Fireside (5 page)

He peeked around the side of the building into the alley. It was empty. All of the rats must have gone back to their nest. His eyes fell on several vacant cars and he had an idea. “Block the back door with as much shit as you can,” he told the Shooter that had been with Charles. “Quietly.”

He waived a few men over from the remaining group and gave them a mission to go find Tyler’s team and pass a message to them. Then he and Charles jogged back to where the old cars sat and saw that they’d conveniently already left all the supplies that he’d need sitting in the front seat of one of the vehicles.

*****

The residents of the town had been siphoning fuel from the vehicles around town, probably to start their fires each night, so he’d filled several jugs with the remaining gasoline and rifled through the trash to find five glass bottles. He kept one of the jugs for himself and sent a man up on the roof of the low building to pour the remaining ones across the rooftop.

The sounds continued to drift from inside the building. They were rocking to some old school punk rock. Whoever was playing the guitar hit every chord, but the drummer wasn’t very good. Regardless, it sounded great to Aeric, who’d rarely heard any type of music since the war and reminded him of the people of Eureka Springs that he met on his journey back to Missouri. Not many of the band members from San Angelo State had survived the first few weeks when Mayor Delgado was on the road going after his daughter in Austin.

The ambushers must have relied solely on their outlooks on the edges of town because no one was guarding the building. Aeric took advantage of their overconfidence and emptied the container he’d kept all over the building’s wooden front porch.

Once his man was off the roof, he lit the Molotov cocktails that he’d created in the glass bottles and hurled them high up onto the roof. The old tar paper on the roof caught quickly and he lit the gas he’d poured on the porch. Shouts of alarm spread from inside and Tyler’s men, whom he’d placed across the street, shot several people as they burst through the front door. They fell dead onto the flames blocking the doorway.

Aeric threw the remaining Molotov through the open front door, spreading flames quickly across the inside as the old, dried wood caught fire. The heat from the roof combined with the blaze inside to create a raging inferno. Then the building blew up. Chunks of burning wood and superheated shards of glass flew in every direction. Whatever they’d stored inside with them had exploded once the ceiling collapsed.

Tyler’s squad fired a few rounds towards the east as the sentry from that side of town came running up to see about the commotion. Aeric assumed that the threat was taken care of since they didn’t continue after their initial volley and hoped that no one else would come out of the woodwork to shoot at them as they left town.

Aeric watched as the flames engulfed the building. He braved the heat to peer through the partially collapsed rock wall into the old store. Nothing moved inside, they were all dead. He wanted to feel remorse for what he’d done. He was only twenty years old,
I should feel terrible for their deaths
, he told himself, but he didn’t feel anything except relief that his people were safe. The townsfolk had done this to themselves by choosing to attack his convoy. There would be no mourning from him. He’d grown exponentially during his experiences over the past year. Age wasn’t a factor in the new world; you were either the hunter or the hunted. After his time with the Vultures, he would never allow himself to be hunted again.

He stepped back and continued to observe the fire while his team scanned the area for any threats. Finally, after ten minutes, Traxx was satisfied that no one would sneak up on them and whistled to bring everyone over to the parking lot next to the burning building. Once his team had gathered around, he took a breath to steady himself and said, “Okay, that isn’t what we were expecting. I didn’t want to kill everybody. I figured that we’d extract a little revenge for what they did to Russ and they’d never try to ambush innocent people again.”

“You didn’t know that they had explosives stored in there,” Tyler answered for the group.

“I know,” he mumbled, still wondering to himself why he didn’t really care that every one of his enemies had died.

“What if there were women or kids in there, just enjoying a concert?” one of the Shooters asked.

“Stop,” Tyler ordered. “We can’t second-guess what happened. Traxx made the decision to attack and this is what happened. End of story. Beating ourselves up over what we could have done differently won’t change a damn thing. They’re all dead, end of story.”

Aeric took heart from his friend’s words. The big man could always be counted on to reinforce his decisions, regardless of how horrible their outcome was. He nodded his head, “You’re right, buddy. Let’s leave town and go back to the trucks before all this smoke attracts attention from out in the wastes.”

They turned westward and began walking towards the edge of town where they’d stashed their bikes. When they reached the building where Charles killed the sentry, Aeric was shocked to see a blanket resting on top of the man with the edges tucked in like a shroud.

He immediately dispersed his team to check the surrounding buildings. They didn’t find anything so they continued warily back to their bikes. Everyone had the feeling that they were being watched as they made their way out of town towards their bikes. No one said anything as they pedaled hard to put distance between themselves and the strange little town in the middle of the Texas wasteland.

THREE

Tyler watched his friend help the wounded back into the truck as they loaded up to continue on to Garden City. Traxx made the decision to keep Russ’s body in the back of his truck instead of leaving it out in the middle of nowhere. It was the right thing to do and while the dead body in the cargo area may have made some of the Gatherers uneasy, they all knew that his family back in San Angelo would appreciate being able to bury him in the city’s cemetery.

They were back on the road in under an hour. The rest of the trip to their destination was uneventful, except for a small pack of dogs that ran across the road in front of them. Tyler watched in amazement as some type of small furry animal chased the entire group. It took him a minute to work out that it was a badger chasing the dogs. He wondered what that was about. Badgers were known to be vicious, but weren’t wild dogs supposed to be worse? Packs of the damn things had attacked their checkpoints before, how the hell was a single badger scaring the entire group?

He continued to stare after the strange procession while they drove past. Then they disappeared behind the trucks out into the wastes. A sign said that they were six miles from their destination so he put the odd animal behavior out of his mind and yelled to the men and women in the back of his truck to get ready to go.

They rolled down the highway until they passed a sign proclaiming Garden City’s pre-war population was only three hundred and twelve. Almost immediately, Tyler saw a large, one story building on the left side of the road with a sign out front that said it was the Garden City Community Center, which is where they were told the food warehouse was hidden. It looked like a typical, abandoned building like they’d seen hundreds of times in their journey. They’d done an excellent job disguising the place.

Aeric’s lead truck rolled past the building and they made a few turns down the narrow, dusty town streets to check out the town. It looked uninhabited. Their informants had told them that only a few people were left alive when they’d come through, maybe the residents had actually abandoned it. There wasn’t much around in the way of infrastructure either. Even before the war, the residents had obviously been poor. The only highlight that he could see was the football stadium. The town was tiny, but they still had that famous Texas football culture and built a nice stadium. Maybe that weirdo Justin had been correct about the old society’s priorities being misplaced. These people couldn’t have afforded the stadium. Regardless, they still built it in the hopes that their team would do well enough to win an obscure six-man football championship.

As the trucks continued through the town, no one in Aeric’s party saw anyone, so they returned to the community center. A few trips around the building didn’t turn up any residents, or anything out of the ordinary, so Traxx decided to move in. They dropped a small squad of Gatherers behind the building to secure the back side and then parked the trucks across the street. He wanted to keep their primary means of escape out of the way of stray gunfire if it came to a firefight.

“Alright, buddy. You ready?” Aeric asked Tyler as the squads were getting off the trucks.

“Yeah. I know what to do,” Tyler replied. He glanced around the Gathering Squad members until he saw Nicole. The fact that she wanted to get in his pants could be overlooked because the girl was one of the most tactically-proficient Gatherers on the squad. He usually chose her to accompany him on the more dangerous missions. “Nicole, you ready to go see if anyone’s home?”

She broke away from the others, slinking over to him. “Are we just gonna walk up and knock?”

“You got a better idea?”

“We could try and sneak in a door on the back side or go through a window. Hell, we could even breach the side of the building and then storm in. Pretty much anything is better than knocking on the front door.”

“That’s not how Traxx wants to play this one. We’re gonna try to recruit them instead of attack. If anyone’s inside, he wants to point out that Midland-Odessa is only a little ways down the road and they’re obviously all alone here. He’s willing to offer a spot in San Angelo for whoever’s here if the haul is good enough.”

“I thought we had a population problem,” she stated flatly.

“Yeah, well…” Tyler trailed off with one of his trademark shrugs.

“Fine. Come on, big boy,” Nicole muttered and hooked a hand through his arm.

Tyler allowed her to lead him across the street while the remaining members of the Gathering Squad and the Shooters spread out around the sides of the building.

The moment that Tyler and Nicole stepped from the pavement onto the community center’s concrete parking lot, a loud hissing noise came from the building and the clanging of metal grates falling into place over windows and doors filled the silence of the afternoon. He dove to the ground with his rifle pointed towards the building, willing someone to appear.

When they’d scouted the community center, it appeared totally abandoned. That obviously wasn’t the case. “What the fuck was that?” Nicole asked. She stood above him, exactly as she’d been when the gates were released from their hiding places.

“No clue. Get down!” He pulled on her arm to bring her down to his level.
Dammit, combat training 101 was that when you get fired on, you either take cover or get down immediately,
he thought.
What is she doing standing up?

“I’m fine. That wasn’t gunfire,” Nicole whispered in his ear.

He ignored her and continued watching the community center. Besides the metal grates that now covered every possible entrance into the building, it seemed just as abandoned as before the commotion. Tyler rolled slightly to his side and looked down the length of his body to where Aeric and the Shooters waited.

Aeric raised both hands up to shoulder height with his palms up in an exaggerated motion that could be seen from all the way across the road. Tyler took it to mean basically that he didn’t have any fucking clue what to do.

“Okay,
somebody’s
home. I guess we still try to go up and see if anyone wants to talk.”

“Yeah, sure,” Nicole snorted. “They’ve probably got the parking lot wired with explosives.”

That made him pause for a moment. He didn’t know if the EMP that wiped out all the non-hardened electronics in the US also knocked out things like detonators. He wondered if the old school box and plunger-type detonator from the Old West would still work. About the only thing he knew was that it created an electrical charge by pushing the plunger downward. Did the EMP destroy things that created an electrical current via kinetic means or what about items that were constructed after the EMP?

Then he remembered the old truck that he and Aeric had seen driving in Corsicana those first few days after the war. The driver had been able to get that old beast to crank, so the EMP hadn’t knocked out everything. Tyler wished that he’d paid more attention in his high school shop class or that he’d signed up for an engineering class at the University of Texas before things went to shit. It was the simple things that he’d overlooked as a kid that could end up saving his life now that they were living in the apocalypse.

He thought for a moment longer and shook his head while he pushed himself to his feet. “There’s nothing that we can do. We can’t just sit here, and then go back to San Angelo, with Russ dead and nothing to show for it. I’m going to the door.”

The big man stormed towards the metal grate covering the entrance and smiled to himself when he heard Nicole’s boots scrape against the cement a step or two behind him. “Hold on, Tyler. I’m coming,” she breathed heavily.

They reached the door and saw that the grate was comprised of two large pieces of metal that collapsed into place from either side of the door. The large, fake plants in the planters flanking the door had hidden them from sight while they were on the road. He glanced off to the right, the ones covering the windows had slid down from above. By hiding the security gates, anyone driving by wouldn’t have noticed that there was anything different about the building. Hell, he’d had his own doubts about the community center as a place holding a lot of food. He would have thought to look in a school cafeteria, gas station, bank, or a grocery store, not the community center. The person who’d set this up knew how to deceive others.

It was also fascinating to see the ingenuity in the metal grates’ construction. Whoever built them had drilled holes through the thick metal rods to allow bolts to pass through. They used large bolts with the ends bent over and wrapped the joints with heavy wire, finally securing everything with some type of soldering so the joints couldn’t be easily broken. The molten metal would ensure that nothing short of a large hacksaw, and hours of hard work, would get past the grate.

They stared at the door for a long time until Nicole reached around him and pounded the flash suppressor on her rifle into the door. It echoed loudly outside, Tyler could only imagine what it sounded like inside the large cinder block building.

After a full minute without any indication that anyone was inside the building, Nicole banged on the door once more. This time, in response to her knock, a small metal plate set high in the door opened.

“What is it?” a man’s voice drifted from the hole above their heads.

Tyler tapped Nicole’s arm and said, “Hi, sir. Do you have a moment to talk about your lord and savior, Jesus Christ?”

“What the hell?” the voice asked. “No, I don’t want to talk to you. I’m doing quite fine on my own. Please go away.”

She slapped him hard across the bicep. “I’m sorry. My idiot friend thinks he’s funny. We’re from a city called San Angelo. Have you ever heard of it?”

“Of course I’ve heard of it. What do you want?”

“We’d like to talk to you about becoming a member of our community,” Nicole continued.

“Why on earth would I ever do that? I’m perfectly safe here.”

Tyler recovered from his amusement and interjected, “Did you know that the residents of Midland-Odessa are out, actively looking for supplies?”

The man inside the community center snorted, “They should be. We’re all so stupid for living out here in the middle of nowhere without any resources or way to replenish what gets used.”

“Do you have many people living with you?” Nicole questioned.

The voice didn’t immediately reply, prompting Nicole to ask, “Sir, did you hear me? Are you alone?”

“I… Yes, I heard you. I’ve been alone since my wife was killed back in December. One of the pumpjacks collapsed on her.”

Garden City was surrounded by the useless pumpjacks—the large, above-ground pumps that pulled oil from the ground and fed the crude into a storage container nearby. Tyler absentmindedly placed a hand on the metal grate blocking the doorway. The metal could have come from the oil pumps.

“I’m sorry, sir,” Nicole answered quietly. “What was her name?”

Tyler nodded; she was trying to appeal to his emotional side. “Her name was Emily,” the voice in the door responded.

“That’s a very pretty name. What’s your name?”

“Ted,” he replied. “What do you want?”

“We’d like to talk to you, Ted,” Tyler replied.

“Is that why you brought your army?” Ted asked bitterly.

“We didn’t bring an army,” Nicole stated. “We brought a few people to help protect us. The world is a dangerous place nowadays.”

“It sure is. I’ve heard some stories from people passing through. That’s why I chose to hole up in here.”

“There was a group of people that came to us in April, led by John Pavlik and his wife. They met you and told us that you would be a good addition to our community.”

“The Pavliks made it?” Ted asked, obviously relieved.

“Yes, sir,” Nicole affirmed. “John said that you had a brilliant mind and could help us in San Angelo.”

“They said that, huh?”

“Yeah, they said that you know your way around machinery.”

Tyler nudged her and mouthed,
What are you doing?

Nicole held up a finger and smiled when Ted replied, “Yes, ma’am. I’m a trained mechanical engineer, worked on the pumps in the oil fields for more than fifteen years.”

“Ted, can we speak face to face instead of through the door?”

The man behind the door paused and Tyler began to feel uncomfortable. How much had he even interacted with the Pavliks? For all they knew, he could have turned them away like he was trying to do to the two of them. Nicole had taken a major leap to say that John Pavlik had recommended him to them.

The silence was almost palpable until finally, they heard a crank turning behind the door. The metal grate stayed in place while the door into the building opened inward, revealing a thin, wiry man who Tyler guessed to be in his mid-thirties. It was difficult to tell though because the skin on his face and arms had seen years’ worth of damage under the harsh west Texas sun. His head was bald with a few spots indicative of skin cancer, and he wore a faded rock band t-shirt and jeans over standard work boots.

He opened their face-to-face conversation abruptly with, “My finger is on a button right now that will dump a hundred gallons of crude oil on your head and light it. It’s highly flammable. The good news is that it will kill you in only a few seconds, so you won’t suffer much.”