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They headed south for some time and the eastward again into the suburb of Lakewood. The dusk was turning into the full darkness of night when they saw a fire up ahead. It was burning in an old oil drum and several figures were standing around it.

  “What do you say?” McLean asked Carrie.

  “I don’t know,” she replied, staring through the darkness at the firelight. “They don’t look like soldiers from here. But what are we looking for, anyway?”

  “Well, as much as I’d like to just hole up somewhere out of the way,” McLean whispered back, “the reason we’re here is to talk to some people and see if we can plant some seeds of rebellion ahead of the assault. This might be our first opportunity.”

  “We won’t know until we try, I guess,” Carrie said. “But let’s make sure we have a good escape route in case these guys aren’t friendly.”

  They made a plan and then began to cautiously approach the fire through the darkness. But McLean’s blood nearly froze when he heard a hoarse whisper from the bushes right next to him.

  “Hey! What do you think you’re doing? Don’t move, or so help me I’ll put a cap in you!”

  McLean and Carrie whirled, reaching for their concealed pistols, but suddenly realized that there were several shapes around them, men with weapons. Some lay prone on the ground, some were crouched, all were hiding behind cover, shielded from the firelight ahead.

  One of them had a pistol aimed at McLean’s head. “I said, don’t move!”

  Chapter 17 : Sowing Seeds

  McLean and Carrie raised their hands, trying to keep one eye on the men around them and one on the group at the fire up ahead.

  “Don’t shoot,” McLean said, quietly. “We don’t want any trouble.”

  “Then what are you doing in the middle of our ambush? Huh?” the figure with the pistol asked, jabbing his weapon at McLean. “You don’t look like Avenuers.”

  “We’re not,” Carrie replied, unsure of what the man was talking about.

  “Shh! If you screw this up, you’re dead. We’ve been creeping up on those guys for half an hour. I don’t know who you are or how you stumbled into our turf war, but you both better lie down and stay quiet until this is over, or you’re both dead.”

  McLean and Carrie laid down on the ground as commanded. The man with the pistol continued to cover them while the others around him moved stealthily forward toward the fire. He shook his head and whispered at his nearest fellow. “Man, can you believe this? Two zombies almost walk right into our fight!”

  All was quiet for another minute, and then one of the men around the fire noticed movement in the shadows behind him and turned. One of the attackers shouted “Get ‘em! Let’s beat these Avenuers down!”

  The attackers rushed forward and there was a flurry of violence as they swung their weapons at their enemies. Those around the fire sprang into action and tried to retaliate, but even amid the confusion and darkness at the edge of the firelight it was clear they were outnumbered. Seconds later they had all run for their lives.

  While the attackers gave a victory whoop, the man with the pistol gestured McLean and Carrie toward the fire. “All right, get over there and let’s see who you are. You’re lucky! One wrong step and you’d have had your heads smashed in along with those Avenuers.”

  They moved over to the fire so they could see each other. The man holding them at gunpoint was in his early twenties, with a thin beard that didn’t do much to increase his age. He clutched his gun as if it were the only possession he had, and he did so in a manner more reminiscent of gangster movies than professional firearm training. The others, two of which were women, carried an assortment of blunt instruments and knives. They were collecting the items their enemies had dropped in the scuffle and congratulating each other on the successful skirmish.

  The man with the gun looked McLean and Carrie over. “You’re not from this part of town. You really are just a couple of zombies, aren’t you?”

  “Zombies?” Carrie asked. “We’re not… what are you talking about?”

  “You know, zombies. Walking dead, right? That’s what we call you refugee types that just come walking through with your eyes glazed over. We see a lot of your kind.”

  McLean decided the kid wasn’t going to shoot anyone tonight, if the gun was even loaded at all, which he was beginning to doubt. “We’re not zombies. We may have stumbled into your little gang fight by accident, but we’re no one you want to try pushing around. Take my word for it. Now, I have a few questions for you.”

  The gun-toting gangster stared back in surprise at the authoritative tone his captive was using, and those around him stopped to watch the exchange.

  “Who are these Avenuers you just ran off? Another bunch of gangsters?”

  “You don’t know the Avenuers? What part of town are you from?” the younger man replied. “They used to run this part of town. Sold out to the soldiers and went around ratting on everybody. But we’ve been gaining ground on them, haven’t we, guys?” The others murmured their assent. “We don’t let them walk all over our hood anymore. If they do, we beat ‘em down!”

  McLean nodded. “Okay. So you guys don’t like the soldiers either, huh?”

  The pistol kid nodded. “That’s right. Some of us are original fighters. Been resisting since before they got here. Dave and Curtis over there were West Side Gorillas back when the mayor was trying to clamp down on Lakewood. They showed him, huh, Davey?”

  Davey, a heavy-set man wielding a baseball bat with some nails driven through its tip, nodded and grunted.

  “All right,” McLean said. “Sounds like we lucked into a group of people we can use. Is this all of you, or are there more?”

  The kid with the gun tried to take a more impressive posture. “There’s more. But what do you mean, use us? We aren’t interested in whatever job you got. We fight for ourselves, hold our own ground. Nobody’s ever driven us out of here, and no one’s going to.”

  “It’s not a job,” Carrie put in. “It’s an uprising. Things are about to change drastically around here. And we need you men and women to do your part when the fighting begins. You aren’t afraid of real fighting, are you? Beating back the Correctionists?”

  “Fighting against the soldiers? Man, you really aren’t from this city, are you?” one of the gang members asked, taken aback at the steely glint reflected by firelight in the eyes of the two newcomers.

  “No,” McLean said with a wolfish grin. “But we’ve come to take back Denver anyway.”

  They spent the rest of the night learning what they could about how things worked on this side of they city. McLean and Carrie were escorted back to the hideout of the gang, which called themselves the Tigers. The desperate group of young men and women showed respect for McLean and Carrie, especially when they revealed a few details about the breadth of the resistance army they represented.

  After a couple hours of sleep, the Tigers guided them toward another band of neighborhood guardians known simply as Dartmouth. These people were more established and mature, but guarded their territory no less fiercely. The Tiger’s leader introduced McLean to a middle-aged man named Calhoun, neighborhood leader and bearer of several scars that showed what he’d come through in order to still be in charge of an area of Denver despite the Correctionist invasion.

  Calhoun pointed at his missing ear. “Soldiers took that one for ‘suspected harboring of resistors and outlawed contraband’. But if they knew what we’ve got hidden away under the floorboards, they’d have taken the other ear too.” After McLean and Carrie had gained his trust, he showed them a small stockpile of rifles and shotguns literally hidden under the floor of a burned-out suburban home.

  The Dartmouth neighborhood eagerly accepted the news of imminent overthrow of the Correctionists. They and other citizen groups had suffered harshly at the hands of the soldiers, losing precious food and water to the regime as well as friends and loved ones. The tales of abuse and wanton murder carried out by the Correctionists in the name o
f order and authority made Carrie cringe.

  Calhoun agreed to hold his people in readiness to respond when the call to arms came. He recommended McLean visit an enclave of wealthier inhabitants of the suburbs to see if they would pledge their resources to the coming fight. As it turned out, wealth was relative in this new era of Denver’s history. The Pinehurst Country Club had become home to some better-protected and less desperate characters, but they still lacked access to clean water, medical care, and freedom from harassment at the hands of the Correctionists. At first they were hesitant to admit anything to the two insurrectionists on their doorstep, but Carrie flashed her smile and got an influential woman, the former manager of the place, to open up to them. From there it wasn’t hard to convince them to pitch in to the growing effort to undermine the soldiers’ ability to respond to Carl’s assault and maintain control over the city.

  All that day, McLean and Carrie moved between groups of beleaguered citizens, powerful gangs, and bands of half-starved Denver natives. They avoided the uglier parts of town and the lawless zones where soldiers were known to shoot at anything that moved. There weren’t many firearms left among the populace, and even less ammunition. But the people were well accustomed to meeting violence with improvised weaponry, and almost everyone they met had some way of defending themselves along with the will to use it.

  Carrie played her part actively, guiding their journey through the city and bringing a softer, more inspiring message to compliment McLean’s words of rebellion and battle. But her true value as an undercover partisan was in the connections she was able to make with the women they met. Although men were generally the first to challenge McLean and Carrie as they entered a new area, time after time it turned out that women were at the heart of the decisions the groups made. Without winning over the women in several of the citizen alliances, they never could have convinced the whole group to take risks and put their weight behind the coming fight. When they saw Carrie’s quiet strength, however, many of them became united in their willingness to fight to free the city.

  It was nearing sunset when they had an unexpected run-in with the very soldiers whose downfall they were preparing. McLean and Carrie had worked their way eastward throughout the afternoon and were meeting with a combined group of citizens in the middle of a wide intersection. This location had been chosen because it was the intersection of three neighborhoods. None of the groups trusted each other enough to venture onto the other’s ground, but they had each come to the corner of their area to listen to what McLean and Carrie had to say. There were over a hundred people gathered and, sensing an opportunity, one enterprising young woman had brought bottles of hand-filtered water to trade.

  McLean was just finishing up an entreaty for those gathered to prepare for open warfare the next morning when they heard the engines. More than one vehicle was approaching their meeting spot, and the noise filtering past the buildings toward them left little doubt that they were the powerful military vehicles the Correctionists used to navigate the city on important runs. The people began to scatter.

  “Come on!” one of the neighborhood leaders shouted to McLean and Carrie. “It’s the soldiers. If they find us assembled here, they’ll take us all in!”

  McLean moved toward the doorway of an empty building, but Carrie moved further into the street to help the water-bottle girl gather up her wares from the street. “Carrie!” McLean shouted. “We’ve got to go!”

  But Carrie wasn’t listening, so McLean ran back out to help. They got the girl packed up and moving toward safety, but just then the trucks came around the corner. There were two humvees and three open-backed trucks filled with an assortment of men, gear, and boxes. The drivers spotted McLean and the women with him, and the lead hummer roared ahead to apprehend them. Several other civilians were still dispersing from the meeting, and it must have been obvious to the soldiers that they had just broken up something big.

  McLean tried to hurry Carrie and the girl off the street, but a soldier in the hummer’s passenger seat thrust a handgun out the window and called for them to stop. “Hold it! Where do you think you’re going?”

  McLean held up his hands. “Just passing through, sir.”

  Two soldier got out of the back seat and approached them, as the trucks pulled up behind.

  “Just passing through, huh?” one soldier asked. “With a bunch of bottles? What was going on here, what’s that in the bottles? Is this a moonshine swap?”

  The girl shook her head. “No, sir. Just water. I was selling filtered water, that’s all, I swear.”

  “Yeah, I bet,” the soldier said, his tone threatening. He took a bottle and checked it, sipped some, and spat it out. “Just water,” he called to those in the humvees, clearly disappointed. Then he turned and with a vicious blow knocked the entire flat of bottles from the girl’s arms. They tumbled all over the street. “Get out of here! Disperse!” he yelled.

  The window of the second humvee came down and McLean found himself staring right into the eyes of the gray-haired general he’d seen months earlier at the prison near Colorado Springs.

  “Pick those up, Sergeant,” General Maughan ordered. But he wasn’t admonishing the man for his cruelty. “We’ll need them at the airport. We’re running low.” The window went back up.

  The sergeant turned back to the girl. “You heard the General. Pick them up!” he screamed. “I want those bottles in the back of the truck in thirty seconds, or I’m taking you in. Maybe you’ve heard how girls fare in our jailhouse.”

  The girl got down on her hands and knees to collect the bottles, but McLean stared down the soldier. He knew many of the people he’d just given his speech to were still watching, waiting to see if he would really stick behind what he’d said. “Book her for what?” he asked. “She hasn’t done anything wrong. And are you going to pay her for the water?”

  The soldier, aware that his general was watching him, wasn’t about to tolerate the challenge, even though in other circumstances he might have been cowed by the tall man with the square jaw in front of him. “Selling without a permit. Unlawful assembly. Failure to surrender contraband!” McLean guessed that the reason the soldier could assume the girl had no permit was that no one was issuing them. But the soldier didn’t give him a chance to challenge anything more. “Pick them up! You, too, Mom and Dad,” he yelled at Carrie and McLean. “Or you’re all going in the tank tonight.”

  McLean knew he couldn’t afford to make any more of a scene. “We’ll do it, but you’d do well to treat people more fairly, Sergeant. You might find that you need the goodwill one of these days.”

  McLean and Carrie pitched in and quickly loaded the bottles onto the truck. Then McLean hurried the girls off of the street before the soldiers could make any more trouble.

  The convoy drove off toward the northeast, and the girl thanked Carrie and McLean for their help. “I wish I’d poisoned that water!” the girl hissed, holding back tears of fury and hatred. They sent her on her way and moved off toward another rendezvous Calhoun had set up for them.

  “So, the General isn’t going south after all,” Carrie said. “Sounds like he’s preparing to hole up in the airport instead.”

  “Yep. He knows he’ll never have full control of these streets; they’re too wild and sprawling. He wants a citadel to strike from, where his troops can retreat to if they’re pushed out of this urban terrain. We can’t let that happen or this fight will take months. We’d better notify Carl.”

  They did so, using the handheld radio they’d been given and using a code that obscured both the message and the nature of the call. Then they quickly moved out in case the Correctionists had anyone triangulating radio signals in the city.

  By nightfall McLean and Carrie had only covered half of Lakewood and some of Littleton and Englewood, connecting up with local leaders and coalitions. But they were confident that due to their efforts, word of the uprising had spread throughout the western suburbs and into what was left of Denver proper
.

  “Let’s hope the rest of Carl’s infiltrators have the rest of the area covered,” McLean told Carrie as they rested during the small hours of the morning in a friendly house. “Dawn comes in a few hours, and the game’s up at that point.”

  “There’s one more thing we need to do, if we have time,” Carrie said, stifling a yawn. “Word of what we’re doing has probably already trickled through to the soldiers. We should use that to our advantage and see if we can trick their leadership into congregating in one place. Cut off the head of the snake.”

  McLean sat up and looked at his wife. “Carrie, you’re speaking like a true guerrilla.”

  She smiled tiredly. “I learned from the best.”

  Chapter 18 : War in Denver

  Before the sun peeked over the valley rim, the first shots had been fired. General Maughan responded to an early decoy attack staged by Carl’s men, and things escalated from there. A contingent of Correctionists were drawn into a large-scale ambush and Carl scored his first victory, gunning down over a dozen of the enemy soldiers and sending the rest scurrying back into the city for reinforcements.

  But Carl and his advisers knew that Maughan would probably hunker down in defensive positions until he could be sure what he was up against. They had already positioned men near the city in places with good cover and fields of fire. Some had even managed to work their inside the city without being spotted. Soon Maughan found that he was surrounded by a shifting, mobile enemy force that seemed to appear out of nowhere to rain bullets on his men, and then disappear just as suddenly.

  One of his lieutenants managed to catch a group of partisans from behind, and shredded them with rifle fire and a few grenades before they could get away. But that was the only triumph Maughan scored that morning, and his men paid for it dearly. The lieutenant responsible never even lived to be congratulated by his general.

  Inside the city, things began to boil out of control as well. Everywhere, people were moving, talking, watching, and running between buildings and tunnels. When the first shots were heard and it became clear to everyone that this outbreak was real, the elderly and children were shepherded into places of relative safety, and the men and women that were ready to take part in the mayhem streamed out into the streets to fight for control of their city.