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  “But not enough to be with me.”

  “I’m with Katie, your friend, remember? She’s pregnant.”

  “Not with your baby, Aeric.”

  “Please, let’s not have this discussion now,” he answered uncomfortably. At times like this, he was painfully aware that he’d only really dated Kate; he didn’t have any other previous experience with women to draw from. “I really need to get to the Provisions Warehouse so we can get going.”

  She held him tight, not granting him the escape that he desperately wanted right then. “I have one question for you, Aeric. I’ve never asked you before, and I won’t ever bring it up again if you answer me truthfully.”

  “Um, okay.”

  “If Kate hadn’t gotten pregnant, would you still be with her? I understand that you’re trying to be honorable, but it’s that gang leader’s baby, not yours.”

  He got angry for a split second. Regardless of whose child it was, he would raise it as his own. The anger quickly subsided as he tried to see it from her point of view. She was looking for answers to help her deal with her own feelings. He wished that he knew what she needed to hear. If he said that he would have been with her, would that hurt the relationship that she’d developed with Kate? On the other hand, if he said that he would have stayed with Katie regardless, would that make Veronica feel inadequate?

  God, he hated all the talking about this subject. He was so much better in the field, out where he could take matters into his own hands. No one ever second-guessed a decision that he made in the heat of the moment. It was so much simpler to define life by action and reaction than the various traps and snares that he had to dance around with the women in his life.

  “Well, are you gonna answer?” she prodded.

  He stared down into her deep, brown eyes. “I’m sorry, Veronica. I was thinking. You know that you mean the world to me—” he tried to say before she cut him off.

  “No. I know that you care for me, Aeric. I just want to know: if Katie hadn’t gotten pregnant, would you have been with me?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “It’s really simple. Yes or no?”

  He thought about it. The thought of finding Veronica safe back in San Angelo had kept him moving forward all along the trip from Austin to Springfield and even after he’d begun sleeping with Kate again, the thought of Veronica pressed close to him like she was now had driven him along.

  Finally, he told her the truth. She wanted to know what he thought, and this was unlikely to do anything except complicate his life more than it already was. “Yes. If you’d have had me, as hideously deformed as I am, then I would have absolutely been with you.”

  She let out her breath in an audible sigh. What does that mean? he asked himself frantically. She answered him by pulling his head down to hers and kissing him.

  TWO

  What the hell had he done? He’d told the truth and now he regretted it more and more with every rotation of his bicycle pedals as he made his way to the Provisions Warehouse. Veronica had asked him that if Katie wasn’t pregnant, would he have been with her instead. Stupid. He should have lied and told her that he was completely committed to Kate and had been since middle school.

  He had a mission to focus on; he couldn’t be sidetracked by his conversation about what could have been if things were different. And besides, what the hell had she meant when she said that she loved him and then followed that up with a kiss? Dammit!

  His Gathering Squad was going on a potentially dangerous mission. No one had really been beyond a twenty mile radius from San Angelo in over three months. The last small group of refugees that they’d let in had been in April—they were the ones who’d told Aeric about the warehouse in Garden City.

  He didn’t know how much Veronica or Katie knew about the world outside the walls that they’d constructed. It had gotten much worse than when they were out there as the winter went unnaturally long and people began to starve to death. He suspected that Veronica knew a lot more than she let on, though. Her father was the mayor of the town and she ran the city’s soup kitchen, so she interacted with everyone almost every day. She likely heard the darker tales that he tried to keep from her.

  The perimeter guards were notorious for embellishing their stories, so there was the hope that Veronica discarded what they said, however, it was unlikely. The way that she’d refused to let him go proved that she knew something was not right out in the wastes. The mutations in the remaining wildlife had gotten worse, while the showdowns with scavengers and raiders had gotten downright deadly.

  One of the ugly secrets that they didn’t tell the good, hardworking citizens of San Angelo was the Gathering Squad’s tactics. Besides the guy who managed the city’s ammunition, Mayor Delgado and Colonel Henshaw, the Air Force base commander, were the only people outside of the squads who knew how often they got into firefights and scrapes out in the wastes. Aeric hadn’t lied when he told Veronica that they tried to negotiate with people first. That rarely went well and they often got into fights rather quickly. Aeric’s heavily-armed men and women were almost never received well and those initial meetings usually ended with the people dead. Luckily, the Gathering Squads had been better than those that they ran into so far.

  He’d discussed the moral dilemma with Tyler and the Squad’s lieutenants on multiple occasions. Were they any better than the psycho-scavengers roaming the land because they killed and stole things for the betterment of an entire city instead of themselves? Aeric wasn’t sure. He knew how precarious the situation in the city was though. There were over thirty thousand people living in San Angelo—which was less than a third of the pre-war population. Even with the centralized food kitchen and supply point, the city’s constables found people dead on a daily basis. The investigation almost always pointed to a fight over food. The simple truth of the matter was that until the temperatures warmed enough to grow crops, a population of thirty thousand wasn’t sustainable. They needed to reduce the population down to a third of that number to be able to feed everyone without daily supply runs.

  The Provisions Warehouse came into view around the corner. They’d spent a massive amount of time building concentric rings of fortifications around the warehouse so they could fall back to supplementary positions if there was a sustained attack on their supply storage site. Surveying the warehouse as he rode up, Aeric once again wished that they had working tractors. His long-term plan was to build earthworks behind each barricade so the defenders could shoot over the walls instead of using them simply as a barrier. It was a prudent plan to keep their supplies, literally their lifeline, secure. In time, when the squads weren’t so busy, he’d make sure that his plan for the defenses were completed.

  Two large military trucks called MTVs were parked out front of the Provisions Warehouse. The MTVs, or Medium Tactical Vehicles, were large trucks with a five-ton carrying capacity. Their cargo areas contained the Gathering Squad’s bicycles for the trip to Garden City. The shooters and the actual men and women of the squad would ride back there as well. Then on the way back, the trucks would be full and the squads would ride their bikes beside the full trucks.

  The MTVs were a major improvement over the contraptions that the Gathering Squads normally used during supply runs. They’d taken Aeric and Tyler’s concept of a pull-behind trailer on their bicycles and increased the capacity. Since horses were in short supply, they’d fabricated a way to haul a lot of supplies at once. Aeric’s rough design was developed by several engineering students and now they had several variations of long, flatbed trailers with lightweight metal side rails that were hitched to either four or six bicycles, similar to a team of horses.

  Their carrying capacity was the next best thing to using the limited fuel in the military trucks. Unfortunately, the bike and trailer combinations’ inability to maneuver also made them death traps for the riders if they were attacked. It was a lesson that only needed to be learned once. After that, they began sending heavily-armed sin
gle riders as well as the team and everyone in the Gathering Squads were trained in military tactics. The result was a militarized group of men and women who went out on the supply runs.

  “Hey, Aeric, glad you could make it,” Tyler called from between the trucks. “I thought for a second that you finally got yourself tangled up in bed with Veronica this morning.” The musclebound Nebraska native was easily recognizable in a crowd of people. Even with the heavy coat and large hat he wore, at six foot seven, with a big black eye patch covering the puckered scar where Justin had plucked out his right eye and a shock of unruly blonde hair, no one would mistake him for anyone except Tyler Nordgren.

  Aeric and Tyler had been roommates together at the University of Texas in Austin when the Vultures started the war that wiped out most of the big cities in America and, presumably, the rest of the world. The two of them had been through a lot together since then. Chief among their experiences was the trip to Missouri to find Aeric’s parents and then their subsequent capture and torture at the hands of the Vultures’ leader, Justin Rustwood.

  “You just want the juicy details of something like that so you can spread the gossip,” Aeric quipped as he grasped his friend’s enormous hand. Aeric was larger than most of San Angelo’s residents, but he was still dwarfed by his friend.

  “You know it! That would be some good gossip that nobody could resist.” Tyler held up his hands, imitating an old movie theater marquee and said, “The mayor’s daughter and the Chief Gatherer entwined in a forbidden romance. That would sell, bro.”

  “Keep that shit up and Katie will kick you out of the house.”

  Tyler waved his hand dismissively. “Eh, I can handle her. She’s a pushover.”

  Aeric snorted. “Maybe to you. She doesn’t let me get away with anything.” He smiled as his friend. Much like Kate and Veronica’s relationship, Tyler had hated Kate when he first met her. He’d been convinced that she was using Aeric and would have ditched him at the first opportunity. When she’d killed Justin and rescued them, he became her biggest supporter. The woman could do no wrong in his eyes.

  “She lets a lot of your puppy love with Veronica slide,” Tyler replied slyly. He was one of the biggest gossipers in town and apparently, there wasn’t a line that he wouldn’t cross. To top it all off, he had a way of ingratiating himself with everyone and before long, people told him their entire life story, giving him more ammunition. Aeric hated walking around with him when they weren’t busy because it took forever to get anywhere.

  “Alright, can we keep my private life…private?”

  “I’m just busting your chops, old buddy.”

  “So, are we ready to go?” Aeric asked, hoping to change the direction of the conversation.

  “Yup. We’ve got enough food and water for three days in case we get out there and it’s a bust, enough ammo to stop a herd of charging elephants and a total of twenty-six people. Fourteen from the Gathering Squad, two squads of Shooters with five people each, plus you and me.”

  “Alright, let’s make sure everyone’s ready to go, then we’ll leave in ten minutes.”

  Tyler made an exaggerated effort to check his empty wrist and said, “Okay, I’m synchronizing my watch now.”

  Aeric pushed him playfully in the shoulder. “You know what I mean, asshole.”

  The big man flipped him the bird over his shoulder as he walked towards the group of people standing around. “Alright, folks,” he shouted. “We’re leaving in about ten minutes. You know where the outhouses are, make sure you do your business before we get in the trucks. Meet back here for the final brief from Traxx.”

  Aeric watched the group spread out as they went to use the restrooms scattered around the parking lot perimeter. They’d taken various porta johns from around the city and cut out the back side where the holding reservoir used to be. Then, they inserted metal buckets that could be taken away and dumped or burned. Almost every aspect of their lives had to be reimagined without electricity or running water.

  When everyone had returned, Aeric cleared his throat and began, “Good morning, everyone. It’s about seventy-five miles to Garden City, assuming no major roadblocks or detours. The terrain should be open except for when we travel through Sterling City. The town clusters around the road so we need to be prepared to repel anyone who tries to get on the trucks. Other than that, we don’t anticipate any problems until we get to Garden City itself.”

  “What’s the read on GC?” Nicole, one of the members of his Gathering Squad, asked. She was one of Aeric’s most trusted subordinates; if there were room for her as a lieutenant, he would have promoted her months ago, but those positions had already been filled by his predecessor. Since none of them were incompetent, he didn’t feel right demoting them to make room for her. Nicole didn’t seem to mind though; the job only came with more headaches, it wasn’t like they were getting paid any more to put their lives on the line than the guys working over at the lake. Everybody got paid in rations, and no one got any more or less than their neighbor.

  “We don’t have any updates to our brief from yesterday,” Aeric replied with a shrug to Nicole’s question. “As of three months ago, there was an entire warehouse full of foodstuff without anyone guarding it.”

  “Why did the guys who found it come here instead of just staying there and keeping all that food for themselves?” someone yelled from the back of the crowd.

  “I’ve talked to them on several occasions about that. Apparently, life in Midland-Odessa is violent and short-lived. They were afraid to take up residence so close to the city for fear that the people in Midland would find out about it and sweep in to kill everyone inside.”

  “How do we know that hasn’t already happened?” Nicole asked.

  Aeric sighed. It was a valid question; however, it should have been asked yesterday during the briefing, not today as they were getting ready to leave. “We don’t know if all that food is still there. But the fact of the matter is that we need more food here. Until the weather stabilizes, trying to grow any crops is pointless. That means we’re reliant on processed food that was made before the war. We’ve searched everywhere around San Angelo and have run into a few similar search parties to the east, likely from Austin. So far, we’ve had limited contact to the west, so we’re hopeful that the Midland-Odessa survivors haven’t found the supplies yet.”

  Tyler stepped in to help control the situation, “Alright, no more questions. You heard Traxx, this is our mission. If you don’t like it, get the fuck out of San Angelo, I’m sure your collecting experience will be appreciated by the Vultures—that is, if they don’t kill you first.”

  “Aw, come on, Tyler,” Nicole said as she stepped closer and put a hand on the big man’s arm. “We’re trying to get as much info as possible before we go out and put our lives on the line. You know, it’s like having sex one last time with your ex before they leave. You know what to expect, but you’re still gonna try and knock their socks off.”

  Tyler’s face turned red around the eye patch. “Uh, yeah. Let’s get loaded up in the trucks.”

  Aeric laughed out loud at his friend’s obviously uncomfortable response. Let him get a little of his own medicine. Nicole had been hitting on him since they arrived in San Angelo. It didn’t matter to her that he was homosexual and wasn’t interested in her physically. She made sure to let him—and everyone else—know that if Tyler ever came over to the other side of the fence, she got first dibs.

  “Alright, you heard him. We’re leaving as soon as I get a head count,” Aeric yelled while Tyler began counting men and women as they got in the trucks.

  Within minutes, they were headed towards the Western Gate. The city’s naming convention for the gates was a little confusing since the Western Gate shot off to the northwest, while the Southern Gate allowed access to the countryside southwest of the city. The only gate that was actually situated where its name suggested was the Eastern Gate, which fed out onto the old US Route 87. The Eastern Gate was the mo
st heavily fortified and guarded gate into the city since Route 87 led directly to Austin.

  The university’s Engineering students had once again come to the city’s aid in designing a wall for the city. Mayor Delgado and Colonel Henshaw had agreed right away that the city’s old footprint was simply too big and not sustainable, so they’d cut off everything north of 19th Street. The students had wanted to exclude everything south of Highway 306. However, since that’s where the mayor lived, along with most of the newer housing areas, they agreed to keep it.

  A massive construction project began, initially with old cars turned on their side and then shored up with dirt and beams to keep them from tipping back over. They also tore down the homes outside of the new perimeter, using the parts for construction. The walls were five to six feet tall in most places, more than sufficient to hold off the small bands of marauders who’d begun showing up in the recent months. The plans were being drawn up to build a massive inner wall around the university area, including the Provisions Warehouse, that residents could flee to if the outer walls were overrun. The Air Force base would have to fend for itself.

  The group drove past Old Fisher, the large lake where the city collected its drinking water. An elaborate system of PVC pipes had been installed, running at a slightly downhill angle from the lake to the city. Workers used bicycle-powered pumps to pull water from the lake into the pipes and residents collected the water inside the wall from a closely-monitored area containing multiple spigots. The water was then boiled at home to remove the contaminants that had built up during those terrible first months after the war. While gathering provisions was hard work, Aeric didn’t envy those poor lake workers. In fact, the town’s police officers used working at the lake and clearing the sewers as forms of punishment.

  The lake disappeared behind them faster than Aeric imagined possible, having become accustomed to the speeds that he could achieve on his bicycle rather than the breakneck pace that the trucks moved at. He glanced over at the vehicle’s speedometer; they were going about forty-five miles per hour, barely a crawl compared to the speeds that people used to drive on these roads.