Infinity's Reach (13 page)

We would hear howls and laughter in all directions, even floating over the water. The first hour we used up too much ammunition, until the squad leader convinced me that was what the crazies were trying to get us to do. After that, we watched and waited as they picked off one soldier, then another, and still another.

In the morning, fog surrounded us. We talked it over and decided to reconnoiter in force—in the direction that Private Chin had gone. That was fortunately also in the direction that Ellie said Infinity had been when she left her.

We organized ourselves, reinforced our body armor, loaded up on ammo, and marched off into the fog.

An hour later, we were all on a point of land that was the nearest we could get to the island. I stood there staring, realizing that one of us—or all of us—would have to go out there.

Sergeant Le pulled out a device that I had seen only at a distance once before. He flipped up a LCD and switched it on. It began to beep, and an orange light flashed beneath the screen.

“It’s a heat sensor,” he said. “If there’s anyone alive out there—or anything—it will register it.” I nodded, and watched. The screen remained green. “Doesn’t look like there’s anyone there.”

“Someone will still need to go out there and check,” I said, my own distrust of technology evident on my face.

“I’ll go,” Sergeant Le told me. I nodded and was glad to be in the company of other soldiers while someone else took the risk for a change. Le didn’t hesitate, but waded out into the fog, getting deeper and deeper into the water, then finally holding his P-5 machine gun above his head as the water went to his waist, his chest, and then his chin. By that time, he disappeared from our view.

We waited quietly for any word from him. Finally the radio crackled.

“Someone was here, and recently,” he said over the radio. “No sign of a fire, but someone was eating something. It looks like a boat landed here.”

“Someone must have come for her,” Ellie said, staring off at the island in the fog. “Evangelist. He finally came.”

“Evangelist?” I asked. “Who is Evangelist?”

“He’s the one who rescued us from the camp. He’s Secret Service. He was there the day of The Event.”

I looked at the ground, trying to remember any Secret Service agent I might have seen at St. E’s. Finally I remembered.

“There was a man in a suit that they pulled from the rubble,” I said. “They took him off to the hospital right away. He was messed up.”

“That must have been him.”

“Describe him to me,” I asked Ellie. “Age? Height? Weight?”

  “Young, about 27. About six feet. One hundred eighty pounds. Good looking.”

I frowned at Ellie, who I knew had added that last statement as a dig regarding my old relationship with Infinity.

“OK, then I guess we get back to the ATVs and get out of here.”

In response, I heard the vehicles start up in the distance. I cringed when I realized that I should have left someone behind to guard them, but after last night’s debacle, no one really wanted to be out here alone.

A second later, I heard a gun blast and a bullet flew out of the fog. It caught me square in my Kevlar vest. The force was enough to knock me backwards. The two soldiers I still had with me began firing wildly into the fog. I was on the ground trying to catch my breath, and wanting to tell them,
Stop firing at nothing, you idiots
.

Finally I was able to squeak out a “cease fire.”

The men stopped their shooting and they were met with laughter out of the fog. They looked at me, unsure of what to do. I scrambled to my feet and barked out the only order I could think of.

“Into the water. Out to the island.”

The five of us waited on the island as the helicopter came for us four hours later. The men didn’t have much to say, and neither did I. I didn’t find Infinity and in the process of looking for her lost half my squad and valuable ATVs to an invisible enemy.

I reported back to Colonel Apollyon—as he insisted I call him—ready to be put on latrine duty for the rest of my military career.

Instead, he was quite philosophical about the whole debacle.

“You were right,” he said. “Helicopters would have solved a lot of problems, and saved the loss of four good soldiers. We have a good sense of where they are and where they’re going. We know that Infinity Richards has some assistance and guidance now. It’s simply a matter of time.”

“Sir, Sergeant Le showed me a heat-sensitive scanner out in the swamp,” I said. “Couldn’t we use that to find them?”

Colonel Apollyon shrugged. “That might work if there were the only two people in the swamp. But I suspect that those others—the
crazies
, and Ellie called them—are all through that swamp. The sensor can show us where people are, it just can’t tell who those people are.”

“Why don’t we use a couple of gunships to empty out the swamp of people?”

“For the same reason,” he said. “We don’t want Infinity dead. A dead daughter isn’t going to be much leverage with her father. We need to capture her alive.”

“So what do we do?”

“We wait,” Colonel Apollyon said, sitting back in his chair. “We wait for helicopters. We set up a perimeter and hope they come out eventually. And we wait for word from anyone who will have seen them.”

Days turned into weeks. I got put on clerical duty—retyping reports and filing them. I spent my leisure time—which was considerable—playing pool and flirting with office clerks. Finally the Colonel called me back to his office.

“One of our spies in a town called Clarksville has reported that he has seen the two of them at a known loyalist training camp called Fort Campbell. We have a company of soldiers in trucks headed that direction, and they will arrive in about five hours. We will meet them there, encircle the camp and go in at night. With luck, we’ll have Infinity captured before breakfast.”

I looked at my father, so confident in his plan, and wished I could be as confident.  
Back to ToC

16. out of the frying pan

EVANGELIST: WESTERN KENTUCKY: DAY 769

Pilgrim was far from ready for what the road held in store for her. But I had run out of time; we’d both run out of time. I’d received word that I was needed up north. I’d also learned from a contact inside the Coalition base in south Ohio that they were making a move to capture Pilgrim. I knew why; as tough and rational as Father was usually, he’d always had a soft spot for his daughter. They were hoping to take advantages of those strong feelings and use her against him.

So not only did I know that it was time to go, I knew that we had to keep moving for the foreseeable future. After all, it’s harder to hit a moving target. Pilgrim would just have to learn what she needed to learn on the road; the school of hard knocks, my dad always called it.

We got out of Fort Campbell the morning of June 12 and headed northwest toward St. Louis across western Kentucky and southern Illinois. As the crow flew, it was 265 miles to our destination, but I had no intention of flying like a crow. Alone, I could have made the trip in about 10 days. But I knew that every day I spent with her was another chance to teach her something that would keep her alive, so I didn’t hurry. What I did know that was important was to keep the Coalition in the dark about our whereabouts. That meant as little human contact as possible. That also meant a roundabout path to St. Louis. I figured about 17 days for the trip.

It actually took 19 days, but even so, I was impressed by how well Pilgrim did. The weak little girl I’d enticed out of that prison camp was rapidly disappearing as she packed on muscle on the trail. She was a sponge, listening intently as I pointed out animal nests, showed her how to make traps or showing her the marks that a bear made on a tree. I only had to tell her once what she needed to do and she did it. And she never complained. Once a piece of jagged metal cut her hand when we were crossing a walking bridge. I cleaned it, added some Neosporin ointment that I kept with me for such occasions, and bandaged it. And I never heard a squeak out of her.

I still, however, got the feeling that she wanted to go with me when I left for up north. But she never said it. Her pleading in the cabin was the last time she verbalized her desire. In a different world, if she wasn’t 17, the daughter of The Secretary and the person I was sworn to protect, I might have taken her up on it. More and more, I was looking at her less as a burden and more as a partner.

I used an old atlas that I had scrounged from an abandoned bookstore to mark our progress. I kept off the main highways but we ran parallel to them. It took us about a week to get to the area around Paducah, in what used to be Kentucky. I started to suggest that we take a day to rest, but she seemed fresher than ever, and there were signs of combat in the area, so we pushed on.

She shot her first deer outside Vienna, and I taught her how to dress it. We didn’t have time to dry the meat, so she and I traded the hide and fresh meat we had—with the exception of some select parts—to a family who looked like they were about to starve. In exchange, we got her an old rifle and several books from their library. One was
Tom Sawyer
by Mark Twain and the other was an encyclopedia Letter S. I wanted her to read up on the area, so I hoped the encyclopedia could tell her something about St. Louis. Last but not least, I also got her her own Bible and took mine back from her.

Despite her protests, we took a day off when we got outside of Pinckneyville. I wanted to give her body a chance to recuperate, as well as the opportunity to read the books. After she read them, we talked.

“Right before the Event, the population of St. Louis proper was about 300,000. The area around it made up close to two million,” I said. “When the Event came, there were only two big U.S. cities that weren’t affected by the EMP. Those were Minneapolis/St. Paul and St. Louis. Because of that, and because St. Louis is right on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers and near the Ohio Rivers, it became the center of the Midwest. They’ve got operating streetcars, lights, even TV there. And hot showers! And of course, the population has tripled.”

“When were you there last?” she asked.

I scratched my chin. “I was there right before the Event, and then was there just about four months ago. Because they still have power and electronics, they’ve been scrambling to develop manufacturing there—radios, rifles, refrigeration—all the Rs.”

Pilgrim smiled. “No fighting?”

I shrugged. “Don’t think so. But that was four months ago. The city fathers had a truce between the local militia under a guy named Ajax and the Missouri National Guard. St. Louis was declared an open city, regardless of what happened in Illinois or in Missouri.”

“Sounds pretty nice,” Pilgrim said, grinning. “I can’t remember the last time I had a hot bath.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Like I said, that’s how it was four months ago. Let’s see what four months have brought us.”

On the afternoon of July 1 we got to the outskirts of East St. Louis. In years past, it has been a poorer section of town. As it was, it was obvious that some fighting had taken place here. Fires burned here and there, and a dark smoke lingered in the air. I looked for somewhere high for us to get a view of the area, but it took a while. Finally, we came upon a 12-storied brick building that was still standing. We climbed a metal fire escape outside, which led us right to the rooftop. We scuffled across the gravel roof to the western edge. Pilgrim brought out her opera glasses and we took turns looking out at the city of St. Louis.

The first thing that I noticed was that the smoke that surrounded us was heavier in the west. In fact, the farther west I looked, the darker the smoke became. Flashes of light and distant rumbles told me something I didn’t want to know.

“This doesn’t look good,” I mumbled to her.

“What is it?” she asked. She was answered by another rumble that sounded like distant thunder.

“That,” I said, “is artillery fire. Rockets maybe. Sounds like it’s about 25 miles away, far in the west. When we get across, we’ll have to link up with Madrigal quickly. Then you two will have to somehow go around all the fighting to get to the House of the Interpreter.”

“But I thought you said St. Louis was an open city,” she asked.

“I did, and it was,” I said. “Apparently that’s changed. Someone’s willing to fight over the city. We just have to get into it and through before the fighting spills out into the streets.”

She nodded, and I wondered what she was thinking, even though I didn’t have the luxury for changing the plan or even making excuses. We ran down the fire escape and I looked around, trying to decide if it was necessary to steal one of the few cars that I saw on the road. Then, as if in answer to my question, a yellow car fixed up like a cab drove by. I quickly whistled and he stopped.

We jumped in the back and looked at the driver. He was a very dark man with dreadlocks.

“We need to get to St. Louis,” I told him quickly. “What kind of currency do you accept?”

“What do you have, mon?” His accent was thick Jamaican.

“I’ve got caps, Canadian loonies, U.S. greenbacks, and am open to barter.”