Lines in Shadow: Walking in the Rain Read online

  Yes, Scott knew. Mike was not tall, but his thick muscular build was still extremely fast. Before the lights went out, Scott bet he’d looked like a college running back in peak condition. If Scott was leaving him in the dust, then either Scott was getting more of a boost than he thought from his adrenaline surges, or Mike was turning soft.

  That was the fodder for a joke, later. After the last four months, Scott doubted the twenty-year-old could even remember what it was like to be soft anymore. The walk out of Branson might not have been the Bataan Death March, but the trek took a noticeable toll, physical and emotional, on those that survived. Mike gained some of the weight back, but he still had a gaunt and hungry look.

  “You can’t act like a muscle-head Marine anymore, Scott. I need you to mold these young men, and you have to be alive to that job. So let the kids take the lead from now on.”

  Scott stretched like a cat, arching his back and listening to his shoulders pop as he did.

  “I hear you, LT, but sometimes you just gotta get it done. To be honest, I just about shit my pants when that grenade came bouncing down those stairs.”

  “Yeah, well, I heard it over the sound of the guns and knew something had happened. Just a miracle you didn’t lose anybody.”

  “Well, I better get up and act like I’m doing something,” Scott said, and as if on cue, Yalonda Butler, their team medic, came charging into the room.

  “Sit your butt back down before I knock you down, Scott,” the woman growled in a perfectly-pitched imitation of one of Scott’s old Drill Instructors from Boot Camp. Scott, shocked into submission, dropped back to his previous position without hesitation.

  The LT watched in silent awe as the diminutive woman in blood-spattered camo and the chopped off blonde hair proceeded to spend the next ten minutes checking out the older man and grudgingly agree that he could get up, if he could stand the pain. She seemed to project her opinion that Scott should just lay there, but Conners knew the old Marine better than that. He’d get up.

  Scott proceeded to do just that, and he grunted at the dull, grinding ache in his hamstrings and up his legs. Pain was nothing new to Scott, though, and he fought down the urge to cry out as his abused body protested.

  “You old guys really ought to try yoga,” Yalonda quipped, reminding Scott of their previous discussion on the matter. She was also trying to sound concerned while trying to hide a snicker. Yalonda Butler might have been caring healthcare professional, a trained and experienced EMT before the lights went out, but Scott suspected she had a sarcastic streak a mile wide even back then.

  Her slender body held surprising strength as she helped Scott steady himself, and for perhaps the hundredth time, Scott thanked the Good Lord for guiding her to the family’s compound. Small though she might be, Yalonda was a crackerjack field medic and the woman could also shoot like Annie Oakley. A fine combination in this current world, and despite her efforts to tone down her looks, Yalonda wasn’t hard on the eyes either. She worked primarily with Nick’s squad, but volunteered for more missions than just about anybody. No one really knew her story, and Scott was afraid to ask.

  “Yeah, yeah, Yalonda,” Scott mutters through gritted teeth, “I’ll get right on that yoga, first thing.”

  Yalonda chuckled, her low, husky voice reminding Scott of finely aged whiskey. He knew it was just her voice and nothing suggestive, and Yalonda was about as flirty as a pitbull. Or not. Scott didn’t know anymore. After his marriage went up in flames, he tried to avoid getting burned again.

  With Conners’ help, Scott gathered up his rifle and gear, then shuffled out to the waiting Humvee. PFC Wallace had the wheel, Conners riding shotgun. Scott managed to fall into a seat in back, and Corporal Arness clamored in the other side, ready to take over the machine gun cupola if necessary. Someone had shoveled out the brass from the earlier shoot, but the interior still stank of cordite and body funk. At least the burnt powder was fresh.

  “Get her rolling, James” Conners said conversationally, and the driver proceeded to do just that. Out of the bullet-scarred window, Scott could see his nephew, Nick, lining out the civilian squads as they finished cleaning up the mess. Everybody handling bodies wore gloves and face shields, since these skinnies, like the one Scott captured earlier, stank to high heaven even before the decomposition started.

  The defense force members didn’t wear military camouflage, but they worked with the unity of purpose that marked them as well-trained and disciplined fighters. Scott was proud of these men and women, and he remembered his own days in the Corps. Fixing rotary wing aircraft might not have been a glamorous job, but Scott remembered they did it with a professional air and the same kind of dedication.

  “Captain Devayne still at the Chicken Ranch?” Scott asked, his voice pitched loud enough to be heard over the roar of the Humvee’s engine.

  “Yeah,” Conners replied, “but don’t let him hear you say that. Trust me, his wife is giving him enough grief over his choice for the outpost. ETA twenty minutes. You might want to sit back, relax, and try of some of that yoga stuff Yalonda was recommending. Loosen up those muscles a little.”

  Scott looked over at Corporal Arness and shook his head when he saw the corporal’s feral grin. The tall soldier’s long legs were already pressed against the seat in front of him, making the exercises not just problematic, but downright painful. No way. Maybe he had room for some isometrics, but that was it.

  “Maybe I’ll just watch my sector,” Scott replied, mainly to himself, and shifted with a wince as the Humvee hit a bump. The suspension wasn’t designed for passenger comfort, after all. No, for that you had to bring your own seat cushion, and Scott hadn’t packed one. Oh well, he thought with a trace of humor, at least I won’t fall asleep.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Disease, starvation, and open warfare in the streets and towns made for an ugly ride, but Scott had long since become accustomed to the scenes of destruction. He spent the trip with his head on a swivel, watching for anything out of place.

  In reality, this area had managed to survive better than most places Scott had seen the last four months. Yes, most of Gentry looked like a burned-out wreck, but even just a few miles outside of town, Scott saw signs that not everything had been lost. Some people managed to fortify their properties, doubling up with neighbors and family to hold out against the roving bands of starving looters.

  Scott knew the Community Center in Gentry, the site of their just finished battle, was really a feeding station for the locals, helping them get enough calories to bridge them until their gardens came in and could be harvested. Darwin saw to that, as he subtly worked with the farmers in the area to make their crops stretch as far as possible. Corn was a staple, and mush might not be all that appetizing in the old days, but in this new work, a warm bowl of any kind of food definitely hit the spot.

  Eggs, too, became a staple for many in the area. In addition to the many small holders who raised their own chickens for local use, this corner of Arkansas hosted a huge number of commercial chicken operations, mostly run in an assembly-line production style that Scott quietly abhorred. Yes, you got your ninety-nine cent Chicken Nuggets, but the process was not pretty. He’d toured one of these scientifically sound but soulless plants once years before, and had vowed to only eat what his brother’s farm produced from that point forward.

  After the lights went out, though, things got a lot uglier. The computerized feeders and waterers shut down, and hundreds of thousands of chickens began dying of dehydration in the dark. To their credit, some of the farm workers managed to salvage a tiny portion of the flocks, cobbling together workarounds that kept the poultry alive. Scott knew it was hard, backbreaking labor to haul creek water to the pens, not to mention carting around hundreds of pounds of chicken feed, while it lasted, and most of the delicate birds died anyway, but some small percentage managed to survive.

  Scott was thinking specifically about their destination, and the man who made it all possible. Parmeyer F
arms was the place, and George Salazar was the man who made it happen. George, plant manager for the operation, rallied a small contingent of his workers into staying on the job with promises of food and shelter at the farm. The actual owners, a mid-sized ag corporation headquartered in Kansas City, had no idea about George’s plans, and that was just as well. Gambling on the lights being out for the foreseeable future, George salvaged what he could at the poultry farm and fortified the main complex, even while re-introducing the birds to the ‘free range’ lifestyle. Without the antibiotics and growth hormones, many of the chickens sickened and died, but some persevered and lived to spawn a new generation of bug-eating, field-scratching fowl.

  Of course, the farm was beset early on by hundreds of hungry neighbors, and instead of trying to run them off at gunpoint, George did the unexpected. He started handing out live chickens to the hungry masses. Most were eaten immediately, and that was fine with George. He knew most would perish anyway, so at least he was able to buy some goodwill from the neighbors at the cost of chickens he need not have to dispose of after all.

  Some of those neighbors inquired about employment with the farm, and George had his assistant, Marcia, handing out applications. Even as almost every other business in the area, perhaps the country, ceased to operate, Parmeyer Farms was already expanding its workforce. With the dollar worthless, workers instead bargained to bring their families to the farm and be allowed to start their own little vegetable patches.

  Not everything was rosy at the Parmeyer Farm. Water had to be hauled from the nearby creek and boiled, and the sanitary conditions required careful attention in the location of the outhouses, but the mainly country folk attracted to the farm found ways to make do. Until the raiders started their attacks, of course.

  George had lost seven of his people to the first wave of attacks, including two children who perished when their family’s tent went up in a blaze, but they’d managed to stave off the attackers. The chicken farmers, the original workers, and those newcomers taken in, grieved their dead and vowed to be ready the next time. And there was a next time.

  By the time Captain Devayne’s scouts followed up the rumors of a chicken farm still in operation outside Springtown, the cemetery at the Parmeyer Farm held sixteen graves, and nobody knew how many attackers they’d killed. Hundreds, most likely. The pile of stripped corpses had been ghastly, Scott recalled grimly.

  Initially reluctant to deal with yet another armed and hungry group, George Salazar met with the sergeant in charge of the scouts and listened to the man’s prepared statement. Instead of simply rolling in and demanding the farm turn over their stocks of food and animals though, the sergeant simply asked if the leader of the Parmeyer Farms group would agree to listen to the proposal from his captain.

  George listened and now, he had thirty soldiers and their accompanying family members added to the mix at the farm. Instead of placing an undue burden, however, these newcomers actually brought some solid security to the place, and for the first time in months George was able to get a good night’s sleep. Plus, George could finally get back to the important business of raising chickens and bartering with other members of the National Guard’s network of protected businesses and agricultural concerns.

  The entry gate into the now-expanded farm complex resembled something from a medieval fort, Scott thought, except the walls and ramparts consisted of converted Conex containers. The sandbagged and reinforced machine gun emplacements looked thoroughly modern, however. The rest of the perimeter had not been walled off, of course. Instead, successive rolls of barbed wire encircled the farm, and Scott saw multiple lines of defensive works falling back from the first layer. Defense in depth, he thought.

  Much of the work was fresh. New additions to the farm since last Scott visited just two weeks prior. Fabricated by the soldiers and the civilians sheltered inside, who no doubt knew their lives and the lives of their families depended on those defenses holding. So far, so good, he mused darkly. This looked more like a firebase in enemy territory than a chicken farm, but food was scarce and bandits remained thick on the ground.

  Private Wallace skillfully negotiated the series of barriers set up to channel visitors, or their vehicles, up to the heavy iron gate and Scott recognized a few of the men standing sentry. Some were soldiers, National Guardsmen, while others appeared to be raggedly-dressed civilians armed with military-style rifles. The civilians, to their credit, looked as comfortable and practiced with their weapons as their military counterparts. Some, like Scott, were undoubtedly prior service, while others may have never picked up a firearm before the lights went out. Combat has a Darwinian effect on those who survive it, as Scott well knew. Some of it was luck, but bad habits or poor training also claimed a tithe every time men clashed. You got better, or you died.

  Trying to rid himself of his morbid mood, Scott tried to remember the name of the civilian head of security here, but drew a blank. He could picture the man in his mind, a skinny black man of average height with sharp cheekbones that made his skin look ready to part when he smiled, but the name escaped him for the moment. It would come to him later, he reasoned, and realized maybe he really was starting to get old. They say the mind is the first thing to go.

  After a quick exchange between Lieutenant Conners and the corporal manning the gate, a metal crash bar was laboriously raised by two privates using a chain hoist, allowing the Humvee to rumble through. Wallace accelerated smoothly through the kill zone and up the slowly rising asphalt road to the semi-circle of buildings that made up the main campus of the farming operation.

  On both sides of the roadway, Scott glimpsed the telltale mounds of individual fighting positions as well as covered trenches that encircled the property, reminding the old Marine of pictures he’d seen in textbooks. Photographs of the far off, bloody battlefields of France, circa 1917. Scott shuddered at this latest reminder of how far his nation had fallen.

  We should be working together to survive this catastrophe, he thought fiercely, not tearing the country apart. He knew the story of how George had started off, offering food and hope to the hungry masses. The farm still shipped out thousands of eggs weekly, some were for barter items for the farm while others were simply distributed at no cost through the area to places like the Gentry Community Center. And each shipment went in convoy via military transport, the reusuable cardboard egg carriers nestled in heavy metal troop carriers. The idea made Scott chuckle.

  “What’s the joke?” Arness asked, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of the big engine.

  “Just thinking about the weekly Chicken Run,” Scott replied. “You guys finally get an APC up and running, and what do you use it for? Egg deliveries.”

  Arness laughed at that before replying.

  “I guess it does look a little funny, at that. Of course, it does deter the ambushers.”

  “Yep, it does at that. I just hope…”

  Scott let the words trail off as his mind raced ahead. He was going to say, “…we don’t end up facing more of these zombie motherfuckers,” but he knew it was inevitable. Plus, some things just needed killing. Instead, after a pause, he finished with something else entirely.

  “I just hope we can find some more hogs to go with all these eggs. I do like my eggs with some bacon. Darwin’s got a whole bunch of sows, but we need more.”

  Arness laughed again as the Humvee pulled around to the parking lot and combat parked-backing into a slot between another Humvee and a battered, old 1950s Chevy pickup with welded metal shutters, shielding the cab on the front and sides. Scott recognized it as one of the farm trucks, and he noticed a lot more bullet holes than the last time he’d seen it. Well, times are tough all over.

  “Wallace,” Lieutenant Conners said as he eased out of the truck, “please see about topping off the tank while we are here. Arness, please check with the supply shed and see if they need anything hauled out to the farm. Within reason,” he added with a cautioning tone.

  A pair of �
��yes, sirs” sounded and Conners beckoned for Scott to accompany him into the small metal building converted into the company’s headquarters. The guard on the door gave them a scrutinizing look as the pair approached, but nodded in recognition as Conners came closer into his range.

  “How goes it, Jags?” Conners asked, and the old corporal shook his head before answering. The lieutenant knew Jagneaux was a coonass from Louisiana, relocated to Arkansas when his wife got a job with WalMart’s corporate offices. Jags was a good man in a firefight, steady as a rock, but with no ambition to climb the ranks. He was happy as a corporal and would likely remain so for the rest of his military career. However long that may last.

  “I think the fuckers are probing us,” the slender man replied, “but you can get the scoop from the old man. He’s waiting inside.”

  “Got it. Keep us safe, corporal.”

  “You got it.”

  Scott followed the young officer into the entryway and on into a small outer room packed with soldiers, makeshift desks, and a collection of communications gear that’d looked old when Scott had still been in boot camp. Field telephones, mostly, with a few radios tuned to the most common AM, FM, and HAM frequencies.

  Captain Devayne was indeed waiting, and he waved Scott and Lieutenant Conners on immediately into the what had once apparently been a small equipment storage room. Now converted to be an office, the tight space had just enough room for a door draped across a pair of sawhorses and three folding metal chairs. No amenities and the only light came from a small kerosene lantern set in a corner.

  “Love what you’ve done with the place, Captain,” Scott murmured, and Conners cut him a surprised look. Scott seldom indulged in what most would consider chitchat, and he wondered if Yalonda had slipped him more than a few anti-inflammatories. Catching the glance, Scott chuckled lightly.