Infinity's Reach (15 page)

Madrigal got into the driver’s seat and I got into the front seat on the passenger’s side.

“Keep your backpack and rifle with you,” he said, tersely. “And keep your eyes open for trouble.”

I watched the side streets for soldiers, and once saw a group of them headed toward the north. But they didn’t seem to pay attention to us at all, and we kept driving west.

“It’s a good thing neither side has any air force,” Madrigal said at one point. “The last attack helicopter was shot down yesterday. One of those can sure ruin your day.”

I sat with my head on the window, watching the insane world I had inherited pass by me. Suddenly there was an explosion right in front of us, and our car careened over on its side. I was thrown on top of Madrigal as the car slid through the street.

“You OK?” he asked, looking up at me. He was bleeding from a facial cut. I nodded.

“OK, grab our stuff and climb out the window,” he said. I threw my backpack and then his out through my broken window. I climbed into the opening and he handed our rifles up to me. I jumped through and then he climbed out as well.

I hadn’t been scratched, but Madrigal was bleeding badly from that head wound. We sat down on the side of the street and caught our breath.

I reached into my backpack to find something to stop the bleeding, but he waved me away.

“We’ve got to keep moving,” he said. He pointed off to our right. Down a side street I saw a large shape moving toward us, accompanied by a rumbling, clattering sound. A tank.

I helped Madrigal to his feet and we started running west again. Two blocks later, we saw a dozen men waving at us to get out of the way. I wondered why and then saw that they had some sort of rocket.

“It’s a Javelin,” Madrigal said. “Tank killer. I’d love to stay and watch, but we have got to keep going, Sweetheart.”

This time, I didn’t object to the term.

We ran as fast as we could along the boulevard going west. We got another two block before we heard a boom. I looked over my shoulder. The tank we had seen was on fire in the middle of the street, but the dozen men we had seen huddling behind the car were gone, the cars on fire as well.

“Glad we didn’t stick around,” I said. I looked over at Madrigal, who didn’t look so well. He was struggling to keep up with me. Suddenly he stopped.

“What?” I asked, looking at him. Then I turned to see what he was staring at.

Ahead of us, a line of vehicles, tanks and soldiers were coming right for us from the west. There must have been at least 200 men.

“Good guys?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” Madrigal said. “Let’s go south.”

“Good idea,” I said, and followed him toward the south. A slight hill rose ahead of us. We jogged up the hill to the ridge above, and once again were surprised to find soldiers to meet us wearing the uniform of the Missouri National Guard.

They grabbed us and shoved us to the back. It was obvious that they were lying in ambush of the convoy that we’d seen. Madrigal and I found safety in a half demolished home a hundred feet behind the line of soldiers.

Madrigal and I pushed our way into a cellar beneath the house, and a minute later, it sounded like the entire world exploded. Once again, I was thankful that we hadn’t stayed to watch the battle.

Suddenly there were three booms, one after the other. The last one resulted in the wooden beams above us collapsing in. There was noise, pain, and then darkness.  
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18. DAYS OF WANDERING

INFINITY: ST. LOUIS: DAY 793

That last explosion was a turning point in my life. In fact, it was a signal for what the next two years would be like.

I woke up to find myself in a makeshift hospital. I was on a cot inside a large high school gymnasium, along with about a hundred other people. I had bandages on my head and left arm and an IV stuck into my right. I started moving around and trying to get up and a woman about 40—I assume a nurse—came up and pushed me back down.

“Don’t try to get up just yet,” she said. “You’ve been unconscious for five days.”

“Five days?” I whispered back to her. “Where—where are we?”

“You’re in Pinkneyville, Illinois,” she said.

“Illinois!” I repeated. “I can’t be in Illinois. I’m going west.”

She shook her head. “No one is going west. Not anymore. They’ve closed St. Louis and the whole Mississippi to traffic. They’re kicking everyone out.”

“Who are they?”

She grimaced. “The great and all-powerful warlord Ajax. He’s in charge now.”

I stared at her as if all of this were a bad dream. All of the hard work that Madrigal and I….

“Madrigal,” I blurted out. “The man I was with. What happened to him?”

The woman shook her head. “As far as I know, you’re the only one they pulled from that basement. But you can check with Mr. Appleton to be sure. He has a list of those rescued.”

I found out later that I had a concussion and a broken arm. They kept me there another two days, during which time I was able to talk to Mr. Appleton and learned that there was no record of Madrigal on either the list of those injured, or on the refugees. The logical side of me decided that he was probably lying dead in the bottom of that basement, but the emotional side said he probably got out before the warlord’s forces got there.

Apparently the Missouri National Guard put up a good fight, but there were just too many troops on the other side, and in the end Ajax was finally able to declare himself Mayor for Life of St. Louis. That’s when the exile happened. Anyone who was injured, or decided they didn’t want to live under control of a warlord was given 24 hours to evacuate to Illinois. Then all of the bridges were blown, armed guards were sent to patrol the shore, and mines were placed in the river. St. Louis, with its power and factories, now belonged to one man.

When my two days were up, I caught a ride in the back of a wagon to a refugee camp farther east, near the Kentucky border. They had rescued me, but not my rifle and backpack, and right now I was as destitute as most of those around me. I had no food, no way of getting food, and no guide. All I had were those things that Evangelist had taught me.

I stayed another week at the refugee camp, healing up and learning what I could about the political situation. I also tried scrounging up whatever I could find, and found that I was a terrible scrounger. Finally, at the end of a week, I had bartered and negotiated for one thing of value; a rusty kitchen knife. Its wooden handle was falling off, it had chips and dings in it, and it was covered with rust, but I knew that it was a start.

I found a stone and began using it to clean off the rust and sharpen the blade. I got a rabbit skin and wrapped it around the handle and strengthened it. Finally I had a tool that I could use to make a weapon. That’s about the time when I realized I had to leave.

It started when people began looking at me strangely. Finally I saw three big men talking among themselves and looking over their shoulder at me while I was in food line. I had made friends with Sadie, one of the women servers there and I asked about it.

“What’s their problem?” I said as Sadie slopped some thin mashed potatoes on my plate.

“They’re thinking they can cash in on the reward,” she said.

“What reward?”

She motioned with her chin to the bulletin board in the corner with a handful of sheets of paper on it. It took me a minute to figure out what she was directing me to.

There in the middle, in black and white, was a photo of me taken from my high school yearbook. Beneath it, in large letters, it read: “Wanted: Alive. Infinity Richards. 500 cap reward.” Lower down, it said: “Deliver her to the nearest Coalition camp for your payment.”

“Girl, if I was you, I would leave this camp,” Sadie said.

I realized that she was right. Evangelist had done the right thing by having as little contact with people as he could. That night, I snuck back behind the meal tent and Sadie loaded me up with day-old bread and anything else I could carry. I didn’t have a backpack, but she found a burlap sack I could use to carry it with me. She also put in a thin blanket she had taken from her own possessions.

“Stay away from people,” she told me as her last bit of advice.

“I intend to,” I said, but I knew there was one last bit of business I had to take care of. I headed southeast, back into Kentucky. I stayed away from people, just as Sadie had recommended, but stopped by the nice family outside of Vienna we had given the venison to. They were overjoyed to see me, but surprised that I was still around. They also told me that they had seen wanted posters with my face on it. They told me that Coalition soldiers had been roaming the countryside, asking people if they had seen me. I thanked them for the information, and took the time to have dinner with them before I hit the road again.

I crossed the Kentucky line, and more and more got the sense that someone was looking for me. One late night, when my food stores were getting very low, I wandered into a little town and tried to find some food. I saw Coalition forces bivouacked at the edge of town. Fortunate for me, they had left a sack of flour and two large cans of beans unprotected, which I was happy to rescue from their clutches.

I found another starving family across the border in Tennessee, and shared the bounty with them. In return, the wife there made me hardtack, biscuits and dried strips of jerky to take with me.

I was near my destination, but all the while I sensed that I was going to be disappointed.

On the morning of August 13 I got to Fort Campbell—or what was left of it. It had been some time since the camp was destroyed. All the ruins were blackened, but there was no smoke and no embers. Green grass and mushrooms had begun growing in the ashes as well. As far as I could tell, Coalition forces had come through not long after Evangelist and I’d left.

Outside the camp I found a mass grave. It wasn’t much of a grave; just a shallow pit where bodies had been stacked, gasoline had been poured on them and lit. I couldn’t recognize any of the bodies after the burning, but there were enough of them to know that pretty much everyone had been captured or killed—or both.

After that, I did an exhaustive search of the base, trying to find items that would be useful to me. At first, it looked like the place had been stripped—and it had. Enough time had gone by that scavengers—human and animal—had picked the place clean. But I’d been a guest there, and so I knew of a few secret places.

It took a full day to go through the camp from top to bottom. In the end, I’d collected a frying pan, a set of knives, six wooden matches, two new sets of clothes, another set of boots—too large, but in good enough shape to trade—and an old, worn out backpack.

I’d saved the commander’s office for the very last. Somehow I sensed—hoped, really—that my greatest treasure would be found there. After an hour of rummaging through the room and especially his desk, I found a secret compartment in the top of one of the desk drawers. In it I found an old 44 Magnum pistol. It was a huge gun, way too big to be practical for me, and I fell in love with it at first sight. I knew that finding bullets for it would be difficult, but I also knew that just the sight of it would frighten many large men away.

I looked another half hour and found a half a box of caps—bullets—to fit the gun. I was elated.

As the sun was going down, I stood on the ridge overlooking Fort Campbell and said goodbye. Once again, my life had taken a turn, and I was entering its third phase.

And that was the beginning of my time of wandering. Once again I realized that I didn’t know as much as I needed to know. And so for months, I determined to live in the wild, away from people, only coming in contact with them when I could find an isolated family that I sensed was in need of help. I learned what I could, slept in trees, many days moving and behaving like a wild animal.

I knew that my future lay across the Mississippi, but every time I approached it, I discovered that fighting was going on on either side of it. I knew that eventually I’d have to cross, but I also knew that crossing would only lead me into more dangerous country than where I already was.

I was no longer the girl who had gone to private schools, waited to be taken care of and ridden in limousines. I was a wild thing, a product of the insane world that I lived in. My father was to the West, and I would get there. He deserved that from me. But in the meantime, I was growing into something that could survive on her own in any environment
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19. INTO THE BREACH

MACK HAWLEY: WICKLIFFE, KENTUCKY: DAY 1566

People used to ask me how I ended up in Wickliffe. Years ago, it used to be a little Podunk town just downstream from Cairo, Illinois. Not much came through there. Most of the rail and freeway traffic was on the north side of the Ohio or the west side of the Mississippi. And the only people who ended up in Wickliffe were people trying to escape the scrutiny of everyone else.

Then they stopped asking. These days, no one pays attention to state lines. You’re either in the Federal Zone or over with the Asian Coalition. That is, if you’re not in demon territory, or stuck in a hot zone, in which case, you’re Chuck out of luck.