“Medicine. There’s a cabin, about ten miles from here. I have some friends there. I’m trying to get up there. They needed these medicines.” Howard looked back at the car and saw the dead woman lying half in and half out of the driver’s side. She was facing the sky. He couldn’t stop looking at her.
“Well, we tried going north. There’s just too many of the things on the freeway. We almost didn’t make it back into the mountains,” Jon said. “Seems better up here on these country roads. I’ve picked up more stranded people, too. I’m running out of space. And I’m low on gas.”
“I’m glad to see you,” Howard said.
“I feel like Noah,” Jon said and smiled. “I think we’ve got twenty-five in there right now. I had to turn some kid away back down the road. No more room. Is there a gas station here?”
“Yes,” Howard said. “But there’s no power. It went out a little while ago.”
“Do you think we could stay with your friends? I’ve got a hand pump. We just have to tap into the gas tanks. And we can hand-pump the gas,” Jon said.
“I don’t know,” Howard said. “I can call them. Ask.”
“Could you do that for me, please? I’ve got some little kids in there and they need something to eat. We can’t just drive around forever.”
“Yes. Yes, of course,” Howard said.
“Tell them I’ve got lots of guns and ammo. Maybe that will make a difference.”
Howard nodded.
“It wasn’t your fault, Howard,” Jon said.
They both heard a strange rattling sound. It was a sound that Howard had heard years before, in the Army. Jon turned around and looked down the street. Almost immediately, he knew what the sound was, too.
* * *
Gary Summers was two miles from Emigrant Gap on a stretch of country road that was dead flat. It had summer homes on either side, set back off the road. He’d thought of going through the abandoned-looking houses to search for warmer clothes, especially a pair of gloves, but he’d been afraid to. All the clothes at the B&B were way too big for him.
When he heard the M-1 Abrams tank, he’d stopped pedaling and pulled to a stop in the middle of the empty road. It was snowing hard, and at first he was unsure of what he was seeing: the dull, almost gold Abrams tank came out of the white mist, straight down the middle of the road.
He stared at it and blew on the freezing knuckles of his right hand. He looked down at both his hands, his fingers were bright red from cycling in the cold. Both hands were numb from exposure. He’d been unable to find any gloves at the bed and breakfast where he’d found the bike. He’d pedaled down the mountain and felt safer the further he got away from the Phelps cabin and Timberline. He’d not seen any Howlers or any sign of life for more than an hour. At times he’d had to slow down because of the dead bodies and the abandoned cars left on the road. But other than the dead, he’d seen no one.
He brought his right hand to his mouth again as he stared at the approaching tank and blew on his knuckles to help revive any feeling. But he couldn’t even feel his breath. The numbness in his hands was starting to make it difficult to steer the bike.
The sound of the tank got louder. The tank’s wide and ugly tracks rattled over the snow-dusted asphalt. He could see details on the tank more clearly as it approached, its hatches were all shut tight. Its armored desert-colored sides carried wintertime camouflage netting rolled into neat bundles. The exhaust from its diesel engine hung in the thin cold air behind it, giving it an ominous look.
“Thank God,” Gary said out loud. If the U.S. Army had come, it was all going to get better now. He’d done the right thing. He raised his hand in a wave, as he expected the tank to slow and offer him help. He yelled at the top of his lungs. But watching it come toward him, he realized that it was not going to slow. Twenty yards away, he had to pull off the road and out of the tank’s way, or be crushed. He rode off the road just in time. The high sides of the Abrams just nicked his back wheel as he darted down the steep side of the roadway and into a trench that had been cut for summer run-off. A lesser rider would have not managed to keep the bike upright, but he did, riding it out of the trench again and back up onto the road.
The tank had not slowed down. It kept right on rolling down the middle of the road toward Timberline.
An hour later, at a checkpoint set up by the New Freedom Army and Homeland Security at Emigrant Gap, Summers was arrested and turned over to the MPs. He was tagged with a pink marker on his forehead, his bicycle taken from him. He was transported to a shape-up area in Sacramento at the McClellan Air force base.
An hour later, a quiet young man in a US Army uniform tattooed Summers’ shoulder and ass cheek. After he was tattooed, given a paper “dog-tag,” and made to drink a strange metallic-tasting concoction that could be “read” by any patrolling drone. They put him on a bus to Los Angeles.
Gary Summers was officially prisoner number 16,001. He wore the CB tattoo on his right ass cheek and a matching one on his right shoulder in dark blue. It was painful for him to sit in the transport truck because of the fresh tattoo on his ass. They put him to work as soon as he arrived at the comfort station a block away from the landmark once known as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and now named TCL Theatre, after a corporation.
On the way down the freeway near the outskirts of L.A., Summers and the other Comfort Boys, saw a billboard, brand new and glossy. It read:
FATHERLAND FIRST!
SERVICE, HONOR, DUTY!
WE WILL WIN!
Drawing on everything he’d been taught from the moment he was born, Gary Summers decided to be the best possible Comfort Boy he could be. By conforming—as he would later that evening for a bloated, gin-soaked, and Viagra-fueled general—he hoped his new masters would approve and favor him, that they would see that he was worthy.
CHAPTER 29
Lieutenant Bell had landed the “executive model” blue and white Sikorsky S-76D helicopter, intended for six people maximum, in the snowy and body-strewn field in front of the Phelps cabin. He’d run over the ground littered with hundreds of dead shot-to-hell Howlers and onto the burnt-black and charred porch to the cabin’s door.
“There’s very little time. There’s an M-1 Abrams on the way here. They intend to make this location some kind of headquarters,” Bell said as soon Quentin had let him in the heavy front door.
Bell and Lacy embraced spontaneously, surprising Quentin. “I’ve dropped Rebecca and Patty Tyson at another Prepper cabin. It was built by some millionaire. It’s unknown to the authorities, I think. It’s, well—it’s in a whole other league from this place.”
“You said a tank?” Quentin said.
“Yes. And it’s coming here. It’s only about five miles away, if that.”
“Then we’ll be rescued soon,” Quentin said.
“No, you don’t understand,” Bell said.
“Why should we run away? It sounds like the Army has come to rescue us,” Quentin said.
“It’s not what you think,” Bell said. “There’s been some kind of takeover—of the government. You don’t want to be here when they get here.”
“I don’t understand,” Miles said. “What do you mean, takeover?”
“I’m not sure. We were going to be made slaves. Rebecca was branded—they were going to make her a prostitute. It all happened at the hotel,” Bell said.