Cherie Priest - Fiddlehead

“You’re not leaving this caravan until everybody leaves it.”

Maria saw an opportunity to deepen the wedge between them, and she seized it. “That was never part of the plan,” she blurted out. All eyes turned to her, so she said it again. “It was never part of the plan for any of you to survive the trip.”

MacGruder came forward, until he stood directly in front of her. “Out in the woods you said this was a suicide mission for me and my men.”

“That’s right. That’s one reason the president rejected the program.”

“There were others?”

“Once he learned what the weapon really does, yes. President Grant doesn’t want to create a legion of walking dead men any more than you do.”

As she spoke, Frankum and his men began a slow retreat, designed to keep from attracting too much attention.

It didn’t work. MacGruder’s men stopped them with rifles primed, promising violence if anyone tried to leave the area. The captain himself whirled around on one heel, stomped up to Frankum, and seized him by the collar. He dragged the pilot off his feet, pulling him forward, and slamming him up against the nearest cart.

Frankum’s eyes bugged out, darting frantically back and forth. He sought his men but found only MacGruder’s face wearing a very big frown.

“Is she telling the truth? Were you supposed to leave us here?”

“You don’t understand…”

“So help me understand. She’s telling the truth—she is, or you wouldn’t be writhing like a worm on a hook. You’re caught; now be a man and tell us what we’d be in for if we followed the orders that so conveniently rely on you and your company.”

Frankum rallied a nasty laugh, choked off by MacGruder’s hand against his throat. “Inconvenient fools, the lot of you.”

“We’re inconvenient? So we die with the mission?”

“Why do you think there are so many of you?” he spit. “How many men do you think are required to move that damn crawler and haul the fuel to keep it rolling? Not the thirty you’ve got. It could be done with a dozen.”

“So this is a death sentence? For being inconvenient?” MacGruder squeezed harder at Frankum’s throat, twisting his fingers in the fabric of the man’s coat collar. “I know that they want me silenced, and I know why; but the rest of these men are innocent.”

“And expendable.”

Henry, gone pale with pain but still standing, cleared his throat. “They’re part of the weapon. That’s it, isn’t it? They’re supposed to be the first wave of the walking plague after they loose the gas upon the city.”

Frankum nodded, insofar as he was able.

Captain MacGruder asked, “But then why are you here? Why send the ship along? To make sure we finish the job? To watch us die?”

“To set off the weapon. But you know that!”

“And why else? Why else, goddammit!”

“To observe, ” Frankum squeaked. “To observe and report, and make sure that you do your jobs without … any…” His face was turning red, but he forced out the last word anyway. “Interference!”

“From people like them?” MacGruder waved a hand toward Maria and Henry.

“From … anyone…”

The captain released his grip. Frankum’s knees folded, and he dropped to the ground, feeling at his throat as if to make certain he was still in one piece. MacGruder stalked back toward his nearest lieutenant and said, “We’re stopping here. We wait for Bradley to come back with word from Washington, and then we’ll reevaluate. And those three”—he pointed balefully at the cargo ship’s crew and captain—“are staying right here with us. Tie them up and throw them into the crawler. If they want to watch the bomb that badly, they can sit on top of it.”

“No!” Frankum objected, loudly and suddenly. “No, you can’t do that!”

“Why’s that?”

“Because … because…” He swore under his breath, yanked off his hat, and threw it at the ground in a gesture of protest. “Because the damn thing won’t hold much longer.”

“It’ll hold, so long as no one blasts it from the air. None of our crew has anything big enough to set it off. We’ll need your ship’s turret gun for that.”

“No, no, you won’t. We’re here with our ship to shoot the thing and set it off—that’s true; I swear it’s true,” he said, hands aloft again, protesting innocence. “But we’re running so late, and there’s the failsafe built in…”

“Failsafe?”

He cleared his throat. “An accidental failsafe, really. The bomb is too hard to control—it isn’t stable. Once it’s set and armed, it has half a day before the gas corrodes the interior components.” He was speaking quickly now. “Half a day, while the gas eats the metal like acid. If we don’t detonate it as planned, it’ll go off on its own.”

“Half a day?”

“We haven’t got another two hours to wait for your messenger,” Frankum insisted. “We may not have one. If you want to follow orders, Captain MacGruder,” he said, trying to keep a sour note out of his voice, and only succeeding because he sounded so afraid, “there’s still time to get Maynard to … to the edge of Atlanta. The gas will settle, spread, and roam anyway; precision in this regard was never very important.”

“Oh, God,” the captain said, though how he meant it, Maria wasn’t certain.

“Follow your orders. Finish the mission, and, and, and we’ll fit all of you into our craft somehow. We’ll get all of you out of here safe and sound, I swear it on my mother’s grave. We can take you out of the blast range—which isn’t far: the gas does the damage, not the detonation, and the gas is heavy. It’ll stay low, and we’ll go high. Just … you can’t keep us here. None of us can stay here much longer, that’s what I’m saying. And that’s the truth—that’s the God’s honest truth, and I swear it.”

MacGruder returned his attention to Maria and Henry—who by now had slid down into a seated position. He’d recovered a little of his coloring, but still looked weak. “Do either of you know how far this gas can travel? How much space it can cover?”

Maria put her hand on Henry’s shoulder. “No one knows. It’ll roam like a cloud, killing everything it touches until it dissipates.”

The captain looked mad enough to chew nails and spit tacks. But he couldn’t afford to lose his temper in front of his men, not at a moment like this, when the nervous chatter was whispering its way to a crescendo of frightened soldiers, the rumor fleeing back and forth along the caravan to anyone who wasn’t present to witness the exchange.

“All right,” he said, his teeth grinding against the words. “Apparently we don’t have time to fulfill our mission objective; we’ll never make the air base in Atlanta with this cargo, not now. These guys,” he said, with regards to Frankum and his crew, “aren’t going anywhere without us. And we’re not going anywhere without them. Evans,” he said to a uniformed soldier standing by. “Get me that map from the front car. We’ve got to find someplace to dump this. Sanders—” He signaled someone else. “As per my original request, I want these three tied up and stuck in the crawler with the bomb.”

“But Captain—”

“Not another word out of you. We don’t have time to wait for Bradley, which means we’re acting on faith. Now, the rest of you—in teams, as we talked about before—start digging. We need those wheels free in less time than it’d take you piss by the road, or else we’re all dead men.” He turned to Maria and Henry, then gave Henry a second, appraising gaze. “He’s not looking so well. We don’t have a doctor, but we can put him in a cart so he can rest.”