Suddenly it all stopped. The truck burned sullenly, the Post Office was a twisted mass of smoking ruins. The shooting ceased. No more shouting. No more movement. The street was littered with bodies.
Christ! They wiped us out and I lay there like a turd.
Alec forced himself up to his hands and knees.
“Okay?” Ferret asked, his voice high with fear.
“You okay? Okay?”
“Yes,” he said, still nearly breathless. “I’m all right.”
Two men jumped out from behind the corner of the building, guns levelled at them. Ferret threw his arms over his head and dived for the ground.
“Hey, it’s Alec!” Gianelli’s voice shouted.
“And that Ferret character.”
“He’s one of them,” Gianelli said. “Shoot the bastard!”
Alec heard the snick of a gun being cocked.
“No,” he commanded, as loudly as he could manage. “He saved my life. Leave him alone. He wasn’t with them. He pulled me out of the line of fire.”
“You got hit?” Gianelli asked, striding to Alec.
His face was grimy, streaked with soot. His partner kept his rifle levelled at Ferret.
“No,” Alec said. “I’m… I wasn’t hit.”
After an hour of cleaning and changing clothes, Alec felt strong enough to look for some food. The other men were dragging off the bodies of the dead, tending to each other’s wounds. The word had quickly spread that Alec’s deepest injury was soiled pants. The men shied away from him.
He found Jameson by a small cook fire, near one of the remaining trucks.
“You’re okay,” Jameson said.
Alec nodded. “And you?”
“Broke a fingernail on the safety of my rifle,” he said with utter seriousness.
“How many… did we lose?”
“Three killed, five wounded. Two pretty seriously. The other three are just scratched. Could have been a lot worse.”
We’re down to a dozen men, Alec thought. “Did they get one of the trucks?”
Nodding, Jameson said, “It cost them twenty-two dead.”
“And wounded?”
“They dragged most of their wounded away,”
Jameson said flatly. “The others died.”
A single pistol shot cracked through the smoldering darkness.
“That’s the last one now,” Jameson said.
“I got caught between you and them,” Alec mumbled. “Went out to… never got my pants down.”
Jameson shrugged. “I hear Ferret dragged you to safety. Guess I’ll have to start trusting him a little.”
“Yeah. Maybe he can help us locate some food.”
Jameson excused himself and left Alec alone by the tiny fire. While Alec tried to get some hot broth down, he heard one of the men grumbling:
“I don’t care if he does hear me! He was crapping in his pants while Ollie and the rest of ’em were getting killed. Some leader!”
And then Jameson’s voice, quiet, calm. “Maybe you don’t care if he hears you but if I hear you make another crack like that I’ll break your jaw. Understand? He was sick… still is.”
The reply was mumbled too low for Alec to hear.
He leaned back against the metal of the truck and held the warm cup of broth in both trembling hands. A dozen men. Twelve against Thebes.
Twelve of us and two trucks to cross the country and find Douglas and the fissionables. And most of the men think I’m either a coward or a madman.
Or both.
He almost laughed. The only real friend he had among them was the half-witted Ferret.
Alec looked up. The first hint of dawn was lightening the sky to the east. It would feel good to have sunlight warming him again.
“All right,” he whispered to himself. “Two trucks and twelve men. We 5tart north. Now!”
BOOK THREE
Chapter 19
It was pleasantly cool among the trees. The Sun still felt hot, falling in mottled patches through the swaying branches and lighting up the grassy glades of clearings among the trees. The breeze had a tang to it as it gusted in from the northwest.
The leaves were already falling, their colors fantastic.
Alec had never seen such a profusion of reds and golds before.
But he was not paying attention to the autumn foliage now. He lay on his belly atop a carpeting of soft leaves at the rim of a hill, under the cover of the maples and birches. Out in the cleared valley below stood a walled village. A cluster of little huts with thin plumes of smoke curling from a few chimneys.
Ron Jameson lay beside Alec. “They picked a good location. Couple of klicks out in the open. Nobody can get to them without them seeing him first and closing their gates.”
Nodding, Alec raised his binoculars to inspect the village’s wall. Old cinderblock, mostly. Some newly made brick. Wooden gates, probably scavenged from one of the abandoned cities nearby.
He noticed a few men working in the cornfield between the woods and the village. No women were in sight, although they might have been in among the rows of two-meter-high stalks.
“They’re greedy,” Alec said quietly. “They’ve planted cornfields all the way from the edge of their wall to the edge of the trees. And they’re trying to get a second crop in before the frosts come.”
Jameson grinned. Perfect coyer.
On Alec’s other side, Ferret jabbed an excited finger. “Road,” he said. “Carts. Wagons.”
“They must be carrying on trade with other villages,”
Alec said. “That’s too much corn for them to eat all by themselves.”
“Maybe they supply Douglas’s people?”
Jameson suggested. “If he’s got a sizable army and an organized base near here, he’d need supplies from villages like this.”
Alec scanned the area again. A cloud of dust caught his attention, far down the road toward the horizon. “Truck,” he murmured. “No, it’s a wagon, pulled by horses.”
“Wagon,” Ferret agreed, nodding happily.
He handed the binoculars to Jameson. “Empty, heading in toward the village. Driver and two gunners.”
“Wasn’t there another one yesterday?” Jameson asked, adjusting the focus as he peered through the glasses.
“That’s right. Gianelli spotted it.”
“Just about this time, too.”
Alec smiled. “We can make a Trojan Horse out of the next one.”
“A what?”
“You’ll see,” Alec said.
All through the summer Alec had driven his tiny band northward, toward the area of Douglas’s headquarters. Not that he knew where it was. Only that it was north, toward the lakes.
When he had first reported on meeting Douglas to his mother, she mused, “He was born up in the lake country. It would be just like him to make his home territory into the center of his empire.”
She assigned the satellite observers to scan the area carefully and, sure enough, they reported extensive networks of roads, villages, farms in the area. It all appeared quite settled and serene, with no sign of marauding raider packs molesting the farmers or villagers.
Alec headed for the lake country.
The laser trucks ran out of fuel after the first few days. Alec burned them, rather than let them fall into barbarian hands. But with the loss of the trucks they also lost their only link with home, the truck radios which were capable of reaching the satellite station and, through relay, the Moon. Alec had one of the radio transceivers taken from a truck and carried along.