The Traveler 01-03 Home, Canyon, Wall Read online

  The illness, a highly contagious and potentially fatal form of pneumonia, has spread quickly from refugee camps in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

  The first cases in the United States hit New York and Philadelphia a week ago. There are now reported deaths in California, Kansas, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, and New Jersey.

  The Texas Department of State Health Services has not received any reports of plague so far, but a warning late Thursday night from the Governor’s Office has healthcare officials in cities throughout the state concerned about the implications of an outbreak here.

  “It’s coming,” the governor’s statement read. “We need all Texans to remain vigilant. The best protection is good hygiene. If you experience any of the early symptoms, we ask you immediately contact a healthcare provider.”

  ARMC has two hundred and thirty-one beds and has access to one thousand healthcare providers. However, should the bacterial pneumonia spread to Abilene, those resources won’t be enough.

  “We’ve already purchased one hundred fifty portable cots,” said ARMC CEO Dr. Harry Newman. “And we’ve hired back many of our recent retirees. We don’t know if it will be enough, but it’s the best we can do right now.”

  “Did you hear me, Marcus?” Sylvia asked. “Did you hear what I said? Everybody is wearing those little surgical masks over their faces. Wes is freaked out. I’m freaked out. Is it here? Is the plague here?”

  Marcus took a deep breath and exhaled. “No. It’s not here y—”

  “Then why is everybody panicking? Why is—”

  “It’s not here yet. But it’s coming.”

  “How did we miss this?” Sylvia shrieked. “Your whole existence is prepping. How did you not know this was happening?”

  Marcus could hear the stress in her voice, so he bit his lip before answering. “I’m a prepper, you’re right. I’ve been preparing for this. And we are prepared, Sylvia.”

  “But you didn’t know it was here.” Her speech was ragged as she tried to regulate her breathing. “You didn’t know everyone would be wearing masks or that the grocery store would be empty.”

  Marcus lowered his voice, trying to sound as calm as possible. “No, I didn’t.”

  “I-I just…I…” Sylvia’s words devolved into an indecipherable garble as she broke into sobs. “The masks…and Wes, I—”

  “Sylvia,” Marcus said sharply, “I need you to calm down. Understand, we are prepared. We’ll stay isolated. Everything will be fine. Those people with the masks, the ones at the grocery stores, the ones panicking about vaccinations that won’t help, they’re not prepared like we are. Okay? I understand you’re frightened, but I need you to calm down. Where are you?”

  “The grocery store parking lot.”

  “Are you okay to drive, or do you need me to come get you?”

  “I can drive,” she whimpered.

  “Get yourself together and come home. Drive the speed limit. We’ll talk about what to do next when you get here.”

  “Okay.”

  “How’s Wes?”

  “Scared.”

  “Play some music. Take his mind off things. Assure him everything will be okay.”

  “Okay.”

  Marcus exhaled, sensing he’d talked his wife off the ledge. “I love you.”

  “I love you, Marcus.”

  “I’ll see you in an hour.”

  Marcus turned back to his computer. On his home page was a preselected menu of items his computer’s search engine intuitively selected based on his location and previous interests. He pressed “Plague Map” on the screen and then “images”.

  A series of maps appeared on the screen. The first was static and indicated known cases with black circles plotted on the global map. The larger the circle, the higher the number of cases in that region. A pinpoint indicated fewer than one hundred cases. The largest circle represented more than one hundred thousand.

  The largest black dots covered most of the major cities in the Middle East, India, Pakistan, Ukraine, Western Russia, China, Japan, and other parts of Southeast Asia.

  Medium-sized dots populated Western and Northern Europe: Rome, Milan, Paris, Marseilles, Frankfurt, Berlin, Stockholm, Geneva, Amsterdam, Belfast, and London.

  The smallest dots were all over the United States. According to the map, the Abilene newspaper article published that morning was already outdated.

  Marcus checked the key at the bottom of the screen. It indicated the map, a product of the CDC, was updated every thirty minutes.

  Next to the static polka-dotted map was a full-color animated map. When initiated, the empty map bloomed with color. The darker the color, the greater the concentration of disease. Atop the map was a timeline. It began two weeks earlier, paused at present day, and extrapolated the data to predict future spread. Within another month, the entire map was dark purple.

  Marcus leaned his elbows on the desk and ran his hands through his closely cropped hair. All of the preparation in the world wouldn’t necessarily prevent them from getting the illness. They needed to isolate themselves. Once Sylvia and Wesson got home, nobody would be leaving for the foreseeable future.

  He picked up his cell phone and called work. Marcus was a security consultant. He was his own boss and was incredibly well compensated for his expertise. It was that compensation that paid for the extravagance of their compound; however, it required a lot of travel. He wasn’t traveling anymore.

  “Hey,” he said into the phone. His booking agent was on the other end. “I have to cancel the upcoming Los Angeles gig. Miami too. Take me off the books for everything until I call back.”

  The agent didn’t like the idea of temporarily losing the ability to book his most sought after consultant.

  “Too bad,” Marcus told him when he resisted. “My family comes first. I’ll be in touch.” He hung up without waiting for the agent’s response. It didn’t matter to Marcus what he said. He was hunkering down. As much as he hated that characterization, it was exactly what he was doing.

  He knew the next four weeks would be critical to their survival. If they could weather the storm that long, they’d be okay in the long term. He believed that. He had to believe that.

  CHAPTER 9

  OCTOBER 13, 2037, 1:47 PM

  SCOURGE +5 YEARS

  EAST OF RISING STAR, TEXAS

  “Is it taut?” Battle called out. “It needs to be taut. No slack.”

  Lola looked up from the bottom of the tree trunk, her head poking above the high yellow grass. “It’s as tight as I can make it.”

  They were fifty yards apart at the entrance to the property, both of them sitting beneath thinning oaks. The gravel driveway was mostly overgrown and barely visible from the highway.

  Battle tugged on the green threaded fishing wire to check Lola’s work.

  “You’re good,” he told Lola. “Stay there.”

  Battle opened up a canvas bag he’d carried with him from the barn and pulled out his supplies. He flipped open a Spyder knife, sliced the top from a plastic party popper, held the plastic-sheathed fuse at the top of the popper, and poured in a vial of gunpowder. He slid a cherry bomb into the bottom of the popper top and then attached it to the fishing thread. He checked the knots at both ends and then wrapped it with electrical tape. He cut an extra foot-long piece of thread and knotted one end to the longer string.

  “How many of these are you making?” Lola was leaning on the umbrella, standing a couple of feet from Battle while he worked on his explosive tripwire mine.

  “Four.”

  “They won’t kill them,” she said. “A firecracker won’t even hurt them, will it?”

  Battle affixed the tripwire to the tree. “No, but the loud noise will confuse them and it’ll give me a better idea of their position.”

  “I thought you had a motion alarm?”

  “I do. It only lets me know someone has breached the perimeter, it doesn’t tell me where. These will give me a much better idea of where they are.�
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  “From the noise?”

  “The noise and the flash. Plus, there’s a good chance they’ll open fire. The firecracker sounds like a gunshot. They might react before they think.”

  Battle reached back into his canvas bag and pulled out a flat metal contraption, a handful of nails, a hammer, and a plastic bag containing shotgun shells.

  “What’s that?”

  “A twelve-gauge booby trap.”

  “What does it do?”

  Battle looked up at Lola and sighed. He didn’t feel like tutoring her. He held the plate low against the tree trunk, just above the tripwire, and hammered it into the oak with four thick nails. He took the free end of the foot-long string and knotted it into a firing pin on the side of the trap, being careful not to tug on it so as to activate the tripwire.

  Once he checked the line, he thumbed one of the red shotgun shells into an opening behind the firing pin. “That’ll do it.”

  “What will it do?”

  “The shells contain pepper gas. At the same time the tripwire pops, the booby trap will fire the shell horizontally at the intruder. The shell will hit them with the gas. It’ll make for a really bad day.”

  “It doesn’t kill them?”

  “No. It incapacitates them, giving me time to react. Incapacitating one or two of them has a multiplying effect. You get guys yelling and screaming for help, it occupies two or three more. If I kill them immediately, they can’t help me mitigate additional threats.”

  “How many of these?”

  “Four. One at each of the possible entry points.”

  “Have you done this before?”

  Battle grabbed his canvas bag and stood. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I only have enough supplies to do this once,” he said. “I’ve never needed it.”

  “Will it work?”

  “We’ll find out. I’ve got other surprises too.”

  They walked toward the eastern edge of the property and a fence that separated Battle’s fifty acres from a neighboring abandoned horse ranch. The fence was only waist high and useless for anything other than keeping lazy horses penned inside its perimeter.

  There wasn’t a spot Battle thought they might be more or less likely to penetrate the fence except for a point at which the fence swung northwest away from his house. He strung the tripwire for twenty yards on either side of that point, running the fishing line an inch above the top rail of the fence. That line was attached to a booby trap designed to shoot upward. Battle secured it to the fencepost nearest the center of the tripwire. He knew it was a crapshoot, but better to have the additional security than nothing.

  He placed the third tripwire/booby trap combination on a northwest-southeast diagonal stretching between his house and the barn. He repeated it along the covered walkway leading from the garage to the rear of the house.

  Battle took a swig of water from a canteen on his hip and leaned against the side of his house facing the rear garden. “All right, now comes the fun part. You need to pay attention.”

  “What do you mean fun?”

  “We’re gonna set cartridge traps.”

  “What are those?”

  “They’re designed to break an intruder’s foot. Make him even less mobile than you are right now.”

  Lola wiped sweat from her forehead and reached for the canteen. “Not funny.”

  “Wasn’t meant to be,” he said. “The idea is to maim, not kill. At least not at first. An injured man is a much bigger problem than a dead one.”

  “You’ve said that a million times.”

  “It’s the truth. Follow me.”

  Battle retrieved a shovel and a stack of thin plywood boards from the barn and they trudged south through the grass toward the treehouse. Once they reached the tree, he tossed the boards to the ground, pulled a can of spray paint from the canvas bag, and shook it.

  “What don’t you have in that bag?” Lola asked.

  “You’re getting too comfortable.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Your sarcasm,” he said, rattling the can. “It’s indicative of someone who’s comfortable. Don’t get comfortable. You’re not staying here. As soon as your ankle—”

  “I’m anything but comfortable, Battle.” She took a step back and her eyes narrowed. “My son is missing, maybe dead, my ankle’s busted, and I’m not welcome by the one person who could help me. I’m uncomfortable. Sarcasm is also a coping mechanism. You’re such an—”

  “Fine,” he cut in. “You’re not comfortable. Now I need you to pay attention.”

  Lola huffed and tossed the umbrella to the ground. She folded her arms across her chest and shook her head as if he was wasting her time. “What?!”

  Battle uncapped the paint can and sprayed a yellow square onto the weeds and dirt. He took five steps and painted another square. He repeated the process until he reached the gravel driveway at the gate.

  “If you have to run from the house, make sure you’re to the left of the driveway. If you’re on this side, you could get caught.” Battle stuck the shovel into the ground at the edge of the first spray-painted square. He kept shoveling until the top of the spade disappeared below ground as he dug.

  It took him a half hour to hole out each of the squares. Lola was sitting under the treehouse, leaning against the trunk, sipping water from Battle’s canteen. She pushed herself to her feet and joined Battle once he’d finished the dig.

  Battle knelt beside the first hole. He took one of the plywood boards and lowered it to the bottom. It fit perfectly inside the square and provided a flat surface for the next step in the project.

  “Can you hand me one of the large silver cylinders from the bag?” he asked Lola. “It looks like a big bullet.”

  She fished around in the bag and pulled out a pair of the silver cylinders. “What are they?”

  “Big bullets.”

  “Sarcasm is a sign of—”

  “They’re fifty-caliber rounds, and they’re the key component of these traps. Now hand me a handful of nails and the hammer, please.”

  She fisted a half dozen nails and handed them to Battle. He leaned over the hole and drove the nail into the board deep at its center. He took four more and hammered them lightly into a tight pattern around the center nail. Then he slid the fifty caliber cartridge into the center of the four nails, which held it upright on top of the center, deeply driven nail.

  He took another balsa wood square, placed it on the top of the hole, and covered it with a thin layer of dirt and grass. The hole was concealed.

  “That’s a cartridge trap,” Battle explained. “Somebody steps on the balsa wood, it can’t support their weight, the foot drops onto the top of the cartridge, and that drives it down onto the nail. The nail acts like a firing pin and the bullet rips through the guy’s foot or ankle. It’s a bad deal.”

  “How’d you come up with this?”

  Battle laughed. “I didn’t come up with it, the Vietnamese did. This is a variation on what they put throughout the jungles of South Vietnam. They used them to injure and ambush.”

  “And you’re putting them across the whole yard?”

  “Only the wide side. It stops them from getting too close to the house. You need to remember, if you have to bolt, it’s on the left side of the driveway.”

  “Let’s hope neither of us have to bolt.”

  ***

  OCTOBER 13, 2037, 2:15 PM

  SCOURGE +5 YEARS

  ABILENE, TEXAS

  The Cartel was bigger than anyone could comprehend. Even its leadership, who divided its power into large areas and regions, didn’t know its true scope.

  In the days after the Scourge, as civilization devolved and desperation trumped reason, disparate criminal elements seized control. After months of bloody turf wars and needless thinning of the unrighteous herd, the countless factions reached an agreement. Instead of fighting each other, they fought the existing, legitimate power structure and beat
it back.

  From small, disconnected enclaves, they consolidated their lands and held much of the space between the Mississippi River to the east, the Red River to the north, the Sandia Mountains to the west, and the Rio Grande to the south. The Rio Grande was a porous border, and the traditional Mexican drug cartels were considered brethren, if not patrons, of the new consolidated Cartel.

  The men who rose to the top of the Cartel were the meanest, most morally bankrupt of its membership. They weren’t elected to their positions, they grabbed them and choked the life from those who opposed their ascension.

  One of those men was Cyrus Skinner, a ruthless self-preservationist who, before the Scourge, was a drug-dealing prison guard in South Texas. His thick neck and barrel chest matched the gravel rolling around in his nicotine-tainted voice. In his area he was king, judge, jury, and executioner.

  Skinner was in his office, a back room in the corner of the HQ that used to house the hardware store employee break room. He was leaning back in a cracked leather chair, his boots planted on the edge of the black metal desk. Cigarette smoke swirled around his head, mixing with the dust dancing in the stale air. A fat man with a hand wrapped in gauze stood across from him, demanding action.

  “He shot me,” Rudabaugh whined. “That’s got to break some sort of rule. You’ve got to be able to do something about it.”

  Skinner rocked gently in the chair, which creaked under his weight. He held half a cigarette to his lips between his thumb and forefinger, sucking the ashes red. “Probably,” he said.

  Rudabaugh tugged on his belt buckle, lifting up his pants. “Probably what?”

  “Probably breaks some sort of rule. Frankly, Rud, I don’t rightly care. You’re two grown men. You fought. He won.”

  “There wasn’t a fight, Cyrus. He hauled off and put a hole in my hand!”

  “If I say it’s a fight, Rud, then it’s a fight.”

  “So you’re not gonna do anything? You’re gonna let it slide?”

  A voice from the doorway behind Rudabaugh answered for Skinner. “Damn right, he’s gonna let it slide.”