Snareville II: Circles (9 page)

“Good old human nature,” Cherry muttered.

“Galesburg’s a pretty good sized town,” Wallace said. “Lot of highways run right through town. Spoon River does too.”

“Can you navigate it?” I asked

“Small boats, Boss. Canoes, john boats, that sort of thing. Nothing much bigger.”

“It’s going to have to be overland, Dan,” Kenny said.

“What about Colonel Tom’s birds?” Cindy asked.

“We need to haul a lot of specialized ammo, canisters and a few artillery pieces,” Wallace said. “We won’t be able to fly them out.”

We looked at the map some more. I turned it toward me and got a closer look. “I don’t like the idea of running down interstates I don’t know. I could run out to Des Moines and not worry a lot, but going southwest like that, we’re in the dark.” I turned and looked up at Wally. “You don’t know anyone there?”

“Lots of folks actually, I just haven’t had contact with them in three years.”

Pepper slid the map over to her. She sat on the edge of one of the chairs. Cindy looked over her shoulder. Cindy was part of the group that would go with, as was the rest of my platoon, but the women didn’t want to send me out without knowing what I was going to be driving through.

“What about state roads?” Cindy asked. Pepper traced her finger over a smaller line on the map. “There’s some state roads you can hop to go into Galesburg. They pass through some smaller towns, but it’s a pretty direct route. You just have to bypass Kewanee.”

I looked over Pep’s shoulder. Sure enough, one state highway after another wound its way through the countryside. A turn here, a jog there and there you were, cruising into Galesburg.

Kenny leaned over the table. A bead of sweat dripped onto the edge of the map. “That might well work,” he said. “Might be the best bet. Less likely to run into any road warriors and if you find some survivors in little towns along the way, make some contact. We might be able to add them to the Alliance. Or if there’s not enough in a given town, bring them back with you to Princeton or Henry.”

We nodded around the table as we laid out the route. It sounded like the plan would work.

I e-mailed my brother Tom about our trip. We had a few tanks and artillery pieces laagered here in Snareville. He had a lot more up at the arsenal with him. We didn’t plan on taking the Bradleys or the Abrams. The heavy metal wouldn’t be able to keep up with the trucks. What we were planning to take were the semis and our HumVees. Tom sent a tanker truck of diesel for all our rigs. He also told us to let him know when we left so he could have air support online if we needed it. We now had a small air force stationed at the Quad Cities airport to supplement his squadron of helicopters stationed on the Arsenal. No commercial flights yet, but it was good to know that the fighter jocks were a phone call away.

“I am so ready to be done being pregnant with this child,” Pepper groaned. “This one is beating Mommy up worse than Mikey did.” A bulge swelled from the side of the belly. It was shaped like a little foot. It always amazed me to see something like that.

“Come, talk to this child.”

I crouched beside her in the recliner. Soft words as I rubbed her belly. The child calmed down. I could never explain that. Same thing had happened with Jenny when she was pregnant with Rachel.

“How long you plannin’ on being gone this time?”

“Not long,” I said. Cindy came into the room. “Couple of days at the most. It’s not a long trip. ’Bout a hundred miles and this time Cindy’s going.”

“Good. That’ll give us time to get Bill and his family moved across the street without you in the way.”

“It’ll really seem weird not having them in the house with us,” Cindy said. “They’ve always been here.”

“Baby boom,” I said. “We’re going to run out of room real quick with four more babies in this family.”

I helped Pepper to her feet. It was getting late and Cindy and I had to get an early start. We headed for bed.

“One of these days, we might have to think about stopping having babies, you know, Danny.” Pepper smiled.

“What, you don’t like being barefoot and pregnant?”

Cindy elbowed me.

“I said one of these days, not now.”

Chapter 12

We rolled out of Snareville as the sun came up. My HumVee was in the lead of a column of twelve vehicles. Cindy sat beside me in the passenger seat, radio between us, antenna whipped in the wind as it flew our flag: blue background with an AR-15 crossed over a cavalry saber. Wally sat behind me, Cherry on the other side, Jinks in the middle to man the M-60. The pig was loaded up with belts of ammo, spare cans stowed.

Behind my rig were Bill and Heather with their crew. There were HumVees behind, four semi trucks, followed by four more hummers. We made an impressive convoy. None of it would mean dick to anyone with artillery pieces, just good targets, but it ought to give anyone else pause.

Empty fields faded away into the horizon. We were ten miles south of town on a county blacktop. We didn’t often come this way, so we really didn’t know what to expect. Out in the fields were cattle that had gone feral. One of these days, we’d have to get out and catch some more milk cows. We’d need it soon. Beef cattle were hunted pretty regularly and the Mennonites still raised them in the pastures around Plow Ridge. I slowed the rig as a small herd of feral hogs wandered across the road.

“World’s going back wild,” Cherry said from behind me. “It’s starting to remind me of Stephen King’s world in his Dark Tower series.”

I grunted. I’d never read much King. Saw his movies, but he was awful wordy for me. I just didn’t have the time.

“One of the phrases he used a lot in those books was that the world had moved on. Looks like we got to that point.”

“Don’t know that I’d say that,” I said. “I think we’re more at a fork in the road. We give up and die out, or we do what we can to save ourselves.”

I turned onto another county road headed west. In places, the blacktop crumbled. Three winters of freezing and heaving in the spring with no maintenance started to take its toll. We stopped in one valley and had to clear trees from the road. Winches came in handy as we dragged the deadwood out of the way. We’d have to come back and cut it up for firewood. It made a good trade commodity on the market.

We passed through Bradford. No one was home. Two stray zeds wandered toward us, but they were down before they got within smelling distance. We rolled west on through town, picked up Illinois 40 and put our foot in throttle. Ten miles later, we hooked into another state road and turned south.

Six miles after that, we stopped the rigs. Two miles on the horizon, buildings sprouted out of the prairies. Trees reached for the sky with heavy green leaves. I stood behind the open door of my HumVee and scanned the town with my binoculars. A cluster of industrial buildings on the edge of town caught my attention. Broken up, burned out, they reached out like burnt idols.

“What the hell was that place?” I asked no one in particular.

“I think it was an ethanol plant,” Wally said from the other side. “Looks like it went up pretty good.”

“What you think, Danny?” Cindy said. “We blast through or take it slow?”

“Road goes right through town?”

“According to the map,” Cindy said.

“Slow and easy, I reckon. We try to run through, we’re liable to get blocked in somehow.” I radioed we were going in. I’d be on point. Walking speed. When we hit town, everyone but the gunner and driver would get out and burn some shoe leather.

Big River Cooperative
was
an ethanol plant, according to the sign in the overgrown yard. It looked like the office building was the only one not touched by flame. Everything else was burnt to skeletons. Windows in the office were busted out, shards left in the frame, crystals scattered across the gravel parking lot. We stopped to get into formation. Cherry took the wheel. Jinks climbed up behind the gun. The HumVees had a granny low gear and could move at a walk, the semis would have issues, but I wasn’t going to risk a bottleneck.

We walked into town, past the same scene from every other town we’d been through: burnt out houses, overgrown yards, rotting vehicles. On occasion, a cat would skitter across the road in front of us. From under one pickup, a dog growled at us as we passed by. It had the leg of something clamped under a paw, what it was, I couldn’t figure. An old radio station was the only thing different from other places, but this far out, you had to listen to something. WALZ looked like it’d been off the air for twenty years, but who knew.

We turned a corner to the north and town became less residential. There were more businesses, a couple of churches. One of the churches looked maintained. I radioed my people to be alert. A few more businesses started to show signs of use. We were in downtown now. Two story brick buildings all around us as we followed the road back west. Something didn’t look right. It was too clean. Nothing busted up. No windows out.

Half a block ahead of us, a tractor dragged a semi trailer across the road. I heard curses through the microphone in my helmet as the groups at the rear were boxed in by a couple of armored pickups. We went on the defensive, but didn’t have any targets. We scanned the buildings and realized that we had gun barrels aimed at us from about every window on the second floor.

A shot swung my attention back to the north. A woman stood in front of the trailer, SKS in her hand. She wore jeans full of holes and a ratty blue and gold sweatshirt. Greasy blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail.

She held up a hand. “Only reason you’re alive is ’cause you look military.”

“This good or bad?” I shouted over my rifle.

“Don’t know yet. You boss?”

“Yeah. Danny Death, of the Snareville Raiders.”

“I heard a you. I’m Jessica Nelson, guess I’m boss around here.” She waved her hand. Guns pulled back from the windows. She took a step forward, hand out. I stepped around the hood of the HumVee and took it in mine. “You’re a long way from home. You shoppin’?”

Her crystal blue eyes looked into mine. They didn’t settle in one place long. She was always on a glance somewhere else. I imagine I was the same the first year into the plague. Jumpy. Purple satchels hung low under her eyes.

“Sort of,” I said. She glanced around at my group. Well fed and rested. Fully loaded arms. Clean clothes. I wondered when the last time was they’d been able to get a shower and wash their clothes in this town. “We’re passing through. Headed for Galesburg. There’s a few things we need down there.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” More of her people had stepped out into the sun. There was a mixture of folks: teenage girls, a few boys the same age. Two or three old women and a few people like her, in their thirties probably. Not a real big group.

“It’s only twenty miles down the road from here. Make in less than a half hour. You have time for a parlay?”

I took a look around. We had time.

I ordered my people to stand down. In an even fight, we’d have slaughtered the two dozen or so townies that milled around in their ragged clothes and mismatched guns. But they’d had the jump on us. And we were still blocked in. Jessica led me, Cindy, Bill and Wallace to a small storefront. A few of her people followed. No one disarmed. We sat in what had been an accountant’s office.

“Why you want to go into Galesburg?” she asked.

“Wait. I told you who we were. Who the hell are you?” I asked.

Jessica grinned sideways. “We’re the Cock Blockers,” she said as she glanced around the room, then outside. “We’re the choke point, the blockers for this route. Some folks just end up dead. Others, we stop and have a parlay first.”

“You’re more than a little outgunned. If you think you can take us.”

“Doubt we could. Don’t really want to try. What I want to do is find out why you’re going into Hell voluntarily.”

She didn’t believe in putting much gap between her words and it was a bitch to follow what she said.

“We’re going into town to get some of the equipment from my old unit. Do you know if any of the military are still left down there?” Wallace asked.

“Who’re you, Luey?” Jessica asked as she nodded at the bar on his collar. “Never mind, don’t want to know the dead. If there are soldiers left, son, they’re down there chompin’ like everyone else.”

“Place is full of zombies then?” I asked.

“Led by a demon from hell. He came and made it his home when the first minions were spat out from Hades. He leads them now. They do his will. Sometimes they’re here, sometimes there. You never know until the rotten bastards show up at your door.”

“They’ve got a leader?” Cindy spoke for the first time. Her hands had never left the butts of her pistols.

Jessica grinned, slow. “Yeah. One who was touched by Satan himself, they say. Man can’t puke out all his blood and live without something saving him. We’ve tried to eliminate him, but he’s always surrounded by minions. Can’t get within shooting range.”

Cindy turned and looked straight at me. I nodded.

“How about within artillery range?” I asked. “What’s this leader look like?”

“Looks like a healthy corpse, instead of a rotten one. Black hair. Beard. He’s got women around him looks like him. His seed is tainted. Some of the girls he took from here. Some right out of the school. They either die, or join him.”

I stood. The vibe in the room was getting dangerous. “We need to go. Do you need to have supplies? Do you want to move out of here? How many people do you have? I know of a couple of towns that would take you in.”

Jessica looked at me from the desk. “Why would we move? This is home. We’re the Cock Blockers.”

“How many?” Cindy asked.

“Started out near five hundred,” Jessica said softly. She looked away, out the window to her small group. “We got three dozen left. Either got ate, died or just drove off one day. We’re all.”

For a long minute I said nothing. A single tear ran down her face, dripped onto her desk. “Do you need supplies?” I asked quietly.

“I used to be the history teacher up at the high school. Did you know that?”

I shook my head. Her mind seemed to be coming around.