Out of the Dark (39 page)

Despite that, Abu Bakr’s report made it harder than it would have been under other circumstances. He’d deliberately broken their band up into smaller groups of no more than two or three vehicles each and sent each subgroup down a separate route, or at least separated them by a day or two if they were using the same route. Each group had been well armed, with leaders who’d survived the same learning curve Torino and Abu Bakr had survived. They ought to have been able to take care of themselves under most circumstances, and he’d judged that traveling that way was less likely to attract the Shongairi’s attention than moving in a larger, more noticeable convoy would have. He was still confident he’d been right about that, and Eric Hammond’s had been the best-manned and armed of them all. But that didn’t change the fact that he hadn’t arrived after all . . . or that he’d been transporting four of their remaining Stingers and that Jane Breyer had been the best they had at convincing frightened refugees to risk talking to them, not to mention a near-genius at constructing homemade Claymore mines. In some ways, though, the news that Angie Clifton hadn’t made the rendezvous point was even worse. She’d been their only trained physician . . . and the majority of their scavenged medical supplies had been in the trunk of her car.

Well, you all knew it was going to be a risk using the roads,
he told himself grimly.
And not just because of the Shongairi, either. That’s why you came down through the mountains and followed the Parkway as far as you could to stay off the interstates. You weren’t just avoiding the puppies; you were staying as far away as you could from
human
scavengers with guns, too. The truth is, you’re damned lucky you got this far without losing even more people, and you know it!

The fact that that was true was cold comfort at the moment, but he’d gotten used to moments like that over the last two or three months, as well.

He closed his eyes for a moment, squeezing the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger while he considered what to do next.

Targets had gotten progressively thinner on the ground in the Northeast, especially after the Shongairi finally lost patience and destroyed New York City and Boston. Not to mention Syracuse, Albany, and Buffalo, in New York State; Springfield and Bridgeport, in Massachusetts; Paterson,
Newark, and Jersey City, in New Jersey; Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Harrisburg, in Pennsylvania; and Cleveland and Akron, in eastern Ohio. There’d probably been even more cities and towns than he’d heard about, but that had been enough to make the aliens’ attitude towards the swath between Maryland and Canada abundantly clear. The destruction of all of those cities together had probably killed less than another couple of million Americans, given the mass exodus from any conveniently concentrated urban target, but New York, Pennsylvania, and eastern Ohio had already been sinking into complete chaos and anarchy because of that same exodus. Now it looked like the panic the fresh wave of devastation had induced had effectively finished public order off completely.

It hadn’t happened because surviving local governments and law enforcement agencies weren’t trying their damnedest to prevent it, either. You simply couldn’t displace that many members of an urban population with no experience of producing their own food—and no
means
of producing it, even if they’d known how—without mammoth disruptions. Throw in the breakdown of public health systems, the disappearance of gasoline, the steady disintegration of the power grid, the sudden scarcity of medical supplies, and a refugee population with zero experience at maintaining sanitation and hygiene in mass encampments, and the recipe for anarchy was pretty much complete.

Of course, the loss on the very first day of so many of the people who would normally have been available to resist those disruptions hadn’t helped. Torino still had no idea why that huge Homeland Security exercise had been called—he didn’t
think
he would have been sent off to Plattsburgh without someone at least mentioning the possibility of an outside attack if anyone in Washington had really figured out “aliens” were coming—but one of the consequences had been to concentrate huge numbers of first responders in the very areas the Shongairi had blasted from orbit in the first wave. The survivors of Reserve and Guard units were mostly doing their best to assist whatever local government and law enforcement survived, but others were too busy doing what Torino himself was doing at the moment.

And still others, much as he hated facing the fact, were using their weapons and their own internal cohesion for much less selfless purposes. His own band had encountered two separate groups of onetime National Guardsmen whose leaders were busy setting up as local warlords. One of those leaders had made the mistake of attempting to add Torino’s people—and especially their weapons—to his own “protective association.” That
particular would-be warlord was never going to bother anyone again, and a quarter of the liberated slaves he’d been “protecting” (the majority of whom, oddly enough, had been young, female, and physically attractive) had joined Torino. The ones who’d chosen not to had been given most of the thugs’ weapons and directed towards Scranton, which had somehow survived the Shongairi’s kinetic broom and where local officials were reported to have done a far better job of maintaining public order in Lackawanna and the surrounding counties. Of course, Torino figured there was a limit to how much longer Scranton would be able to continue absorbing refugees from the rest of the region. Eventually, the authorities would be forced to close their “borders” or go under like the areas around them.

For that matter, they might leave the border closing too late and go under anyway.

It looked to Torino as if the Shongairi were doing everything they could to encourage exactly that kind of disintegration, in which case they might simply be waiting until Scranton had attracted as many refugees as possible before striking
it,
as well. Of course, he could be wrong about that. He could simply be looking at the unintended consequences of a strategy which had completely different objectives. In either case, however, the confusion, anarchy, spreading starvation, and growing disease threat were far too vast for his limited resources to have made any difference. So, given that the Shongairi seemed to have completely withdrawn their ground forces from the area, he’d decided to shift hunting grounds.

It continued to amaze him how the tattered wreckage of a society which had been so totally dependent on cell phones and the Internet still managed to pass news along. It often got distorted in the process, yet he’d discovered it didn’t get a lot more garbled than it had been with every yahoo in creation adding his own ten cents’ worth of exaggeration when he posted his version of events (or, for that matter, his complete
fabrication
of events) online. And news and rumors spread with remarkable speed even without electronic media and even in a society which was rapidly disintegrating.

Assuming the reports they’d been able to pick up were remotely accurate, the Shongairi had established a base somewhere in North or South Carolina. Apparently, they’d modified their initial strategy from one of a general occupation to establishing what the US military would have called “Forward Operating Bases” and gradually extending perimeters of control from there. It made at least some sense, and from other bits and pieces they’d been able to piece together, the Carolinas—or, at least,
North
Carolina—had been far less devastated than New England and the mid-Atlantic states. They hadn’t been as heavily populated to begin with, and apparently they’d been hit less hard in the initial Shongair bombardment.

Well, that was the story on North Carolina, anyway. From the sound of things, South Carolina had taken a harder initial hit and had most of its state government knocked out on the very first day. At least he’d never heard anyone mention the South Carolina governor by name, whereas Judson Howell, the Governor of North Carolina, apparently continued to head a more or less functional state government.

If Torino had been an alien invader with a functional brain, it would have made sense to
him
to move in on a fairly stable area with a central authority he could compel to obey him, and that seemed to be exactly what the Shongairi had done. Which meant that if he wanted to find Shongair convoys to ambush and Shongair troopers to kill, North Carolina was the place to go looking for them.

If these people
have
managed to maintain anything like a degree of public order,
he thought now, eyes still closed,
they probably aren’t going to be very happy to see you, Dan. The last thing they or their families need is for you to be turning their state into the kind of disaster area you just left up north. Most of them probably don’t like these flop-eared bastards any more than you do, but if you start getting them, or their wives, or their husbands, or their kids killed
. . . .

Well, if that was the way it was, that was the way it was. The Shongairi wouldn’t have been pulling in their horns if they hadn’t been getting hurt a lot worse than they’d ever counted on. From everything he’d been able to determine—which, admittedly, might not be all that accurate given the limitations on his communications—they were getting thinner and thinner on the ground. Especially in terms of transport. For that much, at least, he had confirmation from the five ex-truckers who’d fled after being drafted by the aliens to drive human trucks for them. All five of them had ended up joining him, and his raiders had been seeing the occasional human-built (and driven) tractor-trailer rig in the Shongair convoys they’d been hitting even before the aliens had shifted their stance.

Which means we’re
hurting
the fuckers,
he thought fiercely.
However bad it looks from our side,
they’re
getting the shit kicked out of them by people just like us, too, or they wouldn’t be resorting to using
our
equipment. So if we can just go
on
hurting them, go on bleeding them, hammering their capabilities back
. . . .

He decided—again—not to think about that cost-benefit graph he’d thought about outside Concord. Not to wonder whether or not he and his
followers, people like Abu Bakr, had the right to go on killing Shongairi no matter what the aliens might ultimately decide to do about it.

Instead, he opened his eyes, nodded to Abu Bakr, and unfolded one of the North Carolina road maps they’d scavenged from the looted remnants of a gas station in Virginia. He laid it out on the hood of the Honda CRV he’d appropriated as his current “command vehicle” and both of them leaned over to look at it.

“We’re about here,” Torino said, tapping the line of US Highway 421 a couple of miles west of a small circle marked “Boone, North Carolina,” and looked back up at his unlikely lieutenant. “According to everything we’ve heard, this base of theirs is down around Greensboro, about a hundred miles from here. I still don’t want to use the interstate or highways any more than we have to; we’re a lot more likely to run into puppy convoys or patrols or simply get spotted by their orbital recon if we try that. So it looks to me like our best bet is to stay on 421 to Wilkesboro, then take State-268 to Ronda and cross I-77 on US-21 and head for Boonville. From there we can take State-67 as far as Winston-Salem. I don’t think there’s any point planning further ahead than that till we get closer, get a better feel for what’s going down hereabouts.”

“Makes sense to me,” Abu Bakr agreed, craning his neck to study the map. Then he shook his head. “Man, I thought some of those town names in the Pennsylvania boonies were weird! Ronda? Boonville? And what the heck is a ‘Yadkinville’? Or a
‘Pfafftown’
?”

Even now, Torino had noticed, Abu Bakr never swore, and he shook his own head with a crooked smile.

“Let’s not be criticizing Southern naming conventions, Abu Bakr,” he said. “
I’m
a Southern boy, you know. Grew up on what used to be the family farm off Snapfinger Road, in Georgia, as a matter of fact. You wanna make fun of
that
name?”

He didn’t mention that the onetime family farm in question—and his parents—had been less than eleven miles from downtown Atlanta when the kinetic weapons arrived.

“Wouldn’t dream of it!” Abu Bakr responded with a chuckle. “Matter of fact, that one actually makes sense. Sort of, at least. Lot more than ‘Pfafftown,’ anyway.”

“I’m glad you approve. Now let’s see about figuring out how we want to split up for the last stage.”

Fleet Commander Thikair pressed the admittance stud, then tipped back in his chair as Ground Base Commander Shairez stepped through the door into his personal quarters. It closed silently behind her, and he quirked his ears at her thoughtfully for a moment before he indicated another chair with the clawed tip of one finger.

“Be seated, Ground Base Commander,” he said, deliberately formal because of the irregularity of meeting with her here.

“Thank you, Fleet Commander.”

He watched her settle into the chair. She carried herself with almost her usual self-confidence, he thought, yet there was something about the set of her ears. And about her eyes.

She’s changed,
he thought.
Aged
. He snorted mentally.
Well, we’ve all done
that,
haven’t we? But there’s more to it in her case. More than when I last spoke to her over the com, in fact
.

Apprehension prickled through him at that realization, since their last conversation had been less than three of the local days ago. They’d had enough surprises since dropping out of hyper for anything which could affect the imperturbable, always efficient Shairez so obviously—and in such a short time—to make him acutely unhappy.