Push Back: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (The Disruption Series Book 2) (53 page)

“Presuming they even think about it,” Tex said. “This never occurred to me.”

Wiggins nodded. “Necessity might be the mother of invention, but desperation is its favorite aunt. I gotta get home, Tex.”

“Well, we have a better chance now.”

Wiggins nodded at the open hoods. “This place hasn’t escaped notice completely; it looks like someone’s taken the batteries. I’m betting all the gas tanks have been siphoned dry as well. We’ll have to swap the battery out of the Honda.”

He moved to the driver’s side of the nearest truck and glanced in. “No keys. We’ll hot-wire one if we have to, but let’s look in the building. We might get lucky.”

The building had several large roller doors, with a regular man door to one side. The man door was open, obviously forced. They entered cautiously, guns drawn. The pitch-black interior yielded no ambient light for their NV gear to intensify. They listened, but heard only dead silence.

“We’ll need flashlights,” Wiggins said softly as he raised his NV glasses out of the way.

When he was sure Tex had done the same, he switched on his flashlight. It illuminated a cavernous maintenance garage served by the large roller doors. To the right was a large office, overturned desks and chairs visible through the open door.

“Let’s try the office,” he said.

He found a key cabinet on the far wall, standing open with empty hooks, keys scattered on the floor beneath it. Wiggins piled keys on a nearby desk to sort through them. He’d found several Ford keys when Tex spoke.

“Well, well, well. What have we here?”

Wiggins looked up and his face split into a grin. Tex was ten feet away, playing her light over a large route map of New England rail lines, thumbtacked to the wall.

“Great find, Tex. We’ll be taking that.”

Tex was already removing it.

Wiggins jammed a handful of Ford keys into his pocket. “I’m going to try these keys. If one of them works, I’ll start swapping the battery over and gas up.”

“Okay,” Tex said. “I’ll poke around a bit more to see if I can find anything of use.”

Wiggins grunted his agreement and headed for the door. The keys were marked, but the system wasn’t immediately obvious, but there weren’t that many keys, so Wiggins just climbed into the first truck and tried them one by one. He hit pay dirt on his fifth try and hurried across the parking lot to move the Honda over to transfer the battery.

With the new battery, the pickup turned over smoothly, and Wiggins was filling their new ride with gas when Tex showed up and dumped the folded railroad map and a small plastic bag in the front seat of their new truck.

“Find anything of use?” Wiggins asked.

“The map’s the prize,” Tex said. “But I did find a portable air horn and refill cartridges. If we’re gonna ride the rails in the dark, we might want to sound like a train at some point.”

Wiggins laughed, his mood much improved. “Well, you never know. I’ll finish fueling, then siphon the gas from the SUV into one of the empty cans. Would you start transferring everything else over?”

“On it,” Tex said.

***

Half an hour later they were ready to roll, but hadn’t quite decided the best direction to roll in. They grabbed the rail map and went back inside where their lights would be shielded. Wiggins spread the map out on a desk and studied it under his flashlight.

“It’s almost four,” Tex said. “If anyone saw us come in here lit up like Christmas trees, they might come nosing around come daylight. We need to be well away from here and out of town before sunup. What do you think, maybe an hour or so to get out of town, then another hour to get off the rails and find some place to hide?”

“Agreed.” Wiggins traced a line on the map with his finger. “We don’t have to plan the whole route now, but if we head north to Greenfield, we can pick up this line running east, which looks like it connects with northbound lines well outside Boston. We’ll fine-tune the route when we stop for the day. For now let’s just get the hell out of here.”

***

Unfortunately, getting the truck lined up on the rails proved to be a matter of trial and error and not nearly as easy as Wiggins anticipated. They used a nearby street crossing with Wiggins driving and Tex giving hand signals, and it took them almost an hour before the truck was centered on the rails with the guide wheels locked in place. Wiggins cast a worried look at the lightening eastern sky as Tex climbed into the passenger seat.

“Let’s hope we get better with practice,” she said.

“Let’s hope we don’t have to use it long enough to need much practice,” Wiggins said.

Despite the inauspicious beginning, the truck moved smoothly on the rails. Though, Wiggins’ dreams of speeding home were dampened by the large safety notice on the dashboard, limiting the top speed on straight track to forty-five miles per hour and dropping that to thirty for curves, and warning of the near certainty of derailment if those limits were exceeded.

They’d just made a sweeping turn to the left under the Mass Turnpike when Wiggins nodded at the sign. “For sure we won’t be outrunning any bad guys.”

“Which is why we’re running in the dark. Speaking of which, it will be full light in a half hour or so,” Tex said, her NV glasses flipped up as she studied the map with a flashlight. “The delay is going to cost us. If we follow our original plan, we’ll be in a populated area come sunup.”

“Plan B?” Wiggins asked.

“We’re in it,” Tex said. “We’re in a heavily wooded area for the next few miles, with no roads or buildings for at least a half a mile on either side of the tracks. Stopping on the track along here is probably the safest option.”

“Okay,” Wiggins said, tapping the brakes.

Chapter Thirty-One

On the rails

Wooded area

Near Westfield, Massachusetts

Day 34, 4:25 p.m.

They decided one of them would keep watch in the driver’s seat in case they had to run. Wiggins volunteered for the first watch, and Tex stretched out in the backseat of the crew cab and was dead to the world in minutes.

Wiggins was poring over the map for the tenth time when he heard Tex stirring. He looked back over the seat and smiled.

“Lazarus awakes.”

There was a red ridge down Tex’s cheek from a seam in the upholstery, and her hair was flattened on the side of her head. She looked about groggily, then glanced at her watch.

“You let me sleep all day, Bill!”

Wiggins shrugged. “You needed it, and I’m too excited to sleep anyway.” He grinned again. “Even at thirty miles an hour, I’ll make it home by morning, Tex.”

“All the more reason to sleep. You can’t drive all night—”

“Oh yes I can, and I’m going to,” Wiggins said.

“Okay, but don’t forget the river crossings, even on the railroads. There are at least four major—”

“Twenty-nine,” Wiggins said.

“What?”

“There are twenty-nine major rail bridges on our route. We’ll cross the Nashua River five times, and some big creek I never heard of six times, and several of the rivers twice or three times each.” Wiggins grinned.

“Then why are you so happy?”

“Because ninety-five percent of the crossings are out in the boonies without a road nearby, much less anyone likely to contest our crossing, AND I confirmed we can give Boston a wide berth. We still have to transit some smaller cities, but I don’t think we should have a problem on the rails in the dark.”

“Still, we need to be cautious. For sure some of those railroad bridges are going to be blocked or guarded,” Tex said.

“Yeah, but it’s like we were talking about before. People guarding the major highway bridges pull cars across the road or make other strong barriers because they EXPECT cars might try to crash the roadblock,” Wiggins said. “But where we’ve seen railroad bridges guarded, have we ever once seen one with a substantial barrier?”

“No, I’ll grant you that. But that doesn’t mean—”

“That’s exactly what it means, Tex. Anybody guarding a railroad bridge is expecting to stop pedestrian traffic or maybe bikes or motorcycles, or at the very most, a car bumping along at slow speed. Nobody will expect a rail vehicle to take a bridge at speed, and it’s such an unlikely event they’re not likely to waste time constructing a barrier against it.”

“I agree, this is our best option by far,” Tex said. “I just don’t want to see you get your hopes up too high. We’re bound to have to go through some rail yards, and we don’t know how all the rail switches are set. Or the blackout might have left a train on the track somewhere, blocking our way, or any one of a dozen things—”

“In which case we raise the guide wheels, get off the track, drive around the problem, and get back on,” Wiggins said.

“Which we found out last night is not quite as easy as it sounds,” Tex said.

“Well, maybe,” Wiggins said, his enthusiasm not noticeably dampened.

***

Wiggins’ patience was tested almost immediately when he suggested leaving as soon as it was full dark. Tex pointed out they had to transit Holyoke to reach open track, including a section of track running down the center of a city street for a half mile. Wiggins grudgingly conceded the point, and they delayed their departure until eleven.

Once clear of Holyoke and running north at full speed, a new variable surfaced; they were much noisier than anticipated. The guide wheels rode the tracks with a metallic hum and shrieked a piercing lament as they rounded curves. Likewise, there was a clunk at each rail joint, not unlike the clackety-clack of a freight train, but with a different cadence due to the short length of their vehicle and the odd spacing of the guide wheels and the truck tires.

“So much for stealth,” Wiggins said. “I’m sure we can be heard for miles.”

“That might be a good thing,” Tex said. “Nobody’s likely to try to stop a train, and by the time they figure out we’re NOT a train, we’ll be long gone.”

Despite Wiggins’ determination, he soon realized his goal was unrealistic. Braking of the rubber tires on the smooth steel rails was touchy at best, and every time they came to a rail yard, they slowed to a crawl, fearful they might find themselves switched to a siding and hurtling toward a stationary string of freight cars.

Likewise, the sound they produced at full speed gave far too much advance notice to anyone who might be waiting at a rail bridge. After some discussion, they decided to slow down well in advance of all bridges and creep forward in the dark until they could use their NV gear to see what awaited them.

It was an expenditure of time made all the more grudgingly because Wiggins had been right about most of the bridges. However, on two occasions their caution paid off, and they spotted guards ahead. The first time, they crept close enough in the dark to dash across and escape down the track before the sleepy guard knew what was happening.

On the second occasion, the guard was more alert and raised a powerful flashlight as they barreled toward the bridge. But Wiggins and Tex were prepared. They’d raised their NV glasses, and Wiggins hit the high beams just as Tex blasted the portable air horn in the guard’s direction. The terrified guard leaped to one side, and the pickup rushed past. By the time the guard recovered, Wiggins killed the lights, and the pickup sped away in the darkness.

They were through Lowell by three o’clock, and halfway through Lawrence when Wiggins let out a resigned sigh. “We’re obviously not going to make it tonight. We need to start thinking about a hiding place. We’ll push across the Merrimack at Haverhill and out of the city. The track runs through rural areas north of there.”

“The Merrimack is a pretty substantial river,” Tex said.

“Definitely not one of the ninety-five percent. It’s a major crossing in an urban area, so I expect it’s guarded.” Wiggins laughed nervously. “I guess we’ll see how valid my ‘no barricade’ theory is, now won’t we?”

Tex studied the map. “There’s another problem, I’m afraid. There’s a commuter train station to the left, then a long sweeping curve. We won’t be able to see a thing until we’re practically on top of the bridge, and if we take that curve at anything but a crawl, those metal wheels will squeal a warning. Anyone there will know about us before we know about them.”

“What’re you thinking?”

“I’m thinking we should stop before we round the curve and check it out on foot,” Tex said.

***

Wiggins began slowing as soon as he saw the commuter rail station, and they rolled to a silent stop just as the tracks began to curve left. They started down the track on foot, carrying their M4s and moving cautiously.

They reached a viaduct, which carried the tracks over a city street. Tex touched Wiggins’ arm and pointed; the street passing below them ran the short distance to the river and onto a car bridge. Wiggins followed Tex’s pointing finger to see a roadblock across the bridge entrance, glowing green in his goggles. Three cars blocked the bridge. He could make out people seated in each of the cars, and one man leaning against the hood of one, holding an assault rifle.

“Well, there are definitely toll collectors on the car bridge, so there’s probably someone on the rail bridge, since they’re side by side,” Wiggins whispered.

Tex nodded, and they started across the viaduct, being careful not to miss a step and plunge between the ties. They were halfway across when Wiggins spotted it.

“Well, so much for that theory,” he muttered softly, then pointed to a car parked across the tracks a hundred feet away.

Tex studied the scene for a moment before responding. “It looks like there’s some sort of little parking lot there, so all they had to do was back across the tracks.” She paused. “I see one guy at the wheel zonked out. You see anyone else?” she whispered.

“Negative,” Wiggins whispered back. “Stay and watch the roadblock while I take care of the guy in the car and roll it out of the way. If those guys down there hear us, be ready to discourage them from charging to the rescue too quickly.”

Tex nodded and Wiggins moved forward. He circled around to the driver’s side of the car and studied the man through the open window. His head lolled back against the headrest and he was snoring softly; drool dribbled from the corner of his open mouth. Wiggins put the muzzle of the M4 against the man’s head.