The Orphans (Book 4): White Lie (17 page)

Lou gripped Greg by the shoulder stopping him from leaving for a minute. “Look kid, are you being straight with me? Is what you are offering up really true? Is it something you can follow through with?”

Greg nodded and said, “You know what, if you get there and don’t like it, you leave and come back here. The fence is to keep the Turned out, not keep us in. It’s meant for safety, so is the perimeter guard we have set up. The weapons training we do is for a few hours a day.”

Lou smiled, thinking of the fact that he could be free of this place, that he could sleep and that his daughters could sleep and would have more protection going forward then he could offer the two of them if he never slept again. Greg went out through the stairwell exit and when they got back to the door that kept Ellie, he brought the rifle up with intentions to bring it down on the handle, but Joey was already swinging and smashed the handle clean off. He sent a second earth shattering crack of the aluminum bat into the door, effectively swinging it open. Greg rushed in, swiping the rifle and aiming exactly where he was walking. He saw the sled for Ellie was still perfectly in place and because of that, he felt a sense of relief. He pointed the rifle at the door and whispered, “Lou, that’s the door that Ellie is in.”

Lou ran over to it and slid the sled out of the way. He opened the door and could see Ellie in the room still laid out on the bed. He checked her vitals quickly and saw that it wasn’t as bad as the boys might have thought that it was. He lifted her up and Joey came in behind, gathering all of the supplies that they had brought and throwing them into the bags they had.

Greg looked out the door, praying to see that maybe Shaun would be wandering back towards the truck to replenish on ammunition. He wondered how much he would have left after the bursts of fire that he had heard earlier. Greg wasn’t dumb though, there was no way that Shaun was going to waste what ammo he did have on him. He turned around to see that Joey and Lou started heading back up to the third floor. Once they arrived safely, he took a place next to the sliding glass door in the apartment and started flipping through the channels on the radio, hoping that soon he would pick up Aslin or Clary or anyone up so he could relay their position and get a helping hand out of the place.

Lou had placed Ellie down on the ground next to the fireplace, sending his daughters for soft blankets and something with a little bit of padding to it. He unzipped Ellie’s coat and rolled her to her side and pulling up her shirt. Lou used a bottle of water to clear the dried blood and removed the makeshift bandage. He used peroxide to clean the wound and examined it. He looked over at Joey who’d not taken his eyes off of him since they started and said, “It isn’t from those things. There are no teeth marks anywhere, something else caused this. This isn’t what is keeping her out.”

Joey walked forward seeing the long gash in her back and asked, “Are you sure about that Mr. Lou?”

He ran a hand over Ellie’s head and said, “Yeah I’m pretty sure, I don’t know how bad she is though. We don’t have the equipment necessary to do anything that we need to here. But from the bump on the back of her head, I'm thinking she has one hell of a concussion or serious head wound.”

“So is that a good thing or not because I can guarantee you Shaun is going to be your new best friend when he finally makes his way back here?” Greg asked.

He laid Ellie back down on her back, looked at her face and features, not taking very long for him to figure it out. “Let me guess, is Shaun her boyfriend?”

Greg said, “They probably wouldn’t admit to it but I'd hate to be the guy that hits on Ellie in front of Shaun. They’ve been on and off again for quite a while, going back and forth if it’s a good idea to date, blah blah blah same ol’ story.”

Lou’s daughters both laughed at this and Lou looked at Greg who’d removed his coat and had just a t-shirt on underneath it. He saw that there was a good chance these kids had been doing some very serious workouts on that base and realized quickly there was a really good possibility that his daughters, who hadn't seen a boy that didn’t want to rip them to pieces, might not think Greg was hard on their eyes. Lou said, “Don’t laugh at boys, they are nothing but-”

His older daughter Karen finished his sentence for him. “Trouble, boys will only get you in trouble and they only want one thing.”

Theresa laughed at this and Lou said, “Don’t encourage your sister. Karen doesn’t need any help being a smartass.”

Greg laughed and Lou gave him his full attention. “You make sure that you don’t touch my daughters or I don’t care what kind of weapons you have got on you. There is nothing scarier to face than a pissed off father.”

Greg looked at them, thinking that could actually very well be an issue that they have to worry about at some point. He said, “Well for now why don’t we hold off on the courting sir and just try and get everyone safely and alive to the base.”

Lou quickly shook his head then focused on opening up his kit and stringing a thread and needle. “I’m going to clean this wound out as well as I can and make sure that this thing gets a really good stitch and bandage. Do you guys have a doctor on that base?”

Joey smiled proudly and said, “Nope, but we are gonna have a really good nurse Mr. Lou.”

Lou went to work on the cut, doing the best he could to leave her with as little of a scar as possible. He knew he could have done a better job if he had all of his gear from a hospital but that wasn’t a choice at the moment. He said, “You know if we hit a hospital, it might not be a bad idea to pop in and resupply. I want to stay away from the one where the outbreak happened but any other ones are probably fair game. I can’t imagine there hasn’t been a lot of stuff taken, but there should still be plenty of supplies left. Those hospitals are stocked for a war.”

Greg was still flipping through channels and said, “We have an Army hospital and it is set up for a war. You’ll have everything that you need there and probably more. It’s going to be nice having someone who has a clue about medicine there.”

Lou looked to the girls and said, “Sounds like you best get your stuff going and make sure there isn’t anything else not packed that you care if we leave behind, or that you want to take with us. Greg, you know you two could ride with us, there’s no reason we need to wait for your friends if you don’t even know if they are coming or not.”

Greg hadn’t thought about this but started to seriously consider the prospect of it. “Yeah we could I guess, but we couldn’t leave without knowing where Shaun is. There could be something just as bad going on with him and I wouldn’t want to leave him sitting out somewhere by himself. If you guys want to keep doing the radio, then I'll go out and look for him. I’m sure that I can pick up his trail if I go back to where he left at the grocery store down the road.”

Lou looked across the open field that stretched to the road. The wind was blowing again and the snow with it. There would be no way that the kid would find any trace of his friend, especially after being here for over an hour. Lou said, “You could try kid but I think that you’d be fooling yourself. There is a foot of snow out there and you don’t stand a chance if you go out there on your own.”

Greg kept flicking the radio hoping to either hear from Aslin or Clary. A voice finally came back on the other end of the radio,
“Hello, Greg, Shaun, is that you?”

Greg looked up to the sky wondering if maybe there was a God. He replied, “Oh thank God, yeah it’s Greg, who is this?”

Hammond came back over, “It’s Hammond, man are you in deep-”

Aslin slammed on the brakes of the truck sliding to a stop. He held out his good hand, wincing at making motion happen in his bad arm because of it. He yelled, “Give me that God damned radio now.”

Hammond fumbled with it; he’d heard Aslin mad but was confident that this was an entirely new level of being pissed off. Aslin hit the transmit button and asked, “Greg, is everyone okay?”

Greg said, “Uh, no.”

“Expand on that would you, where the hell are you?”

“We are in Urbandale, it’s not far from the base, you shouldn't have much issues getting here, you’ll see our truck on the bridge, we are just east of there in an apartment complex.”

“So everyone is safe and alive Greg?”

“No, not everyone.”

Aslin started punching the dash of the truck, cursing more than the kids had heard in a while. He punched the truck’s radio so hard that they were worried the airbags were going to deploy. “God damn it Greg, who did we lose?” Aslin asked.

Greg wasn’t speaking on the same terms as him. “We lost Shaun and Ellie is hurt pretty bad.”

Aslin said, “I can’t believe this shit Greg. Just to confirm, it was you who talked them into leaving?”

“I didn’t have to talk them into anything, I flat out lied that you guys said it was ok. I thought that we could get off base for a while and that we could find some survivors to bring back, you know, make some sort of a difference.”

Aslin said, “And because of your lies Shaun is dead and Ellie is hurt, and you still don’t know where any one is?”

Greg said, “No, no, no…..I don't know if Shaun is alive or not, when Ellie got hurt we had to carry her on a sled, we found an apartment complex not far away from the truck. If you swing by the grocery store, that is where I'd look for him at. He told us to head this way but we haven’t seen him anywhere. That was about an hour ago.”

Aslin just looked at the radio trying his best not to lose his shit until they all made it back to the base safe and sound. Aslin looked at the kids in the rearview mirror and wondered what opposite world he was living in where his backup were kids that had probably not even gotten laid yet. He asked Greg, “Do you think you can stay there? I mean if it’s going to be that easy for us to find you, just stay put, don’t do anything else stupid. I want the three of you ready to go once we pull up. Is there anything out by the apartments that we need to worry about running into?”

Greg said, “Yeah there are Turned, but we took out most of what was on the first floor. As long as none of them come out from the second floor I think that we will be ok getting down to you. We have plenty of help getting Ellie down the stairs and to your Humvee.”

Aslin, not wanting to get into this conversation until they were back, said to Greg, “We are now driving a large black dually pickup truck; you won’t be able to miss us. You keep an eye out for me so we don’t have to honk. We both know what kind of unwanted attention that is going to get us. We are going to swing by the store first to try and find Shaun; we need to get him out of this weather if he’s outside.”

“Hey, Aslin…..I'm sorry about all of this. I don’t want to ask any favors but there is an entire floor of people here that need to come back with us. One of them is even a nurse, something that you have to agree would come in handy having on the base right?”

Aslin figured anyone who wasn’t completely locked down had been dead for months. “Wait, you mean- you mean there are still people around. You found some survivors?” he asked.

“Yeah I didn’t find a few, did you hear me? I found a floor of them, there has to be at least twenty five or thirty people here. The one’s that I've spoken to so far have been helpful and brave. They fixed up Ellie so that she wouldn’t keep bleeding but said she has a pretty intense head wound. He had a long explanation that I didn’t understand but the gist of it was that she is in some sort of a coma because of a concussion.”

Aslin started driving again. “You hang tight, tell the people that we can make trips if need be to get everyone that is willing to go back with us, ok?”

“No, they have cars, there are garage units attached to the apartment, they all have their shit...I mean stuff ready to go, they aren’t stupid Aslin. Probably smarter than me, to tell you the damn truth.”

“Like I said, just stay there. And Greg, you and I are going to have a very long and in depth come to Jesus meeting. I can only assume that Clary is going to want in on this and we are going to have to fight over who comes up with the shit duty that you are going to be in charge of doing until we cool off from this.”

Greg, assuming and obviously not knowing that there had been any loss today, said, “Geez man it isn’t like we lost anyone. I admit Ellie getting hurt sucks but this Lou guy seems pretty optimistic that she is ok. It wasn’t like I did it on purpose. I had nothing but good intentions when we left today.”

Aslin snapped and couldn’t pull the words back in. He yelled, “Well your good fucking intentions got Shelman killed today. We had gotten into a collision on our way to find you and someone fired their rifle on accident as a result. They would have never been in that goddamn truck if you would have just done what you were fucking told to do Greg. Sometimes you do such good work and make such good leadership decisions, then other times you just fuck up to no end. You need to learn to think. There isn’t a reason to go out on all these missions you always ask about if all you are doing is bringing back people to die. We need to take this seriously, you need to step up or step out because you aren’t going to stay this lucky forever. You took three people with you today and from what it sounds like all you have is Joey who isn’t damaged. You don’t know where Shaun, your best fucking friend, is and Ellie is in a coma now. Can you tell me one good thing that has happened besides finding those people?”

Greg looked at Karen and Theresa thinking that definitely wasn’t the upside to the day that he had been looking for and said, “No, no sir there isn’t anything that I can think of that is going to put a good spin on today other than there might be a lot abler bodied smart people out there that we can bring back with us than we thought that there were.”