The day after: An apocalyptic morning (13 page)

              They mulled that over for a moment while they stared down at the chewed corpses. Finally Skip said: "Let's get moving out of here. The people who did this are probably long gone, but you never know. They might be nearby."

              They began to walk again, continuing through the muddy forest. Soon the sight and the smell of the two hunters were behind them.

              "By the way," Skip said once they were clear, "that was excellent execution by both of you back there when I waved you to the flanks. You both did exactly what you were supposed to do exactly when and how you were supposed to do it. Your cover was so good that even I had a hard time seeing you."

              "Really?" Jack asked, beaming at the praise. Christine, though she seemed pleased by it, said nothing.

              "Really," he confirmed. "I don't give false compliments, especially not in this world. You two did good, even if it was a false alarm. You keep that kind of thing up and we stand a decent chance of surviving under fire. Always remember that it's usually the people that can keep their heads and respond correctly that survive a combat situation. Panic kills. You two didn't panic, you just did what I told you. I'm proud of both of you."

              "Thanks, Skip," Jack said, looking between him and Christine. "Wasn't that a nice thing to say, sis?"

              "Yeah," she mumbled, not saying further.

              Jack let it drop. So did Skip. They marched onward.

              That night, after the lean-to was built, after the surrounding area was checked for stalkers, and after their simple though satisfying dinner of canned spaghetti, Jack made a big show of yawning and stretching and proclaiming his fatigue. When Skip suggested that maybe he should hit the sack, he immediately took him up on the offer and stripped down. Ten minutes later he was snoring away.

              Skip reached into his sleeping bag and pulled out the last two cans of Bud. He held one out to Christine. "Care to join me?" he asked her.

              She had been scraping the worst of the mud out of her boots with a stick. She looked up long enough to say, "no thanks" and then went back to what she was doing.

              Skip put the can he had offered her back where it had been without comment. He considered trying to talk to her but could not think of a thing to say. Christine would just have to work it out on her own.

              He sipped at his beer as he watched the coming of night. Before it was even half gone, Christine announced she was going to bed and asked him to keep his eyes forward while she undressed. "Can't have you seeing me naked now, right?" she asked sarcastically.

              "Right," he answered softly, with a sigh. He kept his eyes forward and listened to the maddening sound of her shucking her wet clothes. Her smell, that wet, feral odor of musk and sweat, was even stronger than it had been the previous night. It assaulted his nostrils, kicking his libido into overdrive. The knowledge that she would welcome him turning around to look, that she would welcome his touch upon her, did not help. He began to wonder just how long he would be able to keep up his vow not to touch her. He wondered if it was worthwhile to even try.

              No, he told himself firmly. You have to be strong. Sleeping with Christine was wrong.

              He did not turn around. When she was done undressing she climbed into her sleeping bag and covered up. When night finally wiped out the last of the light he made another one of his trips out into the rain to relieve the aching pressure that had built up. It didn't do much good. As he lay next to Christine later, listening to her breathing, remembering how good she had felt in his arms, he stiffened up once again. He did his best to ignore it and finally, after more than an hour, sleep was able to take him.

              The month of October in the Sierra Nevada Mountains signals more than just the start of deer hunting season. It is also the harvest month for the many illegal marijuana plantations that dotted the heavily wooded, difficult to access portions of the mountains. This was the reason that Dave Madison and Mick Horn had been spared when the impact had occurred. Instead of being in their trailer park outside of Rocklin, where they surely would have been drowned by the water surge that took the valley, they had been at an elevation of 3500 feet in a thickly wooded section of the mountains, preparing the half acre of plants they had raised for picking the following week.

              Unfortunately the two men had been prepared only to stay overnight and had brought only enough supplies to sustain them for that length of time. After the impact they had made a feeble attempt to ration their holdings but had been unable to stretch them more than three days.

              They had been sitting under a tree, on the verge of starvation, when the hunter and his son had walked by them two days before, not even seeing them so intent were they on ascending the hill they'd been climbing. Though Dave and Mick had both been in numerous fistfights in their lives, though both had done some time in the county jail from time to time, neither had ever robbed anyone or killed anyone. They would have been genuinely appalled had anyone suggested to them that they would one day kill for food. But that had been before. Things were different now.

              They had held a quick discussion with very little argument and with a great deal of rationalization in it. Both of them, as was customary in the mountains, were armed with pistols. They had gotten up and, utilizing the last of their strength reserves, began to move through the forest behind the two hunters.

              They'd moved tree to tree, making short dashes from one place to another, steadily closing the gap between themselves and the hunters without alerting them. They'd known that they would have to get very near in order to make their plan effective. Pistols were notoriously inaccurate at much more than ten yards. It was when their quarry stopped for a moment to catch their breath before climbing the last section of hill that the two men managed to get near enough to act.

              They crept slowly, carefully forward the last few feet, their guns out and ready to fire at the first sign of detection. But the hunters remained oblivious, the father saying something to his son that could not be heard. They were able to get within fifteen feet before Dave, who was tacitly in charge of this operation, signaled that it was time. He took careful aim on the father with his .357 magnum, putting the sights right on the back of his head. Dave was not an expert shot by any means but he had done a fair amount of shooting at cans and signs and other inanimate objects during his many trips to the mountains in the past. When he pulled the trigger the bullet went where he wanted it, dropping the older man instantly to the mud. Less than a second later, while the kid was still turning to see what had happened, Mick pumped three rounds into his chest with his 9mm.

              They had been disappointed to find that the only food the hunters had had on them had been a few energy bars and a bag of trail mix. It was hardly enough to sustain them for more than a day or two. Had this been the only bounty they'd taken from the operation they would have probably felt guilty for murdering two people for it. But the thick, winter jackets that the two had had on almost made up for the lack of food, as did the fine hunting rifles that they'd carried. They had stripped the bodies of everything usable and had sat right there eating the bulk of the food.

              Now, less than two miles from where they'd killed the first time, they were reasonably warm and fairly well armed but once again on the verge of starvation. Their last rations had been consumed more than twenty-four hours before. They were resting with their backs against a tree, both feeling the heaviness in their stomachs that went with extreme hunger, when movement below them caught their eyes.

              Both stiffened up, watching as three people, a man and two teenage children, passed less than a hundred yards from them. All were carrying assault rifles and they were walking in what appeared to be a military formation. They all three had large packs and sleeping bags upon their backs and they did not appear to be grappling with food deprivation.

              "Did you see that?" Dave whispered to Mick, his mouth actually drooling. "I bet they had food in those packs."

              "Yeah," Mick said, drooling himself, "but did you see those guns they was carrying? Those are fuckin' M-16s."

              "Let's follow 'em," Dave said, getting to his feet. "We need to get those packs."

              "There's three of 'em," Mick protested. "That's three people with combat rifles. We're only two with hunting rifles."

              This argument did not carry as much weight as it would have with full stomachs. "What do we got to lose?" Dave asked. "If we don't get some food pretty soon, we're gonna die anyway. Maybe they'll drop their guard. They have to rest sometime, don't they?"

              Dave thought this over for a second and found himself swayed. "Yeah," he said, standing. "I guess you're right. Let's go."

              They kept to higher ground as they stalked their new prey, moving, as with the two hunters, tree to tree, steadily closing the gap. They kept that gap a little larger with these three however and they kept themselves more carefully concealed as they moved in. This group was considerably more alert than the hunters had been. The one in the lead, the older man, made a point of turning around every fifty feet or so to check their rear. It didn't Micker too much though. They, the stalkers, were now equipped with weapons capable of hitting targets from a much greater range.

              "When they stop," Dave whispered at one point, "I'll bag the big one and you bag the boy."

              "What about the girl?" Mick wanted to know.

              Dave grinned. "We'll try to take her alive if we can. Maybe we can have a little fun with her after we eat."

              Mick returned the grin. "Yeah baby," he said, imitating Austin Powers.

              Skip had had this feeling before. It was a prickly sensation on the back of his neck, a quickening of the pulse, a feeling of being watched. He sensed something up on the ridges above them, something hostile. It was an instinctive knowledge, born from years of working in hostile situations, and something that he had long since learned to trust. Had he been asked, he would have attributed this instinct to some sort of extra-sensory perception, a weak psychic ability that some people learned to utilize as an early warning system of danger. In fact, it was no such thing. It was merely his subconscious processing a variety of tiny inputs from his normal senses, inputs too weak for him to notice individually.

              His auditory sense was the first to pick up a signal. Out of the thousands of sounds that were being processed every second by his brain, one pattern did not belong. Though Skip did not consciously hear the soft breaking of wet twigs, or the gentle sucking of boots coming free of mud, or the occasional scraping of a hand against tree bark from above and behind, he did hear them. And though he did not consciously smell a wet odor of sour sweat drifting on the breeze, a few molecules of this scent did reach his olfactory nerve, which was able to identify the fact that it belonged to neither Christine, Jack, nor himself. His eyes, when he looked back for routine checks of their rear, did not consciously see, among the thousands of other things, a few broken branches or fresh indentations in the mud where feet had recently trod but his brain did recognize that something was just a little different. His brain would have dismissed any one of these things individually. But when they were all added together in the subconscious, warning bells began to go off. The sympathetic nervous system activated the adrenal glands, dumping fresh adrenaline into the blood stream. As the inputs grew stronger and more constant, the subconscious began to yell at the conscious that something was wrong.

              Skip swallowed forcefully when the sensation became too much for him to dismiss as nerves. He did not break stride or make any indication that he was nervous but his senses were now on full red alert status. He glanced at Christine and Jack with his peripheral vision, seeing that they were keeping tightly in formation. That was good. Trouble was coming soon and he hoped they would react correctly to it. He gripped his rifle a little tighter and began to scan the area around them, looking for favorable cover that would protect them from fire coming from above.

              He found it less than a minute later. A group of three tall pine trees had been blown down, probably in the hurricane winds that had followed the initial impact. They lay on the ground like fallen soldiers, their root systems sticking up into the air in an interwoven pattern of mud and wood. If they could get behind those trees the trunks would provide cover and the roots would provide concealment. But would they be able to get there in time if whatever was triggering his instincts turned out to be hostile? He didn't know, but he was about to find out.

              " Christine, Jack," he barked when they were almost upon the trees. "Behind those trees on the left! Now!" He waved his gun towards them.

              They both hesitated for the briefest of instants, probably more out of surprise than fear. It could have been a lethal mistake but this time they were allowed to get away with it.

              "Go, goddammit!" Skip yelled, "Go!"