Sunburn (Book 1, The Events Trilogy) (8 page)

17.

Will was traveling light as he headed back to West Virginia
on the Honda. He wanted very much to see what had happened to his home and mountain hideout. With the cover burnt away it would be very easy to see the house from the valley, if there was anything left of it, and the door to the shelter would have been obvious too.

When he got there after half a day’s peaceful ride, he got a shock. The wind apparently had changed that day and the fire had not
ravaged his mountain, but had swung by to the south. The access road was camouflaged just as he had left it, and when he rode up to the house, nothing had been touched, not by fire and not by human hands.

Somehow this affected him very deeply and he sat down on the stairway to the deck and wept. Something he had not done since he was a child. To find something
saved from all the chaos was indeed a miracle and gave him hope. But hope for what? What did it mean, really? Could Mary and he really come back here and live? And how to resupply after the last can and cracker were gone?

Will had realized that Mary had been lonely here before they left. There had been little to do
after the Event except watch TV and read, or look at the changing light in the valley, and Mary was not quite the reader he was. She was much more, as women tend to be, a social creature. He had sensed her restlessness. He now realized that she was more important to him than the fantasy life he had imagined living alone here, the last man on earth—

Here in the West Virginia hills the roads were narrow and curvy, just what a guy on a Honda likes, but Will Fisher didn’t take advantage of the good riding looking for the Forestry camp. He was cautious, looking for any kind of traps that might have been set for him like the one that had knocked them down in Maryland.  In the few days he had spent at home he had welded an ‘L’ of metal vertically on his bike to cut any unseen wires that could be stretched across the road. It still remained to test it.

The countryside was as it had been weeks ago, barren of people and any life he could see, except for a few deer that had crossed the r
oad far ahead of him. The deer family no longer appeared at the salt lick and Will could only speculate on what might have happened to them. Walter had made an appearance, taking advantage of the now unused salt lick. He seemed to be looking at Will sadly, as if aware of the tragedy that surrounded his wild world. Though the Indians had been known to eat bear meat, Will was sure it was not on anyone’s menu even these days, especially while still alive. While not particularly aggressive as bears went, black bears could be fearsome opponents if threatened.

Had people eaten the raccoons and the squirrels too, or was he just not seeing them?

He slowly worked his way higher into the hill country. He had a map of West Virginia he had liberated from a deserted gas station on his first day. He had a GPS at home but that technology would be down until more Atlas III rockets could be built and launched to put new satellites into orbit. All the earth satellites had been fried the first day of the Event. So it was back to this ancient but reliable method.

Since the Amish didn’t like the BAR because it had been made to kill people, he had taken it with him and so he felt equal to any hostile challenge that might confront him. But
nothing happened.

He didn’t stop at any of the houses or farms along the way. He had gotten close one time and had smelled what was inside and that had been enough for him. He slept two nights in the open and only the mosquitoes and ants had bothered him.
The second day he found a gun store that had been stripped of everything of value. There were several cartons of AA batteries in the back of the store and no one would have bothered to take them before, assuming them to be like all the others, drained by the ambient static charge. But Will took a box of six from the center of the carton, wondering if had been somewhat protected like that. He inserted two of them in his Nikon pocket digital camera. He had kept it because he liked it and hoped someday to find batteries again. The batteries in this box when he put them in the camera, showed only half their potency, but it was enough for the camera to take some pictures if he was careful.

On the morning of the third day he
found the abandoned forestry camp. It had been abandoned long before the Event and the paint had peeled and weather to a gray color. There were ten bunkhouses which still had their old iron stoves and double bunk beds and several other buildings that might have been for meetings or laboratories. Will decided that it would be a little tight, but everyone could at least sleep here from the Old Amish Community and the Wild Men. But how to sustain themselves long term?

He walked about and carefully took pictures of the fields and farm buildings. Too a dozen before he decided to stop to be sure there would be power to show them back in
Pennsylvania. The photos showed plenty of land open for cultivation or grazing in the area. But how would they get all their stock and farm equipment here? He was still mulling this over as he rode down into the valley that led across the Maryland Panhandle to Pennsylvania.

When Will got back he found the Community in turmoil. Bands of Horde people had been spotted to the west and an Amish man passing with his buggy had picked up a teen-aged boy who had approached him. He had somehow escaped the horde. The boy was filthy and deranged with terror.

“They hate her!” he kept repeating, wringing his hands and pacing
back and forth. He could not be induced to eat.

“How long has he been like this?” Will asked.

“Since yesterday,” Samuel replied. “We can’t figure out who he is referring to or why they hate—“

The
boy’s recurrent rant repeated again.

“Wait,” said Will.
“Listen! He’s not saying ‘hate.’”

“They ate her,” the boy said.

The Community perimeter watch was increased and Will went out on the Honda that day and the next to try to establish how far the Horde had gotten and how many they were really dealing with.

“I could sit behind y’all with the BAR and do some serious damage,” volunteered Jack.

“I’m sure you could,” Will replied. “And sooner than later I think we’ll be using your idea. But right now I’m just scouting with these here binoculars, trying to see how much time we have and how we can defend ourselves.”

Later that day, W
ill climbed into the bell tower of the Southern Baptist Church of Smoketown. It was a big white church with a tall steeple and he had a good look at the countryside in all directions, but he was particularly interested in the view to the west. He had a good pair of binoculars that Fred had lent him. So good that he was able to see something he wished was not there to see. 

He climbed down from the steeple and got back on his Honda, confused and upset by what was on the horizon to the west. It had seemed like columns, like an army on the move, but more fluid, more disorganized. But there were a lot of whoever was out there. Were they like the five men he had killed at the house with Mary? Better? Worse?

He decided to go take a look.
Nothing too risky. Just get close enough to see if they were armed and with what. Did they carry supplies? How were they feeding so many people?

On the way he stopped and rested in a field, watched the afternoon fade into sunset. The Horde would not be moving at night, he decided. That would be the best time to get as close as possible on the bike, then creep closer and try to get a better look. The moon was half full so there would be some light, but not too much.

But it never came to that. As he maneuvered closer off road that evening he came across a man sitting on a hill by himself.

“Who are you?” the man asked, looking askance at the Honda.

“My name is Will. Are you with them?” he indicated with a head motion. “What’s your name?”

“More or less.
My name is Mark.”

T
he man looked in his thirties, very skinny and dirty, and stammered when he pronounced his own name.

“Where y’all going?”

“Don’t know. We don’t talk to each other much. No one’s asked my name in a long time. It’s as if we don’t really have names anymore. We walk, drink from a stream, fill our water bottles, catch something to eat, put it over a fire for a while, eat it. Move on. Like that.”

“What is there left to catch?” Will
asked carefully.

“Not much. Animals, when we can find them. Not many left.
Any people who are not us. Not so many of those left either. Any of us who die for various reasons. There are more of those. We manage. It’s a little better than dying, but not much.”

Will was chilled by Mark’s peculiar affect.
“
A little better than dying
.” Will couldn’t see how it was better at all.

“So y’all sleep the whole night?”

“Usually we all sleep after we eat and the camp is quiet. I couldn’t sleep tonight. I don’t know why.”

“Are there leaders? People who decide where to go? What to do?”

“Not that I ever heard. There might be for all I know. We just get up and move until we find something—“

“Yeah, yeah, I get that!
Did you have a family? What happened to them?”

“We lived in Harrisburg,” Mark said.
“Louise and me and our six year old daughter. They died of something bad they ate, I think. So many people were dying in the city, it was hard to be sure why. I left after I buried them in the yard.”

Will didn’t know what more to ask. The Horde was
apparently composed of people, or the husks of the people they had once been. No leaders, no goals, just keep moving, eat and drink whatever you can.”

“I’m going to go now, Mark. Thanks for talking to me.”

“Can I come with you, please?” Mark asked suddenly. “I used to make parts for GPS instruments, but that’s gone and I don’t want to be with these—
“ he seemed at a loss for the word—“people any more. I wouldn’t be any trouble.”

Will
stared in surprise. He would never have imagined that there was still a human core alive in the shell of a person before him.

“Sure, you can come!”

One less enemy, one more on our side, he thought.

Mark got on the Honda behind Will and they continued the reconnaissance of the Horde.

18.

At the end,
Will and Mark rode across the saddle between two low hills. In the valley below they could see some campfires flickering, but weak and far apart. There seemed to be no attempt to keep them fed. He could get no idea of their numbers from Mark except “a lot,” and Will was sure that even this small group was bigger than all the people working the Amish farms. Mark said that the people he had left had no firearms now. There had been a few rifles and revolvers long ago, but when the ammo ran out there was no more to be had.

Will thought again about the movie “Zulu” that the biker had mentioned back at the church. He knew rather more about the battle of Rourke’s Drift than the movie had
shown. There had been an intense battle and the Zulus had lost ten percent of their number, several hundred trained warriors, charging the breech-loading single-shot rifles the British had at the time. Then the chiefs had decided the cost would be too high to overwhelm professional soldiers defending a fortified position with firearms and bayonets. The British, for their part, had taken ten percent casualties as well, only 17 men.

If the Horde attacked
the Amish Farms in the next few days there would be no leaders to say “stop, it’s too much.” There were no leaders and no “too much” any more. The defenders would have to kill and kill and kill until they ran out of ammunition and when they did it would be over for them.

If he got back tonight, could he convince them all
to just leave and abandon farms that their families had worked for three hundred years? Unlike Moses he had a few photos of the Promised Land and was waiting for the appropriate time to show them to Samuel and the Elders.

And what would the bikers, the so-called “Wild Men” do?
Go with them? Stand and fight? Go off on their own?

And could
the Old Order Amish make it out of Pennsylvania, across the Maryland Panhandle and up into the mountains of West Virginia, with their horse drawn buggies and their livestock trailing along? My God, he thought, it would look the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt!

And that’s how Will pitched it to Samuel and the Elders when they got back. They had invited Jack and Tom from the Biker farms as well seeing as this was something Will said they all had to hear and discuss. The Elders were not happy with the presence of so many strangers at the meeting but they swallowed their annoyance to let Will report.

First he told them what he had seen to the west and at night, scouting the Horde encampments. He
introduced Mark and he was given food and water. The poor man ate like he had not eaten for a month. People looked away in embarrassment.