-5-
Late summer turned to peaceful autumn on the McConley farm. The air breezed crisp as leaves reddened and yellowed, and the family lit a fire in the hearth for the first time that year. The ever-present knot inside Jill’s stomach finally loosened itself as she began to feel whole again.
Literally.
She stared at her feet every morning, watching them turn from buds to baby appendages to strange gnarled troll limbs, eventually to something that really belonged to her. Every day she gingerly tested them out, putting a bit of weight on them until the pain told her to stop.
One day she let go of all support and stood.
Victory! she crowed inside, but remained stoic on the surface. Standing wasn’t running, and no matter how many pull-up and sit-ups and careful push-ups with her shins braced on a padded railroad tie she did, she wouldn’t be whole until she could run.
Once her routine had consisted of thirty to fifty kilometers, three days a week, and ten just to keep limber on the off days, interspersed with lots of swimming and bicycling. She’d swum in the creek’s deep pool in the back, and it felt good to eel under the water with all four limbs moving freely, but it was still nothing like training, nothing like being really fit and at the top of her ability.
The first time she’d walked from the barn to the house the family had stared, then burst into raucous cheers. They’d hugged her and congratulated her, though Jane had started to cry, and Jimmy had looked a bit distressed.
They know this means I’ll leave soon.
Jill had gently kept the young man at arm’s length, for reasons both practical and intangible. She had no birth control pills anymore, and even if she had, who knew whether they would be effective with the Eden Plague dominating her body’s metabolism? Other methods might have worked, but it was just safer to simply put the whole thing on hold. She liked Jimmy and before the world went mad she probably would have been happy for a roll in the hay, but now, things had changed.
Before, she probably wouldn’t have thought much about the emotional consequences to such a short-term fling. Now, she thought of the heartache getting in deep and then running off would cause them all, and she just couldn’t do it. If everything worked out, and she came back, perhaps…
It wasn’t long before Jill could take short hikes, with boots laced tight to give the new feet support. Her muscles strengthened rapidly, far more quickly than she expected. It has to be the Eden Plague, she thought. Building muscle was a process of tearing and healing, and no matter how hard she trained, she healed overnight…as long as she got food.
One morning Jimmy invited himself along. He carried his rifle and a wanderer’s bag slung over his shoulder. “Got some things ta show you,” he said with a secretive grin. Jill found herself returning the expression, filled with the sheer joy of healthy physical movement. “Klutz, stay!” Jimmy ordered as they set out, leaving the dog standing forlornly on the porch.
Up the hill behind the house they went, then wended their way into what the locals called mountains. Having grown up near the southern tip of the Sierras and having seen the Afghan heights, Jill thought this branch of the Appalachians barely qualified, but they were rugged, thickly forested, and confusing to anyone who didn’t know them well.
After four or five miles he led her up a steep hillside to a forested ledge that concealed a deep dell with a stream and a pond. Pulling aside brambles, he showed her an opening in the hillside, then entered it. He pulled out a flashlight and handed her another, both modern long-lasting LED models.
Switching them on, they proceeded into the side of the mountain, up a twisting cave that after a hundred yards debouched into a cavern with a still, shallow pool. Inside, Jill saw a dozen large waterproof plastic bins and twice as many small closed barrels. “Supplies,” Jimmy said. “Enough to keep us goin’ for a while.”
‘How long have you had this here?” Jill asked curiously, lifting the lid on one of the bins. It was packed tight with cans of lantern fuel.
“Oh, the cave is an old McConley secret. Pa and I brung this stuff up here after the first nukes went off. Took us a couple a’ dozen trips, too. Only time I’d a wished we kept horses, or maybe mules. But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Jill almost asked him why they’d never said anything about this place before, but stopped herself, because the answer was obvious to the practical-minded: there was nothing to be gained by her knowing, and what she didn’t know, she couldn’t tell if she was questioned.
“Come on.” Jimmy led her into one of several tunnels, all of which showed signs of having been worked – the floors smoothed, corners rounded, protrusions broken off to make for easier transit. The one into which they walked led upward, twisting and turning. At one place they had to wiggle through on their bellies.
“There’s more tunnels than I ever explored, and five or six exits that I know about,” he explained. “D’pendin’ on how hard we was pressed, we could live here for a while an’ come out later, or keep on goin’ up into the higher country. But you’ll like this.” After fifty yards of relatively flat easy tunnel, they emerged into another cavern, larger than the one below.
A stream ran through this one, into and out of a pool, exiting in a rush down a dark hole at the lower edge, but that wasn’t the most interesting aspect of the cave. Along one side sat what was obviously a moonshine still, though Jill had never actually seen one. Big kettles and copper tubing, propane tanks, tubs and buckets and jars. Boxes rested on shelves, along with all sorts of other implements and items whose function she could only vaguely guess at. A metal pipe ran up into the ceiling, for a chimney, she thought.
“I don’t imagine you carried all this up from below,” Jill remarked.
“Nope.” Jimmy walked across the floor, crunching gravel beneath his boots, and pulled back a heavy canvas curtain that covered an opening. On the other side she could see a short tunnel and sunlight through a screen of bushes. “There’s an old mining road that runs nearby, that we can get up with a truck if’n you know the way. If’n we just need to come up to work it, we walk. Don’t make but thirty or forty gallons a month. We’s careful, and we ain’t greedy, but it brings in some extra cash, and lubricates some dealins.”
“I reckon so,” Jill replied, looking around at the arrangement. “I never knew people could…” she ran out of words. “This seems like we just traveled back a century – bootleggers and revenuers, Prohibition. Now it’s just…quaint.”
“Guess so. On the other hand…” Jimmy pulled back another curtain along the rock wall, revealing another room. He waved Jill forward to look.
Inside she saw a small office, with bookshelves – and a computer. It was outdated, certainly, perhaps fifteen years old, but a cable and its power cord ran around the base of the wall and out the door, from there hidden by duct tape and dirt. Jill turned to Jimmy and punched him in the arm. “You’ve been holding out on me! You aren’t such a simple hick after all!”
“Never said I was. Pa says it’s always better to have people underestimate you. One way to do that is to adopt the dialect of the simpler folk around you.” While his accent had not diminished, his diction had abruptly improved.
Jill’s jaw dropped. “Wow. What else don’t I know about you?”
“A fair bit, but that’s as may be. The next question you’ll ask is ‘why.’ Pa wanted to keep our upbringing and lifestyle simple, oriented around our family and hard work. He wanted us to use machines, not have them use us. So he kept the high-tech stuff up here. We got an antenna that gives us access to the internet through cell networks, we got a water-powered wheel and generator, also a gas generator and a battery bank, and some solar cells in a hard-to-see spot up top. We got television too. Makes workin’ the still less of a chore.”
“I’m flabbergasted.” Jill waved her arms helplessly. “You just upended my world, Jimmy.”
He stepped closer, looking into her brown eyes. “Enough to give me a chance? Now that you know I’m
not just a dumb hillbilly?”
“What? Oh…no. I never thought that.” Did I? She reached out to place her hands on his shoulders, but more to keep him there than to draw him closer. “Look, Jimmy, it’s just terrible timing. I’m going to go soon, to try to see if my family is…is still even alive. That means leaving. If I make it back here…then I promise I’ll give you a chance. Give us a chance. Okay?”
Jimmy nodded slowly, pain and frustration in his blue eyes. “Okay…but you said you ain’t even seen them since you joined the Corps. All you did is e-mail. How come you suddenly can’t stand not to travel across the whole country? And if you get caught, you’ll end up in some cell somewhere and…what’s the point? Why not just stay here? We’re your family now!”
Even though she wanted to take Jimmy in her arms, Jill shoved herself away from him with a flick of her wrists. “I can’t explain it any better than I already have. It’s just something I have to do. Now I told you I’d come back when I could, and you’ll just have to be patient. If this Eden Plague thing is really like the rumors say, we’ll live hundreds of years and not get old, so we both have time. Time for things to change. Time for people to come to their senses, and get used to us Sickos. Time to figure out that we’re still the same people, just a little bit kinder, a little bit smarter, and a lot more durable. Now let’s please quit talking about it, all right?”
He sighed and turned away. “All right.”
Crestfallen was a weak word for how Jimmy looked, but Jill told herself that it had to be said, and it had to be done. Giving in now to the way she felt, or might have felt, would just complicate things, and she would never be sure that it wasn’t just fear and stress and the supercharging Eden Plague underpinning everything, rather than love.
“Come on, Jimmy. I’m not saying ‘no,’ just ‘wait’.”
“Ha. That’s how Ma says God answers prayers when you ain’t ready for what you want.”
Jill laughed gently. “Your mother is a wise woman, I think.” She turned toward the computer. “Can you turn this on? I’d love to see what was going on in the outside world.”
“No, sorry. It’s too dangerous. It piggybacks on a cell phone tower signal, or somesuch. We have to only use it from time to time, and not too much, or the phone company might think it’s worth their time to track us down. Next time we fire it up, though, you can.”
“All right.” Jill looked wistfully one more time at the old machine, then said, “Come on, let’s get back…unless you have more amazing revelations.”
“No, no Revelations, unless it’s the Apocalypse already.”
“Was that a joke?” Jill slapped Jimmy on the shoulder.
“A lame one. Here, let’s go outside and eat.” He led her through the curtain, down the short tunnel past more screening bushes and onto a wooded mountainside. Finding a spot in the sun on some rocks, he took off the satchel he carried and handed her a chicken salad sandwich.
Homemade mayonnaise and chopped pickles on fresh-baked bread made it the best meal she’d ever had, except for every other meal since arriving at the McConleys. Real hunger, not the pale imitation the average office worker experienced, was truly the most amazing flavor enhancer. She washed it down with spring water from her canteen.
Jimmy pointed to the left and downward after he’d finished his first sandwich. “See? There’s the mining road. The trick is to make the cutover hard to see. You have to actually go above and past it a hunnerd yards, turn around at a wide spot, and come back. Then you can see it easier, but we allas brush out the tracks and spread some fallen branches. Nobody found it yet. But on foot, we go that way.” Jimmy then gestured to the right along the grade, at a faint trail.
Jill nodded, peering archly at the satchel. “What else you got in there?”
“Got ’nother sandwich, some apples, a half-dozen oatmeal cookies. That oughta hold us until we get back for lunch.”
“Oughta.” Jill chuckled again, reaching for more food. Once they had finished everything, they set off down the mountainside.
Eventually the trail rejoined the one they had originally come up. Jill turned to orient herself and thought she could see where the hidden ledge and dell must be, but even so, she couldn’t pinpoint it.
“Right there,” Jimmy said, pointing it out as he came back to stand beside her.
His arm brushed hers and she shivered with suppressed pleasure in the cool autumn breeze. Not yet, she scolded herself yet again, and patted his shoulder absently. “Come on, let’s go,” Jill said. “There’s work to be done, and then I want to take a swim.”
“Sounds good. Race ya down!” Abruptly Jimmy took off down the slope, satchel flapping, rifle in one big hand. Jill followed, whooping, and trying to figure out how she could beat him. The only thing she could think of to do was stay close so as not to lose the track, and then try to sprint past him to the finish.
Several miles of heart-pounding trail running later they crested the final hill and the farm came in sight. Jimmy slowed in front of Jill and put an arm out to prevent her from running past, and then he pulled her aside under the trees. “Wait. Something’s not right.” He jacked a round into the chamber of his lever-action .308 and glided forward to a position overlooking the homestead.
From almost four hundred yards, their perfected Eden vision allowed them to easily see a truck and an SUV parked next to the family’s two pickup trucks. At least a dozen figures in black uniforms were spread out, looking around. They appeared different from the Unionists, with helmets, standardized weapons, and no armbands.
Searching, perhaps.
Jimmy surged forward, jogging down the path, rifle at the ready. “Wait,” Jill said urgently. “We have to make a plan.”
“We gotta get close enough to see what’s going on,” he replied, slowing to a fast walk. “If they’re just looking for moonshine or doing a routine search, we’ll wait it out.”
“And if not?”
Jimmy stopped to turn and look at Jill. “We do what we gotta do. You okay with that?”
Jill nodded. “Yes. We can’t let your family be taken away. But Jimmy…I’ve been thinking about this for a while. First, the Eden Plague will heal us if we don’t get hit too bad. I’m tactically trained. You’re not. You’re a fine shot but you don’t have the honed instincts for close combat, so you are going to take up the best position you can a hundred yards out. You know this area, so you pick a good spot. Then I go in.”
“And then?”
“I’ll sneak into the barn and get my weapons, or I’ll take one of them down and use his. You watch me the whole way in. If they spot me and I make this hand signal,” she pointed her finger and thumb like a child pretending to have a gun, “then you shoot, center mass low, and you keep shooting as long as you have targets. Don’t get fancy and try to go for head or weapon shots.”
Jimmy angrily replied, “At a hundred yards I can put one through an eye!”
Jill grabbed his arm and shook it. “Shooting human beings isn’t like plinking bottles, or even killing a deer. The first time your gut really knows that you just ended a human life, you’ll find it a whole hell of a lot harder to pull the trigger. So you try to think of them as targets, not people, and shoot center mass, low. They might have chest plates, and under stress you’ll tend to pull high, so it’s always better to put one into the dirt than to go over; at least it will scare the shit out of them. Got me?”
“I got you.” He jerked his arm resentfully away.
“Don’t go all testosterone on me, Jimmy. This is my job, and I’m damn good at it. Now you have to do yours like a pro. Be patient. Be cool, don’t panic, and when you shoot, shoot straight.”
“Okay!”
“Okay. Good luck.” Without further words, she turned to scurry forward, low through the light woods and brush that surrounded the farm. Up ahead she heard Klutz barking, an angry sound.
As she approached, she could see one man looking over the pigpen fence. He jerked back at somet
hing inside. If Jill knew the old sow, she’d lunged at him. She didn’t like strangers getting near her half-grown offspring.
Using the distraction, she crept forward with all her skill. She could now see the man’s uniform was jet black, with the American flag on both shoulders. His appearance seemed neat and military, unlike the local party thugs who had visited them before. Their trucks looked uniform as well, painted with unit numbers, a government crest of some sort, and the words “Security Service.”
She’d heard about this new paramilitary, formed by an expansion and reorganization of the Department of Homeland Security. How they could not see the irony of calling something that would inevitably be nicknamed SS was beyond her. Perhaps that just spoke to their fanaticism and ideological blindness. From what she could tell, the far left and the far right had both gone around the bend to the other side and met in the middle, and this was the result.
Four SS men stood near the trucks, between the barn and the house. Owen, Big Jim and Sarah sat on the front porch, two guards behind them. Another, apparently an officer by his dress and demeanor, seemed to be questioning them. Jane should be coming home from school soon, walking up the three miles from the main road where the bus picked her up. Jill hoped she spotted the men and would stay out of sight.
For now, she decided to watch and wait. Maybe, if they were lucky, the detachment would go away after asking their questions.
Or not. It didn’t take long for their methods to reveal themselves.
She watched the officer ostentatiously slip on a pair of black gloves, and then he struck. Not Big Jim, not Sarah even.
Owen.
He backhanded the boy across the face, flinging a spray of blood. Owen howled and held up ineffectual arms to cover his head. Big Jim surged out of his chair, only to be clubbed down by rifle butts. Sarah threw herself on her husband, and she was clubbed in turn, until the officer yelled for them to halt. Klutz sank his teeth into the officer’s leg, and one of the others reversed his assault rifle and shot the dog, who dropped onto the porch as if poleaxed.
So that’s the way it is, she thought, and clamped down on her sudden rage. I hope to hell Jimmy doesn’t start shooting. Unless they kill someone, they can always get the Plague and be healed. But I can’t just stand here. I have to acquire the tools I need, if we’re going to go up against ten to one odds.
Drawing her combat knife, the one she’d kept in her boot through all of her adventures, she did something she’d thought about, even tested. She ran the blade down her forearm, creating a shallow slash, and wiped the profuse bleeding all over the blade like spackle on a trowel.
She knew the arm would heal within moments, and now the weapon she might have to use on someone was coated with her fluids – filled with the Eden Plague. Everyone she stabbed would eventually heal, easing her conscience about the danger of killing – and would also produce more Plague carriers. In essence, it would force them to defect, or be interned as well, draining the resources of the fascists.
It was far better than killing them, really, no matter what her outrage told her.
With knife in hand, Jill eased forward in a combat crouch, freezing when the man turned toward her, moving when he turned away. It appeared as if he had been placed to watch this sector, but had made the cardinal error of getting out of sight of his fellows. There couldn’t be more than twenty SS here, not enough to really cover the whole perimeter.
When she got as close as she could, behind the last screen of bushes, she took a deep breath, waited until the man turned away, then rushed him silently.
As a cop, she’d never stabbed anyone before. All of her blade work had been theoretical, or defensive, aimed solely at disarming a knife-wielding attacker. She’d heard that a straight blade to the kidney was ideal to incapacitate. The pain and shock involved usually paralyzed the diaphragm for long enough to finish the man off, lethally or not.
At the last moment she realized that the man had a vest on beneath his shirt – a thin one, undoubtedly just enough to stop pistol rounds, but it would likely turn her blade. In a split second she changed tactics, bringing her hands together to grip the knife’s hilt with both. She lifted it and brought the pommel down on the back of the man’s neck, just to the right of the spine, beneath his helmet.
He staggered and fell, letting out a low grunt, and she leaped on him with both knees. Adrenaline surged through her and she swung double-handed at his neck and face, trying to knock him out. She couldn’t think of anything else to do.
It took her four blows, and he was bloody and breathing shallowly when she finished. Ugly and poorly done, she thought, and suppressed a wave of nausea. She’d killed before, with an assault rifle, fending off insurgent attacks on US training and assistance forces, but it was never this close up and personal.
She found she really did not want him to die. He was a fellow American, misguided perhaps, but probably not evil. Just a grunt. So she did what she had intended before, and sliced him shallowly, on his forearm, twin to her own wounds. Hopefully that would transmit the Eden Plague.
Quickly she dragged the man inside the barn out of sight before running back out to retrieve his assault rifle. The odds just got a lot more even in Jill’s book. She made a big come in gesture toward where Jimmy should be, then went back to the fallen trooper and began to strip off his clothes.
By the time she had his black pants and tunic off, Jimmy slipped inside the barn. “I’m too big for those,” he whispered.
“Not for you. For me.” She pulled the trousers on over her own, bloused them in the boots with their strings, then donned the man’s armor vest and tunic. Everything was large, but by cinching up the belt she made it fit. Fortunately she had pinned her hair up for the hike so once she put the helmet and equipment harness on, she made a fair imitation of an SS trooper.
She hoped.
“Did you see what they did to Owen and Ma and Pa?” Jimmy asked, his voice anguished.
“Yes. So we take them down. That means keeping cool. We can give them all the Plague and they will heal up. Just keep that in mind.” Jill reached down to smear some dirt from the barn floor on her chin and face.
“Right.” He squeezed his Browning and looked around furtively, unsure.
Jill ordered, “Go up to the loft and toss me down the .45. Keep the shotgun up there with you. Take a sniper’s position back as far from the window as you can while still able to see your targets. Keep moving from position to position. That way they won’t be able to pinpoint you.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked in a hoarse whisper from the top of the ladder.
“Don’t whisper,” she said in a low tone. “It carries farther than a quiet voice. I’m going to walk out into the open and take down as many of them as I can, by surprise. As soon as I start shooting, you pick off any target you see, especially those behind me. Center mass low, remember? Right in the gut is the best thing, okay?”
“Okay.” He turned away and retrieved her weapons hidden in the loft, tossing the .45 and two full magazines down. She thrust the pistol into the back of her waistband and dropped the ammo into her left front pants pocket. Then she cleaned off her knife, slipped it back into its sheath and eased over to look out across the farm.
Jill would never even have considered what she was planning if she hadn’t known the Eden Plague would give her an edge. Even if they ended up in a draw, with everyone shot and wounded, she and Jimmy would recover rapidly, while the SS men wouldn’t. She performed a slow scan, fixing everyone’s position in her mind, and then called softly up, “Here I go.”
Stepping out the back of the barn, she popped open the ammo pouches on her captured harness, tucking the covers back out of the way and making sure the magazines were loose and handy. A standard load of six thirty-rounders, plus the one in the weapon, gave her two hundred ten rounds. More than enough.
She held her captured assault rifle casually pointed down, but with her hands in position on the grips, an
d strolled around the corner of the barn. Helmet tipped down, she looked out from beneath its rim, opening her mind and eyes to the positions of her targets, just like on the tactical range.
Targets. That’s all they are.
“Hey, Smitty, you look shitty,” someone called in her direction. That was the signal; in a moment they would recognize that Jill was not Smitty. She brought her weapon up, flipping the selector lever to Fire with her thumb, and shot the speaker just below his visible chest plate.
Before he hit the ground, she took down two more standing near him, pop – pop. Working outward and moving rightward in a tactical crouch, she circled the trucks and shot the fourth man in the leg as he tried to take cover, then drilled him in the back as he fell.
With the four at the vehicles out of the way she turned toward the house, scurrying forward, rifle locked to her shoulder, eyes open looking over her sights. A bullet flicked at her heel. Jill barely noted heavy .308 shots sound from the barn; she had to trust Jimmy to keep them off her back.
In front of her on the porch, three standing targets and three prone friendlies occupied her arc of fire. The leftmost target aimed a rifle her direction and fired just as she did. Her shot took the man in the stomach, the high-velocity rifle bullet punching through his vest without difficulty.
His shot struck her in the center of her forehead.
Unlike the vests, the helmet she wore was made to stop assault rifle bullets up to 7.62mm, and so it saved Jill’s life. Her head snapped up with the impact and she fell onto her back, instinctively flattening and rolling, trying to regain some kind of firing position. Rounds from target two kicked dirt around her as she scrambled under one of the McConley pickup trucks, then recovered her feet on the other side. Bullets slammed into the sheet metal and smashed through the vehicle’s windows.
Using one of the vehicle’s side mirrors, she saw target two fall, his head exploding as one of Jimmy’s precision shots rang out. Whether he was showing off, or merely had forgotten her instructions, she had no time to wonder. She turned to scan behind her toward the woods, just in time to see Jane, in a flowered frock and tennis shoes, club an SS trooper down with a tree branch. He’d been aiming at Jill.
Jill waved her emphatically back. “Keep to cover, Jane!” she yelled, the need for secrecy long over. Jane nodded and slipped back into the bushes with her improvised weapon.
Checking the mirror again, she saw the SS officer drag Sarah to her feet and, using her as a shield, back into the house. Big Jim stirred on the floor as Owen sobbed in his wheelchair.
About half of the possible twenty troopers had been taken down, Jill believed. Now she had a hostage situation, but could not wait it out. The officer might have a radio or satphone and she couldn’t allow him to regroup his men.
Only one thing for it. She charged the house.
He couldn’t control Sarah and engage Jill effectively with a pistol. Her vest and helmet and the Eden Plague gave her an edge. As long as she didn’t get shot in the face, she should be able to take the man down.
Two handgun rounds struck her as she rushed through the death funnel of the doorway. One hit her vest like a punch to the chest, hardly noticed due to adrenaline and concentration. The other burned hot fire along her thigh, a nasty flesh wound.
Inside, the officer had his left arm encircling Sarah’s neck, while his right pointed his pistol at Jill. Most attackers would have ducked behind something and looked for a shot, hoping to get the hostage-taker to run himself out of ammo. With her advantages, though, she’d already decided on a different course.
Spiraling to her left and forward, she advanced quickly with her rifle sights fixed on the man’s exposed right shoulder. He fired one more time, and the shot took a piece of Jill’s right ear off.
Then she had him.
From two feet away, impossible to miss, Jill’s bullet shattered his exposed right shoulder joint. Shock and pain caused him to drop his pistol and Sarah both, and as soon as he was clear, she put another round into his stomach. Then she kicked him in the head, ensuring he was out.
Checking Sarah, she saw that the older woman was incoherent and concussed, with one pupil dilated huge, so Jill did what she had planned, if it ever came to this.
With her left hand, she smeared her fingertips into her thigh wound, coating them with ichor. Then she stuck one of them in Sarah’s mouth. Disgusting, perhaps, but if the rumors were true, her blood contained even more of the virus than her saliva, and one good kiss had passed it to Jimmy. This should infect the older woman, and perhaps save her life.
She did the same with the unconscious officer, then scuttled over to the front door. Big Jim looked at her from floor level, still stunned, but he had begun grimly crawling toward the entrance. Jill grabbed his collar and dragged him inside, then fed him a taste of her blood as well.
Next, she grabbed Klutz and dragged him inside. He still breathed, and she shoved a bloody hand between his teeth to coat his tongue. She had no idea if the Eden Plague worked on animals, but it seemed worth a try. Then she stood up and went back to work.
Scanning quickly outside, she spotted two troopers moving toward the barn, left and right, closing in on a flurry of gunfire inside it. Odds were that the remaining SS men would focus on the sniper that was picking them off one by one, and so now it appeared Jill was on the outside of the action, looking in.
Aiming carefully, she popped the one on the left, seeing him fall. Swinging right, she fired but missed her right-side target as he dove forward. A moment later he was out of sight behind the barn.
Using the reprieve, she grabbed Owen’s wheelchair and rolled the crying boy into the house. She saw that Big Jim seemed aware, if badly injured. She kicked the half-conscious SS officer in the side of the head again to make sure he wouldn’t cause any more trouble, and then relieved him of his belt that carried several leather cases, like a police officer would wear.
One case held handcuffs, with which she expertly cuffed the officer’s hands behind his back. Another held a walkie radio, which she slipped into a pocket. Then she extracted two magazines and retrieved the fallen man’s pistol from the floor, pressing the weapon and ammo into Big Jim’s hands.
“I have to go finish them off,” Jill said to her surrogate father.
Big Jim nodded, taking the weapon. “Go,” he grunted hoarsely. “Kill the bastards.”
Jill nodded, though she wasn’t going to follow his wishes; at least, not intentionally. The rumored virtue effect must be damping down her sense of outrage and desire for revenge. It didn’t matter: leaving them alive and infected would be vengeance enough. That would consign them to being abused by the very system to which they had sold themselves.
Swapping in a full magazine, she set her assault rifle for three-round bursts. Now that her enemies were fully warned and waiting, firepower mattered more than surprise. Nearly as effective as fully automatic, this setting was far more controllable and gave her an easy way to track her ammo expenditure. She only had to count to ten as she fired off each thirty-rounder by threes, then drop the empty and insert the full one.
A look out the door showed movement in the trees to the right and left of the barn, but no clear targets. Intermittent firing continued, sounding like half a dozen weapons, maximum. Because Jane was somewhere to her left, she went out the back door and rightward, counterclockwise along the edge of the farm, hoping to flank and roll up the enemy.
Hang in there, Jimmy. I’m coming. Jill sprinted up the rows of vegetables, quickly entering the tree line, then turned left, resuming her gun-up tactical advance. Her thigh burned like fire, but it appeared only slightly impaired and already the bleeding had stopped. She’d also avoided the worst of the shock she should be feeling: Eden Plague again.
She mentally thanked her instructors for making her one of the best; these men, though competent enough, fought hardly better than the half-trained insurgents in the sandbox.
As Jill approached the barn she spotted tw
o targets. One fired his rifle into the wall of the barn near one of the small loft windows. It appeared he had no target, but was just providing harassing fire. The other faced her direction, a very young man, eyes searching, and he spotted her movement just an instant later than she saw him.
She revised her estimate upward slightly – at least they were keeping rear security – even as she lined up on his lower torso and fired a burst. Her bullets dropped him and his weapon stuttered skyward on full auto. Twigs and leaves dropped around her as a dozen rounds sliced through the foliage above Jill’s head.
The other SS man was a veteran, she guessed; at least he did what it took to survive, dropping forward to the ground, out of sight in the bushes. Jill fired several bursts into the scrub to the left and right of his position as she cautiously advanced. He would have been smarter to keep watch himself, she thought, and let the kid fire into the barn.
Jill swung wider to her right, away from the barn, instinctively believing her opponent would not scramble toward that building with his other enemy inside. With her weapon at the left oblique she tried to anticipate his position, circling, circling…
There. A flash of dark movement. She expended the rest of her magazine and dropped down on one knee to reload, then resumed her advance. In a moment a leg came into view, moving slowly, painfully. Jill quickly swept her weapon through three hundred sixty degrees, checking around her before rushing forward to see the wounded veteran, a man of perhaps thirty, pull a pistol from his thigh rig and try to point it in her direction.
Her cop instincts took over and she hissed, “Freeze!” When he failed to comply, she put a shot through his forearm, and the handgun jerked and fell into the dirt. He moaned and his head dropped back. It appeared he had been hit three or four times even before her last shot, and she mentally saluted him.
Tough bastard.
Rubbing the sticky blood around her healing thigh wound, she shoved some of it in the man’s mouth. In other circumstances she’d have bandaged him, tried to save him, but gunfire still stuttered from the barn and she had to come to Jimmy’s aid. This instinct was confirmed when the boom of a shotgun replaced the hard crack of the .308.
They must be getting close to him.
Reloading again, she hurried for the back of the barn, skirting the hog pen. A hole had been knocked in the heavy boards, and it appeared empty; mama pig must have gone berserk with the firing and smell of blood, and broken out with her yearlings.
One man stood in the back door of the barn, looking inward, and she shot him in the kidney. He dropped like a stone. Charging inside, she was just in time to witness a flurry of automatic fire from two men on the ground floor as another climbed the ladder.
Jill picked the man off the top of the rungs, then turned to blast the other two. She took down one before the other shot her in the chest, knocking her off her feet. Her assault rifle went flying. She felt like a mule had kicked her, her vision grayed, and she felt unable to breathe. Lung shot, she thought as she lay on her side, and, this is shock for sure. Apparently there were limits to what the Eden Plague could do, and she’d just found them.
She lay still, watching the remaining trooper approach her with rifle aimed at her head. Her only chance at this point was to seem nonthreatening, too wounded to fight back. “Hello,” she croaked, trying to put some femininity into her voice. “How’s the security business?”
Maybe he won’t shoot a woman, or at least he’ll underestimate me. Come on, Jimmy, now would be a good time to use that shotgun.
The hoped-for blast didn’t come. The SS trooper kicker her in the belly, then in the head, breaking the helmet strap and sending it flying. Her hair came loose of its bobby pins, but it didn’t seem as if the man cared about her gender. He kicked her again, and this time, she blacked out.