Chapter 28 Plague
A/N: I find myself looking at the flashing cursor and wondering what words it is really longing to make appear on this white screen? With the way my world's going, it would slowly reveal – old lady with cats.
Last time around:
A familiar voice from the back of the storage unit called out, "Penny? Penny? Is it really you?"
Chapter 28 Plague
An observer would think that they'd done it a hundred times or more. Wyatt and Sheldon leapfrogged from cover to cover and finally flushed out the last of the two raiders and ended him.
Wyatt was breathing heavily and Sheldon was getting over a case of the shakes but they had both agreed to use the opportunity to go through the small cluster of commercial buildings before heading back.
They went through the small grocery store/pharmacy with a fine toothed comb. Each pushed a cart down the aisles, grabbing stuff off the shelves and when a cart was full, they pushed it to the front and got another.
There was still power to the town and Sheldon wondered about the source and how long it would continue; either a maintenance failure at the source or downed lines would disrupt it eventually.
They filled 8 shopping carts and then Wyatt went to check out the pharmacy section. Sheldon had gone to the loading dock and checked for stuff that might not have been put on the shelves yet but it was empty except for the body of the store manager who'd been shot and left there to rot.
Wyatt met Sheldon back at the store front and held up several small white boxes and a bag of disposable syringes and a plastic bag full of various over-the-counter and prescription meds.
"I put each of the bins of pills in a separate bag along with the ID tag. I didn't want to leave anything behind that we might need in the future."
They'd found Bomber another month or two of life and that lightened the mood considerably.
The pair of travelers rode their snowmobiles back towards the storage area when Wyatt spotted something in the alleyway between a building and a gasoline filling station. They'd need fuel and maybe there was still some in the underground tanks.
"Sheldon, look! A Greyhound bus!" They turned off to check it out. The luggage hatches were open and there were suitcases, items of clothing and personal items littering the alley.
"I'll bet those bastards forced the bus off the interstate and then probably killed the passengers and took their stuff. Bastards!"
"There was a large Greyhound Bus Lines decal on the window of the filling station. More likely they stopped for fuel and to discharge or pick up passengers and were overpowered. Let's check out the bus."
The bus was empty but Wyatt worked his magic with machinery and got it to start and checked the gauges – almost ½ full of fuel so they must have made a regularly scheduled stop.
"Wyatt, I'm certain that regular bus service would have been suspended due to the Choker. These hoodlums wouldn't have bothered with keeping the bus battery charged. Maybe…maybe these people were like us – refugees looking for a new place to start over?"
Penny's father had thought that Leonard was smart but this guy made Leonard seem…ordinary. Sheldon had obviously made connections through unrelated facts and such and come up with a logically obvious answer.
"Okay, Sheldon, that sounds logical. But where were they heading and why?"
"I don't have a clue. Maybe there are 'workers' still alive who can give us answers but there is insufficient data to form more than a questionable supposition. The bus plates are from Pennsylvania but that doesn't mean the passengers were from there. We don't know which direction they were traveling from the current position of the bus…just too little data."
"I think we should add the bus to our convoy, especially if we intend to increase our group numbers. The more people, the more chance we'll have to find valuable skills and talents we'll need in the future," said Wyatt.
"I agree. It'll mean locating additional diesel stores and figuring out sleeping arrangements. I've ridden on buses my entire life and they are not conducive to a comfortable REM cycle. Now a train…"
"Bernadette? Bernie?" Penny pushed past a few women and hugged her friend as if her life depended on it. Bernadette was sobbing into her parka and shivering in the cold. Penny took off her heavy parka and wrapped it around her short friend and hugged her.
Penny was surrounded by naked freezing women who all seemed to shout questions at her and demand answers – answers she didn't have. She had a question of her own, though.
"Bernadette, where's Howard? Is he – "
"I don't know! We haven't seen any of the men from the bus since we were taken. Oh, Penny, it was horrible. They shot the driver and a couple of the passengers, the older ones, and then they – "
Anything else was lost to her sobs and Penny had no idea what to do or say. This was like nothing she'd ever experienced and she was totally out of her depth.
Tasha returned with blankets from the office but there weren't enough to go around. Winkle came back with boxes of clothes and threw them on the ground and went back for more.
Penny yelled to get their attention. "Ladies, I'm Penny and my friends and I are from Pasadena. We're not going to hurt you but you have to be patient while we find you all something to wear. Share the blankets – "
"What about my husband?" one woman shouted and others started hollering and Penny pulled Bernadette behind her and started backing up, afraid for the first time since opening the steel sliding door. These people were desperate and some were in need of immediate help but she was overwhelmed and scared to death.
Winkle came back with two more boxes and then shouted out that they better get dressed and then out of the weather and started shoving the more demanding women towards the pile of clothing.
They started shoving back, clearly panicking and Tasha fired two shots into the air and things immediately quieted down.
"Listen! We never expected to find so many of you and we're doing the best we can. Get your asses over to that pile of clothes and cover yourselves. I'll start a fire and you can all get warm. We're not done opening units yet. There might be other survivors, so shut up, line up and do what you're fucking told!"
Her voice, her authority and her orders brought order out of chaos. The way she'd waved her pistol around cowed a few of the loudest ones and they finally began picking through the piles of other people's clothes to find something warm.
Winkle said, "Tasha, you're in charge of these people. Penny and I will open the other units. Bernadette, stay with Tasha. Maybe you can gather stuff for a fire? Build it in the storage unit near the front and it'll warm the whole unit."
Leslie and Penny went from unit to unit, scanning for heat signatures. Penny was almost ready to give up hope when – "Got bodies in this one, Penny. Cover me while I clip the lock and open the door. If they're like those bitches were, we might have a problem with them."
Leslie used the bolt cutters and threw up the folding door. They wouldn't have any problems. The men in the unit had been worked almost to death and probably had never had enough to eat. They were exhausted and just lay on the cement or leaned against the cinder block walls, too cold to move.
"Howard? Howard Wolowitz? Howie, are you in there?" Penny yelled out and walked in to the unit, trying not to gag at the stench or at the condition of the men. One or two were clearly dead or so near death it wouldn't matter unless they got medical care.
"Who – who wants to know?" His voice came from the back of the unit where he leaned against the cinder block wall. He was so cold he thought he was hallucinating. It couldn't be Penny. She was in Pasadena with Sheldon, not wandering around northern Iowa rescuing people from slavery.
Bomber searched through the office and found nothing of any use. He gathered up the weapons that were stacked against one wall and then found a crude drawing of a 'fort' of some kind and notes about construction.
There were also lists of things they'd planned to bring in and a listing of 3 national guard armories and the towns they were located in.
When Tasha burst in and explained that she needed blankets for the survivors, he pointed toward another room in the office trailer that they'd been using for 'recreation'. There were blankets in there.
"Bomber, we could really use your help. I can't keep and eye on these people and start a fire to keep them warm. Can you help me?"
Bomber rolled a steel trash barrel over in front of the storage unit and started throwing construction debris and anything that would burn into it. He took a bottle of vodka that he'd found in the office and dumped it into the barrel and then threw in a match from a box he'd found in the office.
"Okay, this is the best we can do for now. I'm Hideki, but you can just call me Bomber. I'm retired Air Force and joined up with these people in Barstow. They're good people and don't mean you any harm. We came here to kill the bastards that tried to attack us and didn't expect to find any of you alive. This is the best we can do and be damned glad we're doing it."
"What about my husband and the other men on the bus? We were headed to Omaha and an Air Force base there. We heard them on the radio and they said they would add us to their group and – "
"Offut Air Force Base in Omaha? Lady, those guys make these guys look like social workers. It was a trap. They're predators of the worst kind and you people were easy prey. We almost fell into their trap ourselves – almost."
Bomber wondered how many other groups like this one had been lured to their deaths or worse by those animals in Omaha? If he could find a plane and munitions, he'd gladly bomb it into rubble.
The people from the bus (who forever would be known as 'the bus people) were reunited with their loved ones who had survived. One woman, Jennifer, was alone. Her boyfriend had died sometime in the last few hours and it was his body that Penny and Leslie had found. Penny and Bernadette quickly 'adopted' her knowing that she'd need a lot of comfort and attention in the days to come.
Winkle didn't like her for some reason and her only comment was 'she's not sleeping in the RV and that's final'.
Wyatt drove the Greyhound bus into the compound and began opening the storage lockers in the side of the bus. He and Sheldon had thrown all the stuff from the alley into it and he'd driven back to the storage business hoping they'd found survivors.
"Daddy, where's Sheldon?" Penny didn't see a snowmobile and Sheldon hadn't gotten off the bus with her father.
"He's still in town checking things out. We found more insulin and syringes for Bomber and a whole bunch of prescription drugs. We'll need to take the semi into town and load up what we scavenged. I saw a map in the postoffice and the exit for Tipton is just a mile or so down the road. We'll bring everything here while we get things sorted out, I guess."
"You left him in town alone? Oh, God, he's alone and there's no one to watch his back," she said to her father, pissed off that he and Sheldon ignored the rules when it was convenient for them.
'Rule #1 – do not go anywhere alone'.
She handed Bernadette off to Tasha telling her that she was going into town because her father had left Sheldon alone in clear violation of Rule #1.
"Go. I've got this in hand. We'll start going through the bus luggage and then," she almost gagged, "we have got to do something about getting these people clean!"
Tipton
Sheldon had gone through 8 houses, searching for anything they could use and piling in front of the house for later pick up. He had yet to come across any bodies and that had him both curious and full of dread.
There hadn't been any bodies anywhere and he had a feeling that he was going to stumble over a mass grave or something. It was obvious that not many of the residents of Tipton had evacuated because there were cars and trucks in driveways of all the houses he'd checked.
He walked out of the ninth house with his arms full of clothing and a few jars of home-canned preserves and fruits when he heard the whining of a snowmobile in the distance.
He crouched down behind a line of trashcans that were on the side of the road waiting for a pick up that would never come. His plan was simple, wait until the snowmobile was parallel with his hiding place and then kill the rider. Another snowmobile might come in handy hauling stuff from the abandoned town back to their vehicles.
Penny had turned down the alley between the post office and another building and ended up making a sweeping turn around the outskirts of the small town. Instead of approaching from the direction of the storage units, she was coming from the north.
It didn't dawn on her that in the feeble light of dawn, she wasn't recognizable. She was wearing a helmet for safety and had pulled on a coat from the stuff they'd piled up for the survivors. She'd given Bernadette her field jacket.
Sheldon watched as the rider slowed down after seeing the stack of stuff on the front porch. The rider was probably going to go through it looking for anything of value.
Perfect. He couldn't miss at this distance.
