The day after: An apocalyptic morning (4 page)

              "Thank you," she croaked at him as he kneeled next to her. "You... saved my... my kids."

              "And you probably saved me," he lied, not wanting her to die thinking that she'd done something stupid. "You're pretty mean with a machine gun."

              A faint smile followed by a ragged breath. "You're not... not going to just... take over where they left off... are you?"

              "No, ma'am," he assured her. "I'm not like them."

              She nodded a little, becoming weaker by the moment. "Take... take... take care of them... for me. Please?"

              "Momma," the girl insisted bravely. "You're gonna be all right! He doesn't have to take care of us. Right, mister?"

              Before Skip could answer, the woman answered for him. "I'm dying, baby," she said. "It's a new... a new reality now. Your job is to... to live."

              "Momma!" the boy said miserably. "You can't die!"

              "Can't help it," she said. "I'm all used up. I'll be with your daddy in a minute." She looked at Skip again. "What's your name?"

              "Skip," he told her. "My name is Skip."

              "Take care of them, Skip," she said weakly. "Please? They'll die without... without someone to help them."

              And they'll die with someone to help them, he did not say. "I promise," he told her instead, having only the vaguest idea at that moment of what he was getting himself into.

              "Thank you," she croaked. She told her children that she loved them and a moment later, her breathing stopped. She died with a faint smile on her face.

              While the two kids cried over their fallen parents, Skip picked up the M-16 the woman had fired and looked at it. It was a standard military issue rifle, no different than the ones that he had fired in basic training so many years before. Engraved on the metal just below the action were the same initials he had noted on the .45: EDCSD.

              He popped out the empty magazine and stuck it in his pocket, having to struggle to get it to fit. He then patted down Ricky's pockets, searching for another. He found two of them, one in each rear pocket, both fully loaded with jacketed rounds. He made a quick check to make sure the action and the barrel were clear of mud. There was a little bit in there but nothing to be concerned with. This version of the M-16 had been designed, after all, with conditions like this - mud, water, and rain - in mind. He slammed one of the magazines into the weapon and jacked the first round into the chamber. He then fiddled with the selector, turning it to the setting for semi-automatic fire. That done, he pocketed the other full clip and walked over to where the single surviving biker was still laying in a pool of his own blood. The biker looked up at him in fear as he approached.

              "You know that you're gonna die, right?" Skip asked him, pointing the rifle down at his body. "I mean, even if I just left you alone here, there's no way you could last for very long in this new world of ours without being able to walk. Even if your buddies came and got you, even if they hauled your sorry ass back to camp, I seriously doubt they're gonna waste any precious food feeding a cripple, right?"

              The biker said nothing, only trembled there, his face a mask of pain.

              "So if you concede that you're gonna die here," Skip went on, "the only question remaining is whether it's gonna be an easy death or a hard one." He pointed the barrel of the M-16 at the biker's forehead. "A head shot would be pretty quick," he said reflectively. "One second you're alive, the next second you're dead. I don't imagine that you even feel pain, it happens that fast. But a shot to the groin on the other hand..." He let the barrel drop about eight inches, until it was pointing at the man's crotch. "Now that would be a miserable way to go. It could take hours, days even. You'd just lie there in pain while you slowly bled out onto the ground. Hell, I bet scavengers would start eating you before you were even dead. After all, they gotta be just as hungry as we are."

              Skip saw that his speech was having the desired effect. The biker began to shudder uncontrollably. His face became a mask of horror as he contemplated the thought of coyotes or mountain lions, insane with starvation, making a meal of him while he was still conscious. "What do you want?" he asked Skip in a halting voice.

              "Information," Skip said simply. "It seems I have a couple of people to watch after for a while and I'd kinda like to know just what I'm up against out here. Now I'm gonna ask you some questions and you're going to answer them truthfully and without hesitation. If you lie to me, I'll know it. I've talked to a thousand pukebags just like you in my lifetime and if there's one thing I know how to do is tell when a piece of shit like yourself is handing me a line of crap. Besides, you're about to die anyway, right? What would be the point of lying to me? If we get through this interview without a lie, I'll put a bullet in your head and end things quickly for you. If you do tell me a lie however..." he jabbed a little at the man's crotch with the rifle, making him jump, "... it's semi-automatic castration. Get it?"

              "Yeah," he breathed.

              "How many of you are there at this camp you mentioned?" Skip asked.

              "About thirty or so," the biker replied without hesitation.

              "How many men, how many women?"

              "Mostly men. We got six bitches that were girlfriends and wives we managed to pick up after the comet. We got three more we snatched from other guys up here. Campers and hunters, you know. We keep them in one of the tents."

              "I see," Skip said, not bothering to ask why they were keeping these women in tents. "And what became of the guys these women were with before you snatched them?"

              He hesitated for a moment.

              Skip jabbed at his crotch with the rifle again. "No lies now," he said. "Remember the penalty."

              "We killed them," the biker said, almost defiantly. "We killed them and took their supplies."

              Skip simply stared at him for a moment, enraged at what he heard though not particularly surprised. As a cop he had always instinctively known that he and his colleagues were the only things standing between civilization and the sort of savagery that this man represented. Now he had proof. He took a deep breath, calming himself, resisting the urge to end the interrogation right then by means of a bullet. "And just where is this camp in relation to this spot we're in now?" he asked when he felt he had regained control.

              "About half a mile that way." The biker raised a hand and pointed off to the east. "We grabbed some Arctic tents from a sporting goods store in Placerville before we headed up here. They stand up pretty well to the wind and the rain. Especially since we put 'em in a grove of big-ass trees."

              About half a mile to the east, Skip thought reflectively. That was higher ground up there, more trees and less mud. Was a half a mile close enough for his fellow bikers to have heard the gunshots from the recent battle? Were they even now on their way here to see what had happened, or would they have to wait until the two women who had fled made their way back? He didn't know, could not guess just how far sound was capable of traveling in these horrid weather conditions. But common sense told him to assume that they had heard. They wouldn't have much time.

              "Where did you get these guns?" Skip asked next. "They belonged to the El Dorado Sheriff's Department, didn't they?"

              "Yeah," the man said, again hesitating.

              "So how did you get your hands on them?"

              The biker took a deep breath. "From the arsenal at the ED-triple C," he said, using the local slang term for the El Dorado County Correctional Center. This was a county jail facility where inmates sentenced to less than a year were housed. "All of us in our group were inmates there when the comet hit. The guards let us out when they realized what was goin' on. They said they didn't want us to drown like rats."

              "That was awfully decent of them," Skip said, feeling a fresh rage creeping through his body. "And you repaid them by..."

              "We killed most of them," the biker reluctantly admitted. "There was only eight of them and there was almost fifty of us. Some of the guys didn't get in on it and they went their own way. But me and my guys... well... we knew we had to have guns if we was gonna live and we knew there was a shitload in the armory there. You can't blame us for that, can you? It's survival of the fuckin' fittest out here now. How could we just walk away and leave all them guns behind?"

              "I'm real tempted," Skip said through clenched teeth, "to gut-shoot you and leave you here to die slowly. I'm real tempted."

              The biker said nothing, simply looked upward in fear.

              "But I'm a man of my word," Skip said next. "I don't have much in this new world, but I can still keep my fucking word. Even to a sub-human piece of shit like you. Good-bye asshole. I sincerely hope there's a hell so you can rot there."

              He backed up a few feet and pointed the barrel of the rifle at the biker's head. The biker closed his eyes, awaiting his oblivion. It came a moment later when Skip squeezed the trigger, unleashing a single shot that punched a hole in his forehead and blew his brains out the back of his head. His days of raping teenage girls were over.

              The two kids, still sitting by the bodies of their parents and sobbing, looked up at the sound of the rifle shot, jerked back to the reality they now found themselves in. They looked at Skip fearfully as he walked over to them, the Remington and the M-16 both slung over his shoulders.

              "Are you... are you gonna... hurt us?" the girl, Christine, asked softly, her eyes cast downward. It was hard for Skip to tell for sure but it looked like, under all the dirt and mud that covered her, she might be pretty. Her eyes, though haunted by what they had seen, were a pale blue, the color the sky had once been before the comet. Her hair, which was mostly tucked under a filthy brown hat, was light blonde in color. The shape of her body was impossible to guess at under the bulky clothing she wore, but it seemed she was neither overly chubby nor overly thin.

              "No," Skip said, kneeling down next to them, these two kids he had suddenly been put in charge of. "I'm not gonna hurt you. Whose trailer is this? Are there any supplies we can carry in it?"

              "You killed that man," she said, ignoring his question. "You shot him."

              "I killed all of them," he told her. "They would have killed you and your brother just like they did your parents if I hadn't. Does it bother you that I did that?"

              She thought about that, sniffing a few times while she mulled it over. "No," she finally said. "I'm glad you did it. I'm glad they're dead. Thank you."

              "Anytime," he assured her. "Anytime. Now, we need to get moving out of here real quick-like. Is this your trailer here?"

              "We found it the day after the rain started," she told him. "Our camper got washed down a hill. It almost killed us all but we got out before it went over a cliff. We started walking and we came across this one. The owners didn't seem to be here so Daddy broke into it. We've been staying in it ever since. Why do we have to leave it? It's shelter."

              "Because it's a magnet for people like this," he said, indicating the sprawled bodies of the bikers. "Why do you think they attacked you in the first place? This place just screams out for any passing dirtbags to pillage it. And my guess is that there are a lot of desperate dirtbags out here. That's in addition to the thirty or so other bikers that are part of the group that these ones came from. If they're not on the way here now, they sure as hell will be soon."

              "We'll stay here," the boy, speaking for the first time, said defiantly. "Leave us a couple of those guns and we'll fight them off. This trailer is ours. No one is going to force us away from here."

              Skip looked at him pointedly for a moment. Like his sister, it was difficult to make out his features very well, so dirty was he and so bulky was his clothing. He had light brown hair, the same color as that on the head of his dead father. "What's your name, kid?" he asked.

              "Jack," was the reply.

              "How old are you, Jack?"

              "Fourteen," he said toughly.

              "Well Jack, I'm thirty-five. I've spent time in the army. I'm a combat veteran of the Persian Gulf War. I've been a cop for the last eight years. With all of that experience at fighting and shooting, even I would not try to defend this fixed, highly visible target from a group of bikers armed with automatic weapons. It's suicide."

              "We'll manage," he said. "No one's asking you to stay here. I just want a couple of those guns."

              "Jack," his sister broke in. "I think we should..."

              "Shut up, Christine," he said angrily. "I know what I'm doing."

              "No you don't," Skip told him. "If you stay here, you're going to be killed, probably within the hour. I promised your mother that I would take care of you. You need to come with me."