Anthony DeCosmo - Disintegration

Something caught her eye. A light from a cabinet on the far end of the living room. She stepped over there and leaned close. The light came from a button. She pushed it.

The speakers of the stereo came to life and played a melancholy melody. I'm always walkin' after midnight, searchin' for you…

What is this? Is it…the least bit…familiar?

No. She had never heard this song before.

Still…nice. Sad but kind of sweet. It made her feel a little better but, at the same time, it gave her a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach. She did not understand; she wasn’t hungry. Could she be getting sick?

She stood there…listening…wondering. I go out walkin' after midnight,

Out in the moonlight,

Just hopin' you may be

Somewhere a-walkin' after midnight, searchin' for me…

The Humvee sped along the Cross Valley Expressway. Two escort vehicles followed at a respectful distance.

Trevor sat in the passenger’s seat meandering through pages of reports, updates, and proposed plans attached to a clipboard. Jon Brewer drove the car and Tyr rode in the rear.

Jon did not typically serve as Trevor’s chauffeur, but they had been in the middle of a meeting when Dante’s urgent call had been piped through to the new meeting hall in the basement of the mansion.

Dante refused to explain the emergency, forcing Trevor to the road. With the new autumn offensive only two weeks away, Trevor and Jon could not afford to miss meeting time. Therefore, Jon volunteered to drive them from the estate to meet Dante in Kingston.

Trevor smiled and read from one of the reports.

"Yep. Omar’s got the coal plant one-hundred percent on line. That should put the lights on in Wilkes-Barre permanently. Told you he’d do it. You owe me five bucks."

"I’ll admit it, I was wrong. Still, would have been nice if he had gotten the power back when that heat wave tore through."

Stone remembered that heat wave in July. Air-conditioned rooms had been at a premium during that second summer in the post-Armageddon world; a summer that had begun with him losing Nina, but also saw the addition of hundreds more people to the community after finding and destroying a line of Red Hand camps by the New York state border.

It seemed the more they accomplished the more the accomplishments rolled in. Trevor knew things changed at Five Armies, but he had not expected things to change so fast. The August census showed the community had grown to five hundred people. Just as Stonewall had said, there were pockets of humanity out there waiting for a leader.

Nonetheless, the overall survival rate appeared to be somewhere between a half percent and two percent of the pre-Armageddon population, meaning they still found many more dead bodies than live ones.

"Okay, so Prescott says Chamberlain Munitions is back on line, too" Trevor read from another page as the Humvee drove along.

Jon echoed what the report revealed: "Omar’s been able to crank out some of the raw materials with that matter-maker thingy, so we’ve started production on bullets and light artillery pieces at the Chamberlain plant."

"But Scranton isn’t secure yet."

"No, we turned the Chamberlain complex into a fortress. Besides, most of the baddies in Scranton are small stuff. Nothing that’s a big deal. We can clear it out in a week or two once we get enough bullets."

Trevor shook his head in disappointment. Still, he knew he should know better than to try and move too quickly. The last year-the first year-of the fight taught him that while bold moves would be necessary on occasion, patience would be necessary just as often.

"So you think we should clear Scranton before we launch the big push?" Trevor asked his lead General. "What does Shep say?"

"Shep says his folks are ready to go at any time."

Trevor knew one of Shep’s ‘folks’ was Nina. Shep oversaw what would soon be the ‘southern command.’ Nina fought at his side. They had built a base outside the mountain top city of Hazleton to the south. That meant Trevor did not see Nina around the estate much any more.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Trevor returned his focus to the important stuff.

"Does he have enough bullets to clear Hazleton? Can he do that?"

Jon answered, "We got the Gentex plant up in Carbondale running. We found all the plans for the contracts those guys had with the Marines before ‘all this.’ Shep’s got the first batch of ballistic armor and helmets from there."

Trevor knew Carbondale to be a small town north of Scranton. He knew that the Gentex facility had also been turned into a fortress.

"I didn’t ask you about helmets and body armor. I asked you about bullets."

"Shep thinks he’s got enough."

"Do you think he’s got enough?"

"Um…not yet. Give it another week. Push the launch back to October."

Trevor sighed, nodded his head, and made a note on the report.

"Oh yeah," Jon thought of something. "Eva Rheimmer says she needs more human guards for the new farms."

"What? She’s already got, like, a hundred K9s."

"Yeah, well, she’s got like a dozen farms now."

That surprised Trevor.

"A dozen? I thought it was ten."

"She found two more outside of Center Moreland, both with big corn fields."

"Fully manned?"

"Yep. Families and farmhands. Of course they were happy to be a part of our big family when we gave them medicine and gasoline."

"But?" Trevor sensed a ‘but’.

"But they need protection, too. Lots of weird things out there in the countryside."

Trevor said, "Sure, because we’ve been chasing all the weird things out of the cities. Guess you can’t have everything. Hey, this exit."

Trevor pointed to the ‘Kingston’ ramp off the expressway.

"Where am I going again?"

"Rutter Ave. Just get off on Route Eleven, hang a right, then hang a left."

Trevor knew the way because he had traveled it often in the days before Armageddon. Ashley had lived in Kingston not far from Rutter Ave.

Dante had summoned them to what had been an optometrist's clinic in the old world. Why he had summoned them remained a mystery.

Trevor returned the conversation to their on-the-fly meeting.

"Stonewall still up in Honesdale?"

"Yeah, still working out the details with those people up there. Last time he checked in, he said there’s at least another two hundred people in and around there. They had rebuilt their town, a little. Still, not much in the way of resources. They’re itching to be a part of us."

"Gunna be tough. They’re sort of isolated up there."

Trevor knew Honesdale to be a tiny, remote town, a good forty miles as the crow flies to the northeast of Wilkes-Barre. However, as he mentally examined the map he realized that Scranton and Carbondale marked steps between the estate and Honesdale.

"Maybe we can clear some outposts between Gentex and them. Kind of make, I dunno, islands between us and them. Then start clearing everything out in-between as we get more manpower."

"Not a bad idea," Jon answered as they came to the end of the off-ramp and swerved onto Route 11. "We haven’t spotted any type of big, organized armies out there. So if we’re just worrying about the little stuff-like Mutants and predators-we can build up hard points and wait until we’ve got more strength."

"You’re a genius Jon."

"I thought I was an asshole."

"Yeah, that too."

Trevor paged through more reports. The council he had created to help guide planning and coordinate efforts started to create a bureaucracy. That, in turn, created more paperwork. Trevor feared the whole save-the-world thing was going to get a lot more complicated.

Jon pointed out: "Manpower could be tough. Not everyone wants to be a fighter."