Terry had accidentally dropped the magazine that she had expended between her bounding rushes, but Ken still had an empty magazine that he’d tucked into one of the cargo pockets on his trouser leg.
Ken whispered, “Not bad for ‘withdraw by fire.’”
“Yeah, Jeff Trasel would be proud.”
A moment later, a road flare was ignited near the Bronco and Mustang. The night was so dark that the flare seemed quite bright. Ken and Terry watched with a mixture of fascination and horror a bonfire of wooden pallets, accelerated by a small bucket of gasoline.
By the light of the bonfire, the dozen gang members who had ambushed the Laytons began pillaging the contents of their car and truck. There were loud exclamations as each item was extracted from the vehicles. There were repeated shouts of “Oh yeah!” and “Check it out!” and “This is sick!” One of them hoisted Ken’s Remington riotgun in the air and gave a “Woot-woot” shout.
Seeing and hearing this, Ken and Terry were seething. “Those heathen bastards! They’re taking all our stuff,” Terry muttered.
Ken suggested, “What do you say we make ’em pay for it?”
“I don’t know. Do you think that’s right?”
Ken nodded and answered, “It’s as right as anything could be. Hey, they just did their best to kill us, and they’re taking almost everything in the world we have that’s worth anything. I say make ’em pay for it, with interest.”
Terry reached out to tightly grasp Ken’s hand, in affirmation.
They dropped down on the sidewalk to the right of a hedge, and got into good prone shooting positions, side by side.
Terry said, “I’ve got the guys to the right of the bonfire, you take the ones on the left.”
“Give me a sec,” Ken answered. He shifted his position slightly, and thumbed the HK’s safety to the “E” position.
His first target was the man who held the Remington riotgun. By now, he was shouting, “I got the power! I got the power!” Ken waited until he had several other targets close to the bonfire. Then he whispered: “One, two, three!”
They each fired a full magazine. The man with the riotgun went down hard. They killed or wounded at least five others.
After there were no more distinct targets standing, they expended the rest of their magazines shooting at likely places where the looters might have taken cover. They rose to their feet and ran around the corner, reloading their guns as they ran.
Halfway down the block they stopped to check each other for injuries and to talk. They decided that to get around the riffraff that ambushed them, they would walk another two blocks south, and then turn to resume traveling west.
They moved in tactical bounds for seven blocks, constantly watching for threats. The sound of gunfire and sirens was almost continuous in all directions. Some of it sounded as if it was within a couple of blocks, but most of it had to be farther off. With their movement in buddy rushes, they were soon feeling exhausted.
Ken trotted up to Terry and whispered, “There’s got to be a better way. We’ll never get out of town by dawn doing it this way.” They crawled behind the concealment of some large bushes next to a Lutheran church, and draped a poncho over themselves to consult a street map with a subdued flashlight.
Terry pointed out their location on the map. “It’s ten-plus miles to even get out of Chicago itself, and then there’s suburbs,” she whispered.
“So, shall I call for a cab?” Ken joked.
Then, more seriously, he added, “Our chances of walking out of this without getting ventilated are about one percent.”
He gazed down at the map again, and prayed silently. The map showed no parks or other breaks in successive city blocks for miles ahead.
Terry said, still in a whisper, “Why not go underground, down in the storm drains, just like we talked about for nuke scenarios?”
Ken beamed. “Oh, I love you! That sure beats staying up here in the free-fire zone.”
Terry looked up at Ken and asked, “How are we going to get down there?”
“Remember that illustration in T.K.’s book Life After Doomsday, where you take two big bolts and join them with a piece of wire? Then you stick one of them down into the pry hole on a manhole cover, and pull up.”
Terry nodded.
He opened the top flap of his backpack and started to dig though its contents. He soon found a coil of wire. After some more searching, he pulled out a 1970s-vintage Boy Scout knife-fork-spoon kit that had belonged to his father. He twisted two thicknesses of the wire around the spoon and then the same for the knife, with one foot of wire between them.
The knife ended up working well as a toggle, because it had a bottle-opening notch in the middle. That held the wire in place perfectly.
Ken reassembled the contents of his pack and reshouldered it. He then began searching the block, looking for a manhole cover. It took a few minutes to find one marked “Storm Sewer,” visible by the dim light of Terry’s tiny single-LED flashlight.
Ken handed his rifle to his wife. After inserting the knife into the manhole cover’s one-inch aperture, he pulled up on the spoon connected by the wire. The knife had toggled over and held firm. Ken squatted, beefed the manhole cover up, and slid it aside with a clank that sounded uncomfortably loud. He then retrieved his utensils and wire and stuffed them into one of his pants cargo pockets.
Terry descended first. She said quietly, “Okay, it looks doable. There’s just a trickle in the bottom. Hand me my gear.”
Ken handed down her carbine, then her pack, then his pack, and then his rifle. He lingered at the uppermost ladder rungs to slide the lid back in place over his head. It closed with a reverberating thud.
5. Trogs
“‘It has never happened!’ cannot be construed to mean, ‘It can never happen!’—might as well say, ‘Because I have never broken my leg, my leg is unbreakable,’ or ‘Because I’ve never died, I am immortal.’ One thinks first of some great plague of insects—locusts or grasshoppers—when the species suddenly increases out of all proportion, and then just as dramatically sinks to a tiny fraction of what it has recently been. The higher animals also fluctuate. During most of the nineteenth century the African buffalo was a common creature on the veldt. It was a powerful beast with few natural enemies, and if its census could have been taken by decades, it would have proved to be increasing steadily. Then toward the century’s end it reached its climax, and was suddenly struck by a plague of rinderpest. Afterwards the buffalo was almost a curiosity, extinct in many parts of its range. In the last fifty years it has again slowly built up its numbers. As for man, there is little reason to think that he can, in the long run, escape the fate of other creatures, and if there is a biological law of flux and reflux, his situation is now a highly perilous one. During ten thousand years his numbers have been on the upgrade in spite of wars, pestilence, and famines. This increase in population has become more and more rapid. Biologically, man has for too long a time been rolling an uninterrupted run of sevens.”
Chicago, Illinois
October, the First Year
Ken climbed down to Terry and said, “I sure hope this works.”
They helped each other put on their packs, which was difficult in the cramped confines of the drain. They slung their rifles across their chests, with their muzzles down and with their buttstocks positioned unusually high.