It was locked up tight. “Guess we’ll have to bust open the door.” I started hunting for a log to use as a battering ram—both the overhead door and pedestrian door were metal, and kicking them would only bruise my foot.
“Uh, boss?” Ed said. I paused to look his way. He held a ring of keys, jingling them so they glinted in the light of my lantern.
“Where’d you get those?”
“Took ’em off Cliff’s corpse.”
The third key opened the pedestrian door. Inside, we saw a huge stack of electric water heaters, their boxes forming a wall that blocked our view of the rest of the interior. We crept farther into the warehouse. Most of the racks were loaded with oddments—plumbing fixtures, pipes, electrical boxes, and the like. Along one wall, huge spools of wire rested on their sides.
Finally we found the food: a wall of nearly empty shelves with a few forlorn boxes scattered here and there. A case of sugar-free grape Kool-Aid. A dozen tiny glass bottles of saffron. Two cases of Sriracha hot sauce. A few hundred small paper packets of Sweet ‘N Low, Equal, and Splenda in a moldering cardboard box. I’d like to see the Iron Chefs do anything useful with those ingredients.
Farther along, we found the weapons—hundreds of them laid out in neat rows on floor-to-ceiling shelving. Old black powder rifles. Bolt-action rifles. Pump shotguns. Skeet shotguns. A huge selection of revolvers. I didn’t see any semi-automatic rifles, and the few semi-auto handguns looked old and poorly maintained. I also didn’t see any ammo. A huge section of shelving near the guns might once have held bricks of ammo, but the shelves were empty except for a bottom shelf that held three large wooden crates. I pulled the first crate out onto the concrete floor.
It had no top. I lifted my lantern, letting light spill into the box. Inside were hundreds of cartridges—for rifles, handguns, and shotguns—in a bewildering assortment of calibers. Some of the cartridges were shiny yellow brass, others gray—steel, I figured, although I wasn’t sure. The other two crates held the same chaotic mix of loose ammo.
“We can work with this,” Ed said.
“It’s going to take too long. It’s almost dawn. Let’s carry a box to the east gate and sort it while we wait for Darla and Nylce to get back.”
“Yessir,” Ed replied.
“Don’t ‘yessir’ me,” I said.
“Nosir.” Ed grinned, a rare crack in his normally grim visage.
I laid six of the best-looking rifles on top of the wooden ammo crate. Ed grabbed one of its rope handles, and I grabbed the other. It was heavy—barely manageable between us. We trudged to the gate, reaching it just as the black sky began to fade to the yellow-gray of morning.
Steve McCormick was there with another guy. They were working on the gate, trying to complete a jury-rigged repair of the hinges Darla had shattered when she rammed it. “All quiet?” I asked.
“So far,” Steve replied.
Ed and I knelt in the packed snow behind the wall and started sorting ammo. I found five cartridges for one of the bolt-action rifles we’d brought with us. It looked like a twin of Uncle Paul’s hunting rifle, and I’d learned to fire that over the last year, although Darla was a much better shot than I was. “I’m going to go check on the patrols and the west gate. Get as many rifles ready as you can—we’ll need them when Darla gets back. If you see anyone coming, fire two quick shots. That’ll be the signal that you need reinforcements. I’ll tell everyone.”
“Got it,” Ed replied.
“If it’s Darla and the truck, fire once.”
“Yessir.”
I rolled my eyes at his yessir—a useless gesture, given how dim the early morning light was—and took off jogging alongside the car wall, looking for our patrols.
It took me almost two hours to find everyone. We were spread ridiculously thin—seventeen people to patrol a town that still held hundreds of terrified residents. I ended up back at Doctore s mansion. Our captives were sprawled across the living room, their arms and legs bound. The two guards I’d left there were sitting on folding chairs near the door, overseeing. The prisoners had been complaining about the lack of breakfast. I told our guards to gag anyone who got too annoying; I didn’t plan to hold anyone long enough for them to starve to death.
Just as I finished that unpleasant conversation, I heard a gunshot—not from the east gate, but closer. Did it mean Darla was back? If so, why wasn’t she at the east gate? I left the mansion, running down the street in the direction I thought the shot had come from.
I caught up with one of our patrols about two blocks off. “You guys fire?”
Kyle Henthorn, a burly, red-faced guy in his early thirties, replied, “Had to fire a warning shot. Guy came out of that house.” Kyle gestured with his rifle at a house across the street. “Didn’t want to go back in. Had to put a little scare—”
A rifle shot echoed across Stockton, and Kyle fell suddenly quiet. There was a short pause, and then two more shots rang out, coming from the direction of the east gate.
“The attack signal. Come on!” I dashed pell-mell toward a side street that would carry me in the direction of the east gate, with Kyle and the other patroller close behind me. We had to get there fast—if we were being attacked, there was no way Steve, Ed, and one other guard would be able to hold them off.
It seemed like it took forever to get back to the gate, even though it couldn’t have taken even five minutes. Stockton’s not that big of a town. I didn’t hear any more shots, which I took as a good sign.
As I approached the gate, I saw the pickups pulled up just inside the wall. Darla was back! I slowed to a trot—I was exhausted and starving. I’d had next to no sleep the night before and no food for nearly two days.
The people on the wall were silhouettes in the dim, morning light. I tried to pick out Darla; I hoped she was still in the truck, but I couldn’t see through its windows.
Knowing Darla, she’d be on the wall, even though she had to be at least as tired and hungry as I was. And I knew she was still weak from her injuries at the hands of the Dirty White Boys.
As I scrutinized the figures on the wall, one of them turned toward me. She—I thought, although I couldn’t tell who it was—raised her arms over her head, waving them back and forth frantically What was wrong? I broke into a sprint.
Chapter 10
The woman abruptly quit waving. Everyone on the wall fell flat all at once. I ran even faster.
Darla had obviously brought two full truckloads of reinforcements; there were about twenty people crouched behind the wall or the low log gate. Every one of them had a long gun—Ed must have gone back to the warehouse for more—and were aiming at the road beyond the gate.
Several hundred yards past the gate, I saw a panel van slewed diagonally across the road. Behind it, the top of a semi was visible. Dozens of figures were clustered around the van and spread out to either side, aiming rifles back down the road toward us.
“Get your idiot ass out of the middle of the road,” Darla shouted.
“Take cover, sir,” Ed yelled at the same time.
I veered—putting the edge of the car wall between me and the guns—and sprinted the rest of the way to the gate.
“What’s going on?” I gasped.
“Right after I turned onto Highway 78 about halfway between here and Warren, a line of trucks came over the hill north of me,” Darla said. “They chased us all the way back here.”