“Fox, this is Eagle. Do you copy, over.”
I snatched up the handset. “Copy Eagle. Everyone okay?”
“More or less. We’re en route, ETA five minutes. Don’t approach yet, there’s still a few infected in the neighborhood.”
“Copy. Standing by.”
The roar of Humvee engines approached again, followed by the staccato clamor of gunfire. Several times, the thunder of M-240s pounded the air, the last of which ended with a tremendous WHUMP that sent every bird in a hundred yard radius flapping and screeching in fear.
“Jesus,” Lance said, shading his eyes as he stared at the shore. “Was that a grenade?”
“I think so.” I said.
“The hell did they get a grenade?”
“Beats me.”
Lauren stopped pacing. “Do you think they’re all right?”
I picked up the handset. “Eagle, Fox. What was that explosion? Over.”
A few seconds passed, then Blake answered, “Frag Grenade. Can’t talk.” Another voice said something else, but the hammering of a machine gun drowned it out.
The gunshots and steady thrum of 400 cubic-inch V8 turbo-diesels increased in volume until they were directly in front of the cabin. The frequency of fire slowed until nearly a minute went by with no shots at all. The engines cut off, then a few seconds later, the gun-toting silhouettes of Dad, Blake, and Mike appeared in the back yard.
“Where’s Tyrel?” I wondered aloud.
The radio crackled. “Fox, Eagle. You are clear to approach. Acknowledge.”
I grabbed the mike. “Copy, Eagle. On our way.”
Lance took the helm and guided us in, slowing down parallel to the shore and dropping anchor a hundred feet out. The five of us climbed into the dinghy and set off for shore, leaving the supplies and spare ammo aboard the cruiser. We could always come back for it later.
I drove the dinghy to within twenty feet of the shoreline, then killed the engine and let it drift the rest of the way. When it came to rest in the sand, we all hopped out and dragged it ashore.
“Everybody all right?” Mike asked.
My heart leapt in my chest at the sight of him, my mind going back to last night. I cleared my throat and took a deep breath to steady my hands lest Mike see them shaking.
“We’re all fine,” Lauren answered.
Sophia ran to her father and jumped into his arms. She hugged the big Marine, kissed him on the cheek, then reared back and swatted him on the arm hard enough to raise a welt. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been worried sick. You were supposed to be back yesterday afternoon. What happened?”
Mike rubbed his bicep and backed away. “Listen, sweetie, it wasn’t our fault. I’ll explain everything later, but right now we need to start packing.”
Lauren walked up to them, Dad and Blake looking on. “What do you mean, start packing?”
“We have to leave,” Mike said.
“Why?” Lola asked. “What’s going on?”
“There’s trouble headed our way,” Mike said. “Serious trouble.”
*****
“San Antonio didn’t make out any better than Houston,” Dad said, following Mike and I as we unloaded Tyrel from one of the Humvees. “We barely made it back alive.”
“What happened to Tyrel?” I asked. He was unconscious, the left leg of his pants cut away to reveal a wide swath of bandages over his thigh.
“What does it look like?” Mike said. “He got shot.”
“By who?”
“Long story.”
I grunted in irritation as we carried the heavy ex-SEAL around back and up the steps. “How bad is it?”
“Not too bad. Missed the bone and the femoral artery. Painkillers knocked him out.”
Lance finished prying the last nail from the plywood covering the back door just as we arrived. He lifted it out of the way and stood aside, looking on mutely as we deposited Tyrel on the sofa. Lola followed us in and pushed me out of the way so she could kneel beside him.
“Is he going to be all right,” she asked, voice quavering.
“As long as the wound doesn’t get infected,” Blake said from behind me, “he should be fine in a few weeks.”
Lola stroked Tyrel’s hair out of his face, her hands slow and gentle. “Who did this to him?”
No one spoke. Dad looked around at the defenses Lance had erected and nodded to himself in approval. “We should be okay for a while,” he said. “Blake, Mike, let’s get something to eat. The rest of you hungry?”
We said no, explaining we had eaten already. Dad grabbed three MREs from a box in the den and tossed two of them to Blake and Mike. “So we have good news and bad news,” Dad said. “The good news is we got the fuel we need, and we found out why no other refugees made it to Canyon Lake.”
“Okay,” Lauren said. “So what’s the bad news?”
“Tyrel got shot, and there’s a giant horde of infected, as well as a thousand or so troops, headed this way.”
The room went silent as those of us who hadn’t gone to San Antonio absorbed the news. After a long pause, I said, “So that’s what Mike meant when he said we need to start packing.”
Dad nodded. “Exactly.”
When he didn’t say anything else for a while, Sophia raised her hand as though she were in a classroom. “So … you wanna explain what happened?”
Dad peeled open his MRE, sat down on the ottoman, and laid aside his rifle. “The idea was to approach San Antonio from the north, find a vantage point, and try to get an idea what was going on in the city. Maybe swing around south to Lackland Air Force Base, see what was left.”
He opened a brown mil-spec pouch of five-year-old spaghetti and meatballs and dug in with a plastic spoon. “We didn’t get very far.”
TWENTY-FIVE
It took him ten minutes to explain.
They had headed south, intent on entering the city limits by paralleling Highway 281. There were infected in the distance, but the highway was strangely clear, abandoned cars pushed to the shoulder as if by a giant hand. In a few places, evenly slotted lines pitted the pavement, indicating someone had used bulldozers to move the cars aside.
Somewhere near the junction of 281 and the 46 loop north of San Antonio, they topped a rise and saw what looked like a roadblock up ahead. Even as far away as they were, they could hear gunfire and the unmistakable thunder of tanks and artillery. Helicopters patrolled in the distance, occasionally opening up with machine guns and rocket fire.
To be safe, they backtracked, found a water tower, and sent Blake up with his massive binoculars. A short time later, he climbed down and said the roadblock was military, and extended as far as he could see. Scattered hordes of infected were approaching from the south, obscured in the distance by the hazy smoke of the burning city beyond. He couldn’t tell how many there were, but the piles of dead bodies just past the highway were enormous.
Earthmovers crisscrossed the open ground beyond the barricades pushing corpses into heaps for a small army of dump trucks to haul away. On both sides of the highway, there were earthen berms piled twenty feet high, telephone poles and fence posts and shattered remnants of cars jutting out from the hastily dug earth. Most of the fighting was happening to the south, but a few smaller hordes were filtering in from the east and west. To the north, the direction Dad was coming from, things looked clear. But there were thick clusters of trees and scattered buildings between the water tower and the roadblock. Anything could be waiting there.
At that point, they had a decision to make. It would be no trouble at all to simply fill up on gas and diesel by draining fuel from abandoned vehicles along the road. Doing so would give them what they needed without taking any unnecessary risks. But a large military force might also have information about what was going on with the rest of the country, how the fight against the infected was proceeding, and if there was somewhere we could go that was safer than Canyon Lake. They decided it was worth the risk for one of them to approach the troops and see what they could learn.