He had seen the valleys below only a few weeks before and the devastation that greeted his eyes required a moment’s adjustment.
The western end of the main valley of the Gap was just visible from his position. The Gap was a narrow, but low, north-south crack in the wall of the Tennessee Divide; a crack from which the continuous racket of battle resounded. Mosovich wasn’t sure what the situation was at the moment, but there was no question the ACS were hotly engaged.
Just to the north of the Gap the valley widened out to the east and west. This valley was both low and fertile and had once provided a significant fraction of the produce necessary to run the defending corps. When Jake and Mueller had passed through only a week before it had been busy with the movement of the corps and tan and yellow with the corn, barley and pumpkins ready to harvest. Now it was a barren wasteland. The only sign that there had ever been defenders there was a pile of melted metal that Jake suspected used to be an artillery battery. The ground itself was black and gray with some patches that looked shiny as if they had been turned to glass. The tree-clad slopes that had surrounded it were now covered in fallen, leaf-stripped trunks that looked like nothing so much as scattered matchsticks.
The O’Neal farmstead was in a small pocket or “hollow” on the north side of the main valley and about two hundred feet higher. It was roughly diamond shaped with the entrance pointing slightly southwest rather than directly south. The entrance ran up the gully created by O’Neal Creek and made several twists. Given that the hollow was settled in the early 1800s it appeared that the O’Neal paranoia was probably hereditary.
The holler had not suffered as severely as the main valley but it was badly damaged. The far side of the holler was totally destroyed with all the trees down and a center zone that was scoured down to the bare rock; the lander must not have been very high. The house was splinters and the heavy sandbag and concrete bunker to the side, which had been hidden in a hedge, was a smashed ruin. It was in the latter ruin that Cally said O’Neal had last been seen.
The near side slope was not as badly hit, but it was still going to take quite a while to pick their way down the hillside. There had been a path but it was nearly invisible for all the fallen timber. The one good piece of news was that the most probable avenue of approach, up the road which had apparently been ground zero, was completely covered in trees and rockslides.
Mueller led the way down, occasionally moving the more accessible trees and rocks. Despite his care he slipped twice on the wet hillside, once very nearly breaking a leg.
“At least the Posleen were going to have trouble getting in,” Mosovich said, when he caught the far larger NCO on the second fall.
“Which just means we get to dig out his body,” Mueller said quietly. “Even if he was alive, and it didn’t sound like he was, he’s not going to have survived the night.”
“We’ll see,” Mosovich said. He slid over the bole of an oak that must have been growing there during the Civil War and then down the relatively open bluff beyond. Over the last few years he had humped up and down these mountains to the point that he considered most obstacles to be pretty easy stuff. But this tangle of fallen trees was a pain in the butt.
The last slither, though, dropped him into a narrow strip of ground behind one wing of the O’Neal house which was relatively free of debris. There was a fair amount from the house itself, including scattered clothing that they really ought to collect up for the refugees. But his attention was centered on the bunker. Most of the house was backed onto the hillside and the bunker was on the far side.
“Sergeant Major Mosovich,” his AID chimed. “Be aware that there is a slight increase in radiation in this zone.”
“Bad?”
“Not really. It won’t reach clinically challenging levels for another six to eight hours. And the isotopes that I’m detecting are of a type to decay quickly; the radiation will reduce faster than you’re absorbing it.”
“Okay, we still don’t want to stick around,” he said, waving the group around the house.
He moved cautiously. Despite the fact that the area looked clear it was possible that the odd Posleen might be moving around or even waiting in ambush. Most Posleen normals were bonded to individual God Kings. However, when their master was killed, the normals tended to become “unbonded.” Thereafter, until picked up by another God King, they wandered more or less as wild animals. These “ferals” were an increasing problem not only along the frontier areas but in the interior. Posleen reproduced at a phenomenal rate and tended to survive infancy even without care. So a single feral could pump out multiple young in just a few years, each of which reached maturity in eighteen months. Thus, in areas where they were not kept in check they occupied a primary carnivore niche in the food chain.
Jake Mosovich was not about to enter that food chain if he could avoid it.
The area appeared clear, however, and he slipped around the stump of the house to the front, carefully sweeping his rifle from side to side as the rest of the group closed up behind him.
He could see the bunker clearly now and he could see a very man-shaped hole where something wasn’t.
“Cally?” he called, walking over to the bunker as he lowered the barrel on his rifle.
The bunker had reinforced concrete walls with a sandbag and steel top. It was clearly designed to survive heavy-duty direct fire. The nuke, however, had ripped most of the sandbags off the top and smashed in one side of the concrete wall, dropping shattered concrete and bent steel I-beams into the interior.
Despite that Papa O’Neal might have survived. Overpressure blasts from nukes did more destruction to items that had an “inside” and an “outside” than the rather homogenous character of the human body. Jake remembered about a thousand years ago taking a class on nuclear warfare that covered that fact. Houses tended to be ripped to shreds in conditions where humans survived just fine. The heat and the radiation might kill them. But not the overpressure unless they were at ground zero or picked up and “tossed” by it.
Only two problems. Papa O’Neal had been inside the bunker when it collapsed. The debris was likely to have killed him. Second problem being that he wasn’t there. It was pretty evident that something or someone had come along and dug a body out of the rubble.
“He was right there,” Cally said quietly.
“Yep.” Jake squatted and looked into the interior of the bunker. The rear was down as well, but a doorway was faintly visible at the rear. “Is that how you got out?”
“Yeah,” Cally said, bending down to peer into the rubble. “He was right there, Sergeant Major!”
“He’s gone now, Cally,” Jake said gently, straightening up. “Let’s take a quick look around to see if there’s anything worth salvaging then get back to the cache before whatever took him comes back.”
“Posleen?” Mueller asked, looking at the ground. Most of the grass had been flash-burned by the blast but there should have been tracks. Posleen made very definitive tracks with their claws.
“Probably,” Mosovich said after a moment’s pause. “I don’t see any tracks at all. But the most probable explanation is the Posties got the body.”
“Fuck,” Cally said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, god damn, cock-SUCKER! He really didn’t want to get eaten. He really, really didn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” Wendy said, wrapping her arm around the teenager. “I’m so sorry.”
“Shit,” Cally replied, wiping rain-mixed tears out of her eyes. “Shari is not going to be happy.”