Lines in Shadow: Walking in the Rain Read online

  “So there is a second camp after all,” Nick intoned, and the two other men just nodded. Walter had been telling the truth.

  Scott shrugged. “Or maybe more. Or maybe they knew they were under observation and dribbled out the attacking force in staggered waves, but I doubt it. The timing just doesn’t add up, unless they deployed before we arrived on site.”

  “I agree. Sounds unlikely. Also sounds like you need to give us the scoop on this camp in Lowell,” Conners said.

  “Alright,” Scott agreed, and glanced over at Barden, who was gradually getting his anger back in check. “First, though, I gotta ask. Anything we can do to help out the Captain?”

  Conners looked nearly in tears as he replied in the negative. “Before he lost consciousness, Captain Devayne told Dwyer not to allow anybody to come near their position. We can’t risk having the enemy backtrack us to our other locations. He did pass on orders for me to execute our plans regarding the transmitter, though.”

  Well, that was something, Scott thought. Whether it worked remained to be seen. He thought about the busy hive of soldiers and civilians working together at the Parmeyer Farm and shook his head, knowing it could have easily been their own home that was assaulted, and his own family killed.

  “Can they hold out with what they got left?” Darwin asked, and Scott knew his brother was thinking of how they could evacuate the injured, and the families.

  “Don’t know. There’s still thirty or more effectives there, but I don’t know what they have left in the way of arms or ammo. Main building is gone, and so is the APC, but if the ammo dump survived then they have a chance. And we can’t act until the drones are neutralized, Darwin. That’s non-negotiable.”

  Sergeant Barden’s face was tight with emotion as he asked the question they all wanted to know.

  “The Captain going to make it?” Barden finally asked.

  “Don’t know,” Conners replied solemnly. “Time will tell, I reckon.”

  Scott knew Conners wasn’t trying to be profound, but the words stuck in his head as they continued talking late into the night. What were their chances at coming out in a survivable condition? Time will tell.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  By the time Scott wandered over to the meeting space adjacent to the headquarters bunker at 0700, he already knew word of the Lowell camp had spread throughout the compound. Nobody said anything directly, but four members of the force made a point of stopping him and volunteering their services. He thanked each one, three men and a woman, and told them the same thing. Stand by for orders.

  The men looked ghastly in the morning light. Clean, but with dark smudges under their eyes. And those eyes all shared the same haunted aspect, reflecting what he’d seen in his own when he’d taken the time this morning to shave.

  Before any of the men could say anything, Scott started talking as he walked up to the small gathering.

  “I’m sure all of you heard what happened over at the Palmeyer Farm. My thoughts and prayers are with those we lost yesterday, and no, I haven’t gotten any new intel. That attack does change things a bit,” Scott conceded, noting the scowls deepening on the faces of the men, “but we are still going to go ahead with action against the camp in Lowell.”

  That news got everyone except Sergeant Barden to sit up at attention. The sergeant knew what was coming, of course. He’d been up just as long as Scott the night before, hammering out a plan that pleased no one, but addressed the needs of the group and the community.

  “First thing, we need to pool our information and build as accurate of a map as possible of the camp in Lowell. All of you have pieces of this puzzle, and we are going to fit those pieces together this morning.” Scott paused, again looking around the cluster of men as he met each one’s fierce gaze.

  “Then we are going to take what we’ve learned, and use that information to disrupt, confuse, and terrorize these evil assholes until we have enough force in place to erase their existence from our world. I swore to kill each and every one of these monsters and send them back to the Hell that spawned them,” Scott’s voice rose as he spoke until he was shouting these last words. “So who’s with me?!”

  After the feral war cry sounded in their little clearing, with heads from around the farm turning to look, the men got down to business. As they were trained, each man had drawn out a diagram of their area of observation, and Sergeant Barden proved to be a wizard at combining the parts into a comprehensive and detailed map of the camp.

  With a sure, smooth hand, Barden sketched out the perimeter on the large art pad liberated from some school supplies they’d acquired the night before. The outsized paper with the distinctive gridwork pattern served as an excellent way for the sergeant to note each and every guard station, shack, and piece of cover inside those chain-link walls. He also filled in details about the interior of the main production plant and warehouse, converted into an automotive shop, as well as the placement and numbers of vehicles parked in the makeshift motor pool. The map was to scale, and Barden even managed to lay in some distance markers as he worked his magic.

  While the sergeant handled the map, Scott stuck with the grunt work, reconciling all the troops counts from each observer, with his tally broken down roughly into units. No one had gotten a good look inside the two-story office building adjacent to the ‘big barn’, as they took to calling the large warehouse, but Scott knew how many slept inside and how many came and went during the day. He also got good descriptions of the ‘command staff’ of the camp, as the men in charge seemed to favor gaudy gold necklaces, and the amount of bling seemed to denote their status. Based on their combined observations, Scott even had a pretty good description of the leader of this pack of upright jackals as he’d lorded over his subordinates.

  After two hours, Scott and Sergeant Barden finished their respective tasks and then switched to examine the work of the other man. Again, Scott marveled at the level of detail Barden managed to convey with his mapmaking skills.

  “We done?” Barden asked.

  “I believe we are done,” Scott concurred, feeling oddly formal about the exchange.

  “Dismissed,” the sergeant barked, and the skull session began to dissolve as each man picked up their notebook and wandered off to take care of their chores for the day. Nick and Lt. Conners insured none of them had guard duty for the time being, but gear maintenance and weapons cleaning still remained.

  Scott, for his part, wanted to take a nap, but knew they still needed to present their findings to the powers-that-be. First, though, he wanted to get his ducks in a row, so he waved at Keith as he turned to leave.

  “Get Ben and Mike and gear up heavy for a sniping run. Tell them to ditch anything that looks or smells like Guard issue. Then, ya’ll swing by my barracks after lunch and we’ll talk.”

  “We headed back to the camp?”

  Scott gave the younger man a tight, feral grin.

  “Bet your ass. Don’t talk it around, but the LT wants Barden to take a squad out to scout for their other location.”

  That comment elicited a groan, but Keith didn’t seem surprised. The attack on the Parmeyer farm, and the attendant deaths and injuries, demanded action in response. Not in revenge, thought Keith, but it would make a nice bonus. No, they had to address the unknown threat.

  “So, are we it?”

  Scott knew what he’d meant. For a group of men with either no military experience, or in the case of Scott, experience over two decades old, the scouts absorbed information like a sponge. They read all the books and military manuals available on small unit tactics as well as volumes devoted to sniping, stalking, and staging successful ambushes. Nick and Darwin possessed a library filled with volumes on these as well as many other useful topics, and Nick doled out the books with dire warnings to any who lost such a treasure.

  Thus, Keith knew from history as well as real world experience that four was an awfully small force. Less than a squad in most militaries. Even if they had a good plan an
d a limited objective, their small numbers left no room for error.

  “I’ll try to scare up a few extra at lunch,” Scott assured. “Surely you’ve noticed how many people are eager to help.”

  “Yeah, but…” Keith paused, gathering his thoughts. He knew what he wanted to say, but was unsure how to express himself without insulting Scott, or someone else.

  “Yeah?” Scott asked, his head tilted as he waited.

  “There are some folks who will want to go, but you know this mission may not be suitable for them. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “You mean, people like Sarah. Or Yalonda. Women, in other words.”

  Keith shook his head before answering.

  “Not because they are women, Scott. I got no beef with their skills. Either one can watch my back any time. It’s just…because they have kids to worry about. That’s all I meant. My gut tells me this is going to get ugly, and not all of us might make it back.”

  If someone had told Scott before the pulse that he would be listening to the gut instincts of a nineteen or twenty-year old, the game warden would have laughed in their face. Now, all he could do was nod in response. Both, because Keith was no longer the typical slacker college kid he’d been, and because Scott shared the same sentiment. Plus, he couldn’t bear the idea of any of their female troops, especially Sarah, falling into the clutches of these unholy beasts.

  “I see,” Scott replied. “I’ll keep that in mind. We’re not taking more than one or two extra, anyway. Stick and move, that’s going to be our motto for this fight.”

  “But they all have to die,” Keith said once more. If they had a motto, then Scott decided, this had become their mantra. Keith sounded a hell of a lot older than he had before they’d gone looking for monsters in Lowell.

  “They all have to die,” Scott echoed, and it was the truth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The first round caught the driver of the lead bus in the left eye socket, killing him as simply as if Scott had flipped a switch. Even before the crack of the rifle registered, two more shots rang out and the second bus veered out of line and abruptly slammed into a light pole paralleling the street. Though the bus had barely been going thirty-five miles per hour, the tightly packed skinnies standing in the front section of the vehicle blew out the forward and side windows as if fired from a shotgun. A spray of dead and dying raiders littered the asphalt, and Scott’s eyes never left the scope as he waited for what was coming.

  With the driver of the first bus dead, the smart move would have been for someone to drag the body from the seat and jump behind the wheel of the still rolling vehicle and floor the gas. They were taking sniper fire, for goodness sake.

  Whoever was took the wheel didn’t think. The brakes squealed and groaned as the bus shuddered to a stop, and the accordion door swung open as more skinnies began pouring out of the thin-skinned vehicle, brandishing their weapons and issuing high-pitched war cries. They thought to form a semicircular perimeter around the door of the bus, but that was as far as the tactical training went.

  Ben also watched and waited. He lay in a grass-covered drainage ditch a hundred yards from the now stopped bus. Too close, Scott grumbled, but while Ben agreed, he felt it offered the best view of their site. And the raiders couldn’t have picked a better place to stop. Better for the home team, anyway, Ben thought as he brought his covered wire into contact with the battery terminal, and the whole world exploded with a roar.

  The looted and stripped hulk of the Nissan Sentra sat as a forty-five-degree angle in the left lane, where it had rested since the driver lost control and steered it to a stop over four months ago. Scott thought long and hard before attaching the home-made Claymore mines to the side of the dead car, but in the end his team concurred. Good place for a massacre, even if the front gate to the Lowell compound was only two miles away. At least they knew the buses always came this way, so placement involved no guesswork.

  What made the location suitable was the narrowing of the street just a block before, and the two semi-intact buildings that formed the small stretch of street into a funnel. These structures offered a false sense of security, as the mob was already beginning to break up and approach the charred nail salon across the street when Ben triggered the black powder blast.

  Affixed to the windows like flower planters, riding the glassless edges, the paired explosive charges were hastily painted the same dusty red as the faded Nissan and boasted ten pounds of handmade black powder and twenty pounds of rusty nails and stripped-thread bolts. The detonators were simple, and also handmade from scrap electronics salvaged from Sid’s computer store. Close the circuit and light the diode. Or initiate the explosion.

  Scott recovered first. He’d seen bigger and more destructive explosions before, while the boys were still comparing the flash and bang to what they’d seen on television, or at the movie theatre. Dropping his crosshairs on one of the lucky survivors who’d been shielded from the bulk of the blast by the bodies of others, the straggly-haired woman managed to find her feet after a moment. She was still reaching for her weapon when the rifle barked again. Center chest, Scott judged as he slicked the bolt and chambered another round, which was right where he was aiming.

  No more fancy head shots, he chided himself as he stroked the trigger again. Another target down in a crimson spray. He justified the first shot by remembering that some of the better-equipped raiders did wear body armor, but even the stuff worn by cops wouldn’t stop a .308 Winchester round at this range. He never stopped shooting until the ten-round magazine in the Ruger Scout rifle ran dry.

  He fed a fresh magazine into the rifle but drew back from his shooting position, slipping the safety into place as he wriggled back. Time to go, he knew instinctively, as he shimmied down the ladder and put distance between himself and his rooftop shooting hide. Screams seemed to chase him down the side of the building as those ejected from the second bus, and the victims of the IED unleashed on the first one, quickly found their voices.

  The ambush was a bloody, remorseless massacre. Moreover, it was intentionally designed to challenge the leadership, such as it was, of the compound in Lowell. This close, the raiders at the camp would have heard the gunshots, and the explosions. Darwin had expressed concerns about the plan, but Nick and Conners both saw the psychological impact for what it was.

  “We want them thinking rival gang,” Scott had explained. “Another group of bad guys horning in on their territory.”

  “Or,” Conners intoned, “the ones already here when these newcomers came stumbling into town.”

  “And how do you plan to pull that off?” Sergeant Barden asked, the curiosity evident in his voice. Though he was slated to begin the new recon mission in the morning, Scott and the lieutenant both asked that the savvy sergeant sit in anyway.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Scott temporized, not wanting to overplay his hand at this stage. He didn’t know if the Copperheads could come through with what he was going to request. That was for later, anyway.

  Forming up at their rally point behind a nearby lawn shed, the four men quickly hopped on their dirt bikes and hauled ass along the rutted dirt trail, rapidly flashing by their fifth team member without slowing. Kevin Perkins, their overwatch, slung his rifle and joined in to tail the other men away from the scene of the action.

  The trail quickly petered out, but Scott led the five riders up a back alley and then over a small foot bridge leading to their temporary camp. No effort was made to hide their back trail, much as Scott felt the urge to do so. This, too, was part of the plan.

  At the campsite, the last two members of their team waited. Yalonda Butler already had her trauma kit out and ready, but Scott lifted his left hand off the bike long enough to give her the open palm signal. Everyone is well. No injuries. This time, anyway. Scott watched the tension bleed off the younger woman as he wheeled his mud-spattered bike into the haphazard collection of vehicles around the fire circle.

  Five trucks formed a rough en
closure for the camp, but Scott knew only two of them still ran. The others had been pushed into position to give the patched collection of tents some semblance of cover. The site itself was littered with empty beer cans, discarded food wrappers and even a couple of rusty lawn chairs pulled up under the shade. In other words, just another squatter camp.

  “How’d it go?” Yalonda asked, sauntering up to Scott as his little bike’s engine died with a sputter.

  “Got two buses. They aren’t going anywhere at least. One crashed hard into a pole and the other, well, either Mike or Keith took out the engine block. If either one gets towed back, it will be for spare parts.”

  That was Job One. Limit the mobility of the raiders. From careful observation, Scott knew the Liberation Army had a shortage of operational wheels. The buses were old and worn-out before the raiders got their hands on them. Same with the salvaged trucks. Anything old enough to function without the complicated electronics had to be forty or fifty years old out of the gate. So, if they couldn’t mount up fifty skinnies in their buses and hit the neighborhoods and settlements, Scott and the leadership council hoped to limit the depredations of the horde.

  At Kellerville, the mechanics recruited by the family ended up going another route. Oh, at first the focus was on older models, of course. But, with time and considerable skill, these trained men managed to rehab some newer trucks and tractors, as well as a few big rigs. Scott lacked the specific technical knowledge, but he understood this project was accomplished by circumventing the emissions controls, fuel injection systems, and a whole host of other computer driven doodads. Yeah, they might not get forty miles to the gallon anymore, but at least they functioned reliably.