missing.”

             
“How come you never pursued your commission?” Lee asked. It was a strange question, off topic for sure.

             
“In this Army or the last one?”

             
“Both, but mostly the real one I guess.”

             
“That’s a loaded question. I guess the only thing I can say is I wanted to be enlisted first. Be a ‘Mustanger,’ Green to Gold. No shortcuts.”

             
“Like the ones I took?” Lee didn’t have to say it, but neither brother liked Senior ROTC cadets that became instant officers after graduation. Officers who got commissions that way were just college age punks who thought they were the New Gentry, most either the same age or younger than the men they were told to lead. College commissioned officers could be as self-entitled as the Imperial Japanese Officers of the Second World War, pretending to be the new Samurai after their Empire obliterated the real ones.

             
“Hey man,” Ethan patted Lee on the head with his book. “There was only one scholarship available and you were the Cadet CO for a reason. That reason. It only made sense that you got it. You never got to see the side of the Army I did. NCO’s shield the officers from the day to day stuff, and you guys just carry on like the concerns of the commoners are not your concerns.” Ethan took a swig from a bottle of rootbeer he’d bought at the market. It was homemade and fresh. “And so I was a private for the rest of my life. As for your Army… I guess I just can’t see myself doing it again. What is the definition of insanity if not repeating the same process over and over expecting different results?”

             
Lee seemed satisfied with that answer. “What if they don’t want to fight?”

             
“Who? The people flooding out of Cheyenne? Man, I hope not. I’d rather this mission be for nothing than not be enough.”

             
Lee looked at the book his brother was reading. “You think they’ll write about us in the history books?
Sullivan
, the little town that could.” He joked.

             
Ethan smiled too. “Yeah. That’d be rich. All the skeletons in our closets. We’d make for pretty poor historical figures.”

             
“Could we be worse than the Founding Fathers?” Lee thumbed through the book. “Jefferson had Jungle Fever and shot a man on the White House lawn, Washington had slaves and grew pot, Franklin sat around naked in his house and womanized in France… Shit, the list goes on.”

             
“My favorites were Abraham Lincoln, William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant, though probably not for the same reasons everyone else loves them.”

             
Lee raised an eyebrow. He wasn’t the creative one of the two, and Ethan often came up with fascinating tidbits of historical information that were worth listening to. “And what was so fascinating about them? I know Ulysses S. Grant was a better General than he was a President, but…”

             
Ethan nodded. “U. S. Grant was not a spectacular president, no. The reason I find him interesting is he was actually a failure before the war. He was drummed out of the Army for drinking, in fact. They let him back in when hostilities with the South broke out and he made himself famous enough to become president of the United States later in life. Sherman saw a chance to strike a devastating blow to his enemy and did so with not so much as an apology. Apparently folks in Georgia are still sore about that and I shouldn’t antagonize them by hanging a poster of General Sherman on my barracks room wall, but whatever. And Albraham Lincoln, well, I think he was assassinated right on time to keep history on the path it stayed on. Had he lived he would have tried to send all the slaves back to Africa, not knowing or caring that they would have had almost no quality of life whatsoever. Not a lot of people know that. Liberia is probably the darkest legacy of the Civil War. Hell, the whole conflict cost Lincoln his life, and I don’t mean the bullet to the head. Keeping America from becoming divided, which would have seen us invaded by the English yet again, cost him his health and any stability he might have had at home. I’ve seen photos of the aging process of Lincoln during the Civil War. It was drastic. He went from looking reasonably normal to looking like Frankenstein’s monster.”

             
“I wonder how far we’ve aged.”

             
“I don’t think they quantify human aging with exponents.” Ethan didn’t have anything else to say. He fell asleep soon after. Lee stayed awake, thinking about what was to come. Not in the literal sense of what was tomorrow’s order of operations, but what would become of the town in another year, two years, three.

The convoy left before dawn. The cold was enough to stop most of the scattered living from coming to see what was happening, but a few did. They weren’t hostile, just a couple of men, their wives and a few children. Lee gave them supplies of MREs and medical
stuffs and told them of Sullivan’s protection and prosperity. They didn’t seem interested, but were happy to share knowledge of what was ahead. Had they no forewarning of what was ahead the men from Sullivan might have fallen into the same trap, their lives just added to the scores already taken there.

The large modern bridges on the downhill slope across the Big Piney River were almost completely destroyed.
A single lane remained and a gang controlled it and several military vehicles, including an M-1 Abrams main battle tank, from the top of the cliffs. With this in mind the convoy pressed on until two miles before the bridges. There was no snow there, as if the recent storms had selectively crisscrossed the interstate. A clear path made travel easier, and hid their tracks from anyone following them, but also made it impossible to see if anyone had been there before them. The warfighters donned armor and pressed on the last mile to the bridges on foot, prepared for combat.

             
The first sign of life was a malnourished German Shepard that slowly approached them with his tail between his legs. One of the soldiers had been a policeman in another life and spoke to the dog in German when it didn’t respond to English commands. It went right up to him. “He’s a police dog.” The soldier said. “We didn’t teach them English commands so no one else could confuse them.” They kept the dog and a soldier who’d had a mild sprained ankle took him back to the trucks since he wasn’t going to be of much use either. Many animals sought out people in this abandoned world, seeking the love and food they’d known before. It was inspiring to find something as useful as a ‘K9 Officer,’ a fellow survivor of a world abandoned by hope. With any luck this was a sign of better things to come.

             
The unit closed in on the bridges. They were within three hundred meters when someone spotted the remnants of an outpost hastily made of plywood and tin. It looked the worse for ware and had graffiti all over it. A small fire burned in a 55 gallon drum and a couple of men sitting near the plywood shack in ragged clothing didn’t seem very attentive. Sure enough an Abrams tank, the most powerful tank ever fielded by any standing army, covered in lewd, crude, caveman representations of the female figure sat on a hill like a desecrated grave. From the looks of the stuff built up around it, and the trash on top of it, the tank hadn’t gone anywhere in some time. They couldn’t, however, just assume it was inoperable.

             
Both men faced away from the approaching Cavalrymen as they silently stalked closer. Finally, when they were close enough to smell the men and their putrid encampment Ethan walked up to them and pulled a large, long barreled 1851 Colt Navy from a shoulder holster under his jacket. He put the barrel inches from one of the men’s heads and pulled the hammer back with a dramatic
click clack.
Lee rolled his eyes, knowing that sound was the only reason his brother carried the antique firearm in the first place. It wasn’t even a cartridge conversion, a classic cap & ball, but nothing sounded half as intimidating.