American Apocalypse Wastelands (6 page)

Crossing roads this way didn't feel real to me. It was like we were playing war. Yet I knew by now that the appearance of prosperity and peace was a leftover illusion of an earlier time. The reality was that half the houses we passed were trashed inside, filled with human shit and
graffiti. The nice McMansion behind the trees could hold a pack of feral boomers waiting like spiders for the unaware.

 

We didn't see as many people on the trail as I expected. Back by the motel the bike trails had always been busy. People commuted back and forth from the Tree People enclaves to the shelter or to our little shopping center. The woods may have been hunted clean of their wildlife rather quickly, but firewood kept the people going back into them. That and water from the streams. There was also an element that naturally gravitated to the woods. For the most part they were not the most well-adjusted people.

Our first day out we saw only one man. He was out jogging, which I found rather funny. He wore a T-shirt with a blue globe and some sort of bird on it. It was pretty faded, which I guess is why he was jogging in it. When he passed, I read The Fighting 13th written inside the circle.

He was in good shape and had obviously spent some serious time in the sun. He was wearing a tan SWAT-style holster with a 1911 .45 in it. Actually, it looked a lot like the rig that Max wore.

Max gave us the FREEZE hand signal—his fist raised up in the air. We all froze, but only Ninja mimicked Max, remembering that we had been taught to pass the sign down the line.

The jogger saw it also and stopped. He was running in place but he wasn't coming any closer. Max gave the DISPERSE LEFT signal, which is a no-brainer to remember. We moved off into the grass and weeds. Max didn't move. I heard Night mutter, “I hate freaking ticks.” I was going to talk to Max later. I didn't like her in front of me. I
wanted her behind me, where I would be in a better position for stuff like this.

Max surprised me. He saluted and said loud enough for the jogger to hear clearly, “Semper Fi,” and stepped off the trail.

The jogger nodded at Max as he passed. He checked each of us as he went by, his face impassive. Once he passed us, he turned and ran backward, moving like that for about twenty-five feet. Then he snapped off a quick salute, turned, and was gone. Max didn't say anything. He just got us back on the trail and with a brief wave of his hand he had us moving again.

The rhythm was not right on the trails, but Night and Ninja didn't seem to notice. Night had spent very little time on the trails back at the motel. Ninja had, maybe, more time than her. I had put more time on the trails in a day than those two had in a year. The flow was off.

Later, during a break, I asked Max, “What's up with nobody on the trail?”

“I don't know. We'll push for a couple hours more and then break for lunch.”

I craned my head around to look at him. I knew that tone, and seeing the look on his face only confirmed it. When I stood up I made sure my Ruger was loose inside the holster and slipped the leather thong off the trigger. Night saw me do it and gave me a questioning look. I just shook my head and smiled.

I was worried about her. I wasn't sure if she was up to the grind. So far, everything was good. She was a trooper. Hell, if I had to, I would wear her pack up front and mine on my back. I hoped it wouldn't come to that, though. I was already feeling what I was carrying of hers.

Lunch was simple. Today was a no-fire lunch. We had apples and bread, with water to wash it down. It was good.

I caught Night looking at me quizzically a couple times. Something wasn't right, and now she seemed to feel it, too. I gave Max a look and got the nod in return. I was carrying my shotgun slung across my chest. I didn't like it that way. I was going to have to find a better way of carrying it. For now, though, I was going to keep it unslung and in my hand.

Ninja was busy chattering away to Night. She was not saying much in return, just a nod and a yes every two or three minutes.

“Max.”

“Yeah.”

“I want to take point.” I thought I would get an argument.

“Sure,” he answered. To all of us, he said, “We're going to change things up a bit for the rest of the day. Gardener is going to be point, but I am going to move off the trail into the tree line and walk almost parallel to him. The fancy word for this is
echelon
. I think it's French,” he grinned.

“Ninja, I want you behind him. Drop back to about twenty-five feet. Night, I want you about fifteen feet behind Gardener. You have the right side. Ninja, you have the left. Night, take a look over your shoulder every ten steps or so.”

She nodded her head.

Ninja grinned and said, “Cool, I am almost point.”

“Yep,” I told Night, “our boy is growing up.” We were laughing when Ninja held his hand up in the FREEZE sign.

He whispered, “Someone is coming.” The kid had good ears. I heard it about a second later.

Bicycles. They moved past us—two men and a woman, each bike towing a carrier. The carriers looked homemade, except for one that was a converted kid carrier. No kids in it that I could see.

All three of them were white. One of the males was wearing a tie-dyed shirt, which told me a lot about them: probable Burner sympathizers. The woman was not bad looking. Her brown hair was in a ponytail that bounced along behind her. All three were armed. The man in the front had a hunting rifle over his back; the woman, a holstered pistol. The guy bringing up the rear—he looked like it was killing him to keep that bike rolling—had an AR-15 look-alike over his back. He was the oldest by about ten years.

They were there and gone in a couple seconds. I noticed Ninja watching the woman's ass as she pumped the pedals. Yep, the kid was growing up. I elbowed him and grinned. Night just looked away. A faint smile flashed across her face.

That's when it struck me. Where were all the refugees? With the Feds tightening the D.C. Zone and expanding their lockdown, we couldn't be the only ones who had decided to move out. I had a good idea of what was going on. I was hoping we could bypass it.

 

We kept moving along, and I tried to get into the rhythm of walking. When I'm by myself, I prefer to keep the stops to a minimum. Maybe a breather every once in a while, which for me means stopping and bending over at the waist so my pack shifts enough that it feels like I'm not wearing it for a few minutes. Then it's back to moving. I liked to push until I felt like I was on autopilot.
With it came a detachment from my physical self that was pleasant.

 

We couldn't move that way now for a lot of reasons. My gear was bothering me. The weight didn't feel distributed right. I couldn't retrieve my water bottle without stopping and dropping my pack. Plus, my new sheath knife was interfering with how my gun belt rode on my hip. I noticed both Ninja and Night fidgeting with their gear. It was just part of the process of settling down, until your gear became as unnoticeable as the clothes you had on.

We all wore knives. Everyone in our part of town did. Max wore a KA-BAR, of course. Night wore a fisherman's fillet knife.

 

I could never make up my mind. I changed knives and bought knives the way kids used to buy sneakers. Then I moved from knives to daggers after a while. I thought they looked cool and they certainly were effective for one thing.

The problem was they were useless for everything else. The fifth time I found myself using a dagger to cut string or leather for tie downs, I realized how useless they really were. You couldn't use the tip for a screwdriver. Well, you could, but you ended up with a dagger with a broken tip. Cutting bread or an apple? Let's just say it was overkill. I finally took to wearing a Swiss Army knife on a leather thong around my neck. Not very cool—I felt like a latchkey kid—but very handy.

I couldn't give up wearing a belt knife, though. I had the image thing to worry about. So I was wearing a KA-BAR like Max. I was beginning to wish I had brought a machete. The sides of the trail were overgrown with Queen
Anne's lace, daisies, burdock, and other plants whose sole purpose in life was to trip me up when I needed to take a piss and to decorate my pants with ticks and burrs.

Ninja carried the same knife he had worn for the last year. He was really proud of it when he bought it at the market. It wasn't just a knife. It was the Dragon Knife. Made in China, of course. Stainless steel, with a handle shaped like a dragon's head.

He thought it was awesome. I thought it was ridiculous when he first showed it to me.

“Ninj, what the hell is that?”

“It's my Dragon Knife!”

I shook my head and handed it back to him. “It's stainless steel. You need carbon steel.”

“No, I don't.”

I rolled my eyes. “It's a fantasy knife, Ninj.”

He pointed at the medieval dagger I was wearing back then. “What do you call that?”

He had a point. I held up my hands. “Fine. It's yours.”

After he had walked away, unhappily, I thought to myself,
Wow, nice job, asshole. He's a freaking kid.
I made a point of looking him up later, reexamining the knife, and grudgingly praising it.

When I told Night about it later, she laughed and told me, “He wanted to buy a Ninja sword, but no one had any for sale.”

The sun was beating down on us. Max had told us we were not going to push it past early afternoon for the first week. He also told us that after we stopped for the day and settled in, he wanted to look at everyone's feet. I had a feeling that it would probably turn into a teaching
moment, which was fine. Max didn't beat his points into the ground.

Out of the corner of my eye I caught the occasional bird. I saw a red-tailed hawk soaring above us one day. That was pretty cool. On the trail I saw a lot of Virginia butterflies, also known as gypsy moths.

Maybe that was why they almost always caught me by surprise. Well, not surprise, but off-balance for a second. Probably because it was so unexpected.

I berated myself later. There was no excuse for it. Nowadays, a second meant everything.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I was walking point and had come to a bend in the trail. I could not see around it because of the plants and a fallen tree. I should have held up my fist in the FREEZE sign and gone on by myself first. I didn't. Yet another mistake. Instead, lulled by the sun and walking on autopilot, I just kept going.

What awaited us was a little different from what we usually dealt with when we walked our beat back in Fairfax. Yet in many ways it was the same. It was always the same type of people up to the same kind of shit that they always get up to when no one is around to kick their asses.

The first thing I noticed was a fat, jiggly, very white ass pumping up and down, with a big boil or zit on it. I normally would have shot the guy just for violating the gross and ugly law, but he wasn't alone. They never are.

Also standing with his back to me was a skinny white man with a bunnytail ass and his pants around his ankles. He had long, scraggly gray-and-white hair, and even from this distance it was easy to tell that he needed a wash.
Not just his hair, either. He had a fair amount of blood on him. On the ground off to his right lay a bloody machete. He was watching Fatboy and jerking off.

About four feet away, two more white guys watched the show. One had shaggy blond hair and wore a Polo shirt and khaki pants. He held a hunting bow. My guess was that he was the leader. He was smoking and pointing at Fat Boy pumping away.

He said something to his sidekick, a middle-aged white guy who looked like every high school gym teacher I had ever seen. In his hand he should have had the AR-15 that was at his feet. Instead he had a bottle. They both began laughing.

It was easy to see what must have happened. The guy in the tie-dyed shirt had come around the bend. I'm sure he had seen the downed tree out of the corner of his eye. So when he saw the pine limb across the path it did not set off any alarms, especially since the trail dipped down to cross a stream about twenty feet further on. It had a bridge once, but it was no longer usable for bike traffic.

He had stopped, probably quickly, which wouldn't have helped him any as far as getting to his weapon. Not that he'd had a chance. He'd taken an arrow to the neck and looked as if he'd choked to death.

The woman probably narrowly avoided plowing into him. They must have been on her right away—probably two on her, with the Leader standing back and Bunnytail working his machete magic on the older guy bringing up the rear. It had been a fast and efficient slaughter.

They quit laughing abruptly when they saw me. I shouldered the shotgun. Bunnytail turned around to see
what the big boys were looking at, mouth open, his hand still moving. Fat Boy either didn't hear me or was too close to the edge to care.

I took out the sidekick with the AR-15 at his feet. I didn't like shotguns but I respected them. In World War I, they called them trench brooms because of how well they swept a trench clean of anything living.

As I was racking back the slide I heard the boom of a .45 from my right. Max had taken out the Leader, his bow still at his side. That left the two in front of me. Bunnytail took my buckshot at crotch level. It wasn't pretty.

I felt someone coming up behind me. I really hoped it was Ninja because I wasn't turning around to take a look. He stood next to me. I noticed he was breathing a little hard. Night came up beside us, and together we stared for a minute at the carnage and the two survivors.

Max was moving toward us. He had moved to my right and into the brush without my hearing him. I could tell he was getting ready to say something. It was probably going to be along the lines of “What the hell you gawking at? Is this what I taught you to do?” He didn't get a chance.