He found an old, rusted dumpster, its insides now home to a range of flora. He placed the beads on top of the C4 and covered it with a series of fern leaves behind the dumpster. He inserted a blasting cap into the plastic explosive and wired up a trigger to a trip wire, which he ran across the narrow alley. In the gloom, no one would detect it.
The only worry he had was that some idiot survivor might wander in and set it off before the croatoans tracked the bead’s signal.
On his way back out, Charlie heard a series of raised voices in argument and the barking of a dog—Pip.
Seemed Denver had found the survivors.
Charlie put his backpack on and took the knife from his belt and headed further into the town toward the voices. Whatever it was about, they needed to shut the hell up before the damned aliens turned up.
Further into the town, the foliage gave way a little to brick and concrete. Some of the old multistory brick buildings had survived, mostly on account of being solidly attached to each other, providing mutual shelter from the encroaching trees.
Denver and the others were surrounded by a ragtag group of post-thaw survivors. Their torches flickered in the dark sky, illuminating the red and cream brick of a substantial building. An old iron canon, its black paintwork now peeling with rust, kept guard out on the grass in front.
For a moment, the building distracted Charlie.
It looked almost completely intact.
Ornate cream arches over tall windows contrasted with the deep red brick. As he looked up, he could just make out the spire and the clock tower in the gloom.
A tatty US flag fluttered gently on a breeze from a flagpole that was bent over at the top and yet it still hung on, still flew that flag with defiance to what had happened.
“Stop!” Charlie shouted, silencing the bickering, his word echoing off the building like a gunshot. The group turned to him as he approached.
When he got nearer he lowered his voice. “You lot are gonna get us all killed. Keep your damned voices down. What’s the problem?”
The group consisted of three women and two men. All of them had the gaunt look of desperation about them. One of the them, a dark-haired hard-faced woman, wearing clothes that looked like she had made them herself out of a mix of plaid and chino material, stepped forward and sneered.
Turning to the rest of her group she let out a laugh. “Look who it is, the man and the myth. Charlie Jackson, the survivor, the savior of humankind. You’re not wanted round here, Charlie, you’ll bring those damned aliens after you. We saw what you did with the harvester. Why do you have to keep poking them, eh? Why do you always have to antagonize them?”
“Yeah,” one of the men said, stepped forward into the torchlight, the flames showing his ruddy face behind his unkempt beard. He stood considerably shorter than Charlie, barrel chested, and wore a patch over one eye. “We’ve made a life for ourselves here, we had a peace, they didn’t bother us, we didn’t bother them. Now you’re meddling’s gonna change all that. When are you ever gonna let it go, Charlie? It’s over, man, they’ve won. It’s done, finished, over.”
Charlie leaned in and grabbed the man by the lapels of his filthy jacket. “It’s not done all the time I’ve breath in my lungs. You lot can skitter about like cockroaches in the night, but I won’t stand by while those fuckers slowly kill us all off. I will not go extinct. God damnit, I was there! I lost everyone I loved, but I kept going, for us, for humanity. And you just want to give up? To hide? No, I will not go down like that.”
He pushed the man back and he stumbled. The other man in the group stopped him from falling completely. They glared at Charlie and he could see hatred in their eyes.
How had it come to this? Survivors he often met, mocked him as a myth, a useless old man with nothing to offer while they hid in the shadows like scared ghosts.
“Now you lot have a decision to make,” Charlie said, pointing the group.
Ben, Maria, and Ethan watched on in a tense silence. Denver as ever, cast a quiet determination, backing up Charlie with Pip at his side.
“What are you talking about?” the woman said. The rest of her group stepped forward. Enemy lines were drawn between the two groups now.
“You either do the right thing and let us shelter with you for the night, or you choose to do the wrong thing and refuse. But if you choose the latter, let me tell you now, I will not consider you my allies. I will not consider your lives worth saving. Like I said, your choice. Live and die by it.”
The woman backed off and turned to her group. They muttered for a moment before she turned back to Charlie and the others. He saw she held a pistol in her left hand. “Keep on going, Myth, you’re not welcome here.”
“So be it,” Charlie said, gripping the knife in his right hand to try and channel his anger somewhere the others wouldn’t see.
The woman stepped back and her group parted, leaving a way through the old road. She pointed eastward out of town. “Go, before things get difficult.”
“Wait,” Ben said, “take us in with you, we can help you. We’ve only just met Charlie and Denver, we’re not like them, we just want to stay out of the way.”
The woman laughed and shook her head.
“On your way,” she said again, waving the pistol.
Charlie and Denver, along with Pip, moved on, all the time, Charlie kept an eye on the woman’s trigger finger. Denver had his rifle across his chest. Charlie knew his son would be quicker on the draw even with the larger weapon; it was like an extension of his body.
When he was twenty foot clear of the other group, he turned back and saw Ben, Maria and Ethan pleading their case with the other group. It stung him that they’d be so quick to jump ship, even after he and Denver had liberated them and saved their asses.
Without the beads, they wouldn’t be tracked. They had a chance of life now, and at the first opportunity they’d betrayed his trust and loyalty.
As if reading his mind, Denver patted Charlie on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Dad, it’s their damned choice. We can’t make them follow us. Some people just have to see the world for what it is themselves first. Some people were born to die.”
“Not us,” Charlie said. “You and I, son, we’ll keep going. We’ll endure. I’ll make sure of it.”
“Where do you wanna go?” Denver asked. “Mohan Run?”
“Yeah, the shelter there should still have some supplies unless these scumbags have looted it.” The Mohan Run shelter was in a thick part of the woods on the outskirts of the town. It was one of the first Charlie and Denver had set up when they travelled west from New York when Denver was just thirteen.
It was easier back then. Fewer harvesters and the croatoans were still building the infrastructure after the thaw. Like their previous shelter, it was just a hole in the ground, but it was better than nothing.
With his personal reputation not worth a damn these days, he didn’t like the idea of staying in Ridgway with the other group running around. People like those had built up a myth around Charlie and had distorted who he was, casting him as some kind of villain.
But that was often the case with post-thaw survivors.
They didn’t have the perspective of what the world was like before. They had no way of understanding that the earth wasn’t a giant farm for the croatoans, that it was humanity’s home. They looked at towns and cities and couldn’t picture how people lived and loved, how a society worked.
It was every man and woman for themselves now, despite his attempts at uniting them against the invaders. Ben and the other’s actions were no surprise to him. He had hoped that unlike the others, these would be different; they would show more willingness to fight back.