Fireside (6 page)

“Thanks for the warning, Ted,” Nicole replied. “I’m Nicole and this is my friend, Tyler.”

“Nice to meet you,” he replied. Tyler mumbled a likewise response that he didn’t feel since he was potentially moments away from a horrible death.

“So, like we were saying, we want to offer you the safety of living in San Angelo.”

Ted snorted once again, “Safety! You folks don’t have any idea about safety. I can already tell your type. You think rolling around with overwhelming firepower is the way to go. Strongholds, that’s what will see us through now.”

“We agree,” Nicole replied adamantly. “We have basic walls around the habitable parts of our city, but we need an expert to help us make them better.” She pointed at the metal grates covering the doorway. “You’re obviously the expert that we need, Ted. You did all of this by yourself and without any power tools.”

He beamed under the pretty young woman’s compliments. “Yeah, I guess you could say that I’ve had a lot of time on my hands.” His laughter at his own joke seemed a little off to Tyler. Maybe the months of living alone in his fortress had slightly unhinged the man.

“There’s something else, Mr.… I’m sorry, what’s your last name?” Tyler asked.

“Winston. Ted Winston,” he replied.

“You may have been safe before, Mr. Winston, but the cities are running out of food. Depending on how many people are left, they may already be starving. I guess you could say that San Angelo was lucky because we had our revolution early on, only days after the war. More than two-thirds of the population was killed, so we have a lot more food than other places. I traveled to Missouri right afterwards, and a little more than a month after the nuclear bombs fell, the people in Springfield were starving to death. They did some pretty awful things to each other.”

Tyler tried to shut away the memory of baby Kayla’s mother. He and Aeric had been outside on the street when they heard her screaming. They rushed in and interrupted her rape, but she was shot and killed during the fight with the two men who’d attacked her. They brought Kayla back to Aeric’s childhood home and she’d been a part of their family ever since.

He focused his thoughts and heard the end of Nicole’s comment, “And it will happen to you too.”

Dammit! What had she said?
he chided himself. “Yeah, she’s right. You’re in grave danger living here all alone.”

“I don’t know about that, Tyler,” Ted answered. “I can pretty well take care of myself. You guys wouldn’t have been able to get in.”

“What if I strapped some C4 to the wall and blew a hole in the cinder block?”

The engineer seemed to consider it for a moment and sighed, “You’re right. This place won’t stand up to explosives. Holed up in this building, I don’t have any sort of stand-off distance to keep marauders away. So far, I’ve relied mostly on staying hidden. If you folks knew where I was, then that probably means that others do as well.”

“It’s a good bet that they do, Mr. Winston,” Tyler replied. “We can take you back to San Angelo, where you’ll be safe, in return for your help with designing our defenses.”

It certainly wasn’t the mandate that they’d been given when they were told to go clean out the warehouse in Garden City, but Tyler thought that the engineer’s addition would be a huge help to the city. He obviously knew how to design defensive systems and had done all of the work on the community center himself, imagine what he could do with a force of a couple thousand workers.

Ted Winston thought about it for a moment longer and made an exaggerated effort to remove his thumb from the button that would have coated them in oil. “Alright, I’m listening. What do you propose?”

*****

The rest of the day went by quickly as the Gathering Squad loaded the two trucks with food and supplies. Mr. Winston had amassed quite a bit of food from all over the town as the former residents left Garden City for the
safety
of Midland-Odessa, abandoning what they couldn’t carry. They stacked water off to the side, if they had room for it, then they’d take it, otherwise it would be left behind and they’d have to continue to use water from the lake.

Once they’d cleared enough space on the floor, Traxx moved the trucks inside the community center’s cargo doors and closed them so they could secure the location against the coming darkness. Their experience in Sterling City showed them that they didn’t know much about this part of the country and all of them thought it was best to take as many precautions as possible. The crews worked long into the night to ensure that everything would be ready to go by morning.

Aeric had been prepared to offer Ted Winston a home in San Angelo, so he was fine with Tyler and Nicole’s offer to the engineer. Ted seemed to be the real deal when it came to engineering—the type of person they desperately needed. The security upgrades to the building would have been impressive back in the old days, when there was electricity and scores of people to do the work. The fact that he’d dismantled oil pumps, dragged those parts here and turned them into near-impregnable gates on the doors and windows was amazing. And hiding the defenses so the building looked to be abandoned was a stroke of genius. If Ted could apply his expertise to the walls and checkpoints of San Angelo, it could improve the city’s security a hundredfold. The possibilities were nearly limitless.

Aeric was sure that he could convince Mayor Delgado to allow Ted to stay, even with the current ban on new citizens. The city was overpopulated and the addition of another person wouldn’t help. However, with the death of the Russ, it would technically be a zero sum gain in population for the city. Semantics.

Early the next morning, everyone was ready to go. Ted went through the building that had been his home for almost ten months one final time, ensuring that he hadn’t left anything behind. He paid one final visit to his wife’s gravesite where he’d buried her in the grassy area of the business next door. The town didn’t even have a cemetery, but they had the damn football stadium. When Ted was satisfied, the group mounted their bicycles and began the long, slow journey back to San Angelo.

The trip was seventy-five miles, only about a two-hour trip in the vehicles. However, the men and women riding their bikes expected to be on the road for at least six or seven hours—if nothing out of the ordinary happened. Aeric considered trying to avoid Sterling City by traveling through the desert and ultimately decided against it. They’d been through the town after they burned the convenience store and other than the strange feeling of being watched, he felt the route that they’d already cleared would be the safest bet.

His estimate of the group’s travel time was off. Including breaks and being overly cautious as they went through Sterling City, it was nearing nightfall by the time they made it to San Angelo’s Western Gate. Aeric was surprised to see Lieutenant Griffith on duty. It was odd since she almost always worked the day shift. He greeted her warmly as his bike coasted to a stop near the barricade.

“Hey, Lorelei! You’re a sight for sore eyes.” Aeric and the lieutenant had met each other only a few days after the war when he and Tyler were on the way to Missouri to find Aeric’s family. He’d been the one to tell her and her Army platoon about San Angelo. Her soldiers were given the mission of guarding the interstate entrance in Richland, Texas before the war started. It turned out to be a stroke of luck for them since their base at Fort Hood was hit with a small nuclear missile that devastated everything in the valley where the base sat.

“Traxx! I’m glad that you’re back. You’ve got to come with me.”

“What’s wrong?” he asked in alarm as Tyler’s bike skidded to a stop beside his.

“Kate went into labor yesterday a few hours after you left.”

Aeric did the math in his head, she was somewhere between seven and eight months pregnant. Not good. “Is she alright?”

“No,” Lorelei stated. “She had the baby—a boy—and except for being small, he seems healthy. Kate isn’t doing well, though. When I left this morning to come here and pick you up, she was barely holding on.” Aeric appreciated that about her; she would tell it to him straight without trying to sugarcoat bad news. Information passed more efficiently that way.

Aeric glanced at Tyler. His friend’s face showed concern for Kate. “I’m gonna go with Lorelei to the hospital.”

“Don’t worry,” Tyler said. “I’ll get the trucks to the Provisions Warehouse and make sure everything is unloaded. We’ll send the trucks back to Goodfellow as soon as we’re done so we don’t burn that bridge if we need them again.”

Traxx nodded and accepted his friend’s hand, “Thanks, brother. Come to the medical center as soon as you can.”

Aeric sat heavily on the passenger seat of Lorelei’s tan Army Humvee. It was the same truck that she’d been in when he first met her over a year ago. They’d ripped out all the computers and the monitor that showed them where the other units were located. They were all alone now, there wasn’t anyone left to see. They’d left the military radios installed so they could talk across the city for rapid dissemination of information.

The military equipment was designed with an EMP in mind, so it had been fine after the war. The lieutenant’s platoon initially thought that their radios were damaged in the attack, but realized that their gear was good. It had been the repeater towers that were wiped out from the blasts. Once they made it to where Fort Hood had been, they’d understood why nobody answered them at the base.

Except for the low hum of static from the radio speakers, they rode in silence through the city towards the hospital. Aeric watched the houses fly by as Lorelei expertly maneuvered the big vehicle around obstacles in the streets, taking note of violators the entire time. Even though almost everyone was using bicycles and the occasional horse to move around town, the mayor still wanted the streets clear of debris so they could respond rapidly to emergency situations with the few working vehicles that they did have.

They reached the San Angelo Community Medical Center in less than ten minutes. Early on, it had been decided to consolidate the multiple clinics across the city to the one, centralized location. The much smaller population didn’t need more than one facility and the medical center, while older than some of the others, it fit the bill perfectly. It had everything that a society living without electricity would need.

Aeric mumbled, “Thank you,” to his friend and rushed inside. Stacey, one of the clinic’s nurses, was in the hallway when he went inside. Gone were the days of a dedicated greeter sitting behind a desk performing administrative duties.

Stacey knew Aeric well from all the injuries to the Gathering Squad and the occasional death of one of his people. “I’m so sorry, Traxx. We tried everything we could do.”

“Where is she?”

“Exam room three. Follow me.”

She led him down the hallway to a small room. Inside, a standard hospital bed sat, forever positioned where it had been when the EMP struck. A body rested under a sheet. Aeric knew it was Kate.

“I’ll go get Doc Huerta,” Stacey said as an excuse to give him a moment of privacy.

He pulled the sheet aside. Kate’s blonde hair fell over the edge of the bed. Her face was swollen in the effort of childbirth and her lips were blue with the loss of blood. He brushed the hair away and touched her cheek. Her skin wasn’t cold like they used to show in the movies. Instead, it was the same temperature as the room her body had sat in for an untold number of hours.

Aeric reached down and touched her stomach. It gave and jiggled slightly, no longer holding Justin’s baby that she’d carried since he raped her repeatedly. He wondered if the baby had survived the ordeal. Lorelei said that it was healthy, but her information was hours old. Kate had also been alive when she left for the Western Gate. There was no telling what had happened since then.

The doctor cleared his throat behind Aeric and he turned to see the older man standing in the doorway. “I’m sorry, Traxx. There was nothing that I could do for her. We couldn’t stop bleeding after she gave birth to the baby.”

“Is it… I mean, is the baby alright?” Aeric asked.

“Yes. The boy weighs four pounds thirteen ounces. He’s small, but it looks like he’s a fighter. He would have been put into the ICU before all this,” the doctor gestured in a circle towards the ceiling. “Now the only thing we can do is to keep him warm, keep him fed with formula and make sure that he doesn’t get dehydrated. That’s about all we can do medically.”

Aeric nodded dumbly. He hadn’t expected to become a single father and was at a loss. The only baby he’d ever held had been Tyler’s stepdaughter Kayla. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do all by himself.

Sensing Aeric’s apprehension, the doctor continued, “There is one thing that we could try, from the homeopathic standpoint. Now, keep in mind, it’s not medical science, but there’s plenty of observational evidence to back up the treatment.”

“What is it, doc?” he asked. Aeric would try just about anything that the doctor told him. Katie had been the one with all the experience and who’d read the books, he’d always just planned on picking it up as it went, supporting her when she needed it.

Doc Huerta shrugged and said, “The best thing for the baby is to have skin-to-skin contact with a woman.”

“Huh?”

“It helps a baby feel comforted, nurtured. That’s extremely important for a newborn’s development. Contact with the father is encouraged, but babies respond better to a woman for some reason. Kate was able to do it last night until she died. One of the nurses agreed to hold the baby for a little while this morning. Do you know anyone who’d be willing to help you for at least a few weeks, preferably a couple of months, until the baby has grown beyond the danger point?”