“Something like that,” she said to play along.
He nodded. “Must be painful,” he said softly, then placed his gun upon her cheek and looked around at his men. “Should we help her unload her burden?”
The boys snickered as they closed in … until one of their heads exploded onto half the others. The rest aimed around, but they fell one by one to a few carefully aimed gunshots, not one bullet wasted. She hoped it was her friends.
She suddenly found herself unable to move. She looked down and found Joe’s arm around her and his gun against her head.
“Stop or I’ll kill her, I swear,” he shouted in the opposite direction of her people. “I’m here on behalf of the Gamesman. I just want me bounty!”
Not understanding why he would think her friends would care about something like that, she could only assume it wasn’t them he was talking to; who else was easy to answer.
“The Mountain Men, I presume?” she asked.
He yanked her. “Shut up, bitch.”
She rolled her eyes. “I hate rude men,” she said before hip-tossing him to the ground and running back to her friends.
Joe warned her to come back until an additional burst of gunfire silenced him.
Didi sprinted through the doorway, slid on the smooth floor, and rolled out of the light. A few more gunshots bounced into the darkness, but the little light pouring in revealed her defenders and their new Marine friend against the walls. She thanked God as she hid with them.
“What the fuck just happened?” Isaac shouted over the sparse gunfire.
“I’m guessing it the Mountain Men,” Didi pondered aloud.
Isaac cursed and held his pistol up near his face like he was praying with it.
The shooting stopped. Everyone eyed the doorway, but no one made a sound until Lavon peeked outside. “They’re moving up. Tactical rushes, two by two.”
“What do they look like?” Rachelle asked.
A few more gunshots forced the Marine back into the darkness. “Too far away. I can only see little bits of brown or white popping up from here.”
Didi looked outside but couldn’t see anything more than a few static blobs—the cars—in the haze that was already a little grayer. “It’s getting dark, and I don’t have another battery.”
“For what?”
“Night scope.”
“What kind?”
“PVS-14.”
Lavon dug into her pocket and pulled something out. “I have a spare.”
Didi pulled the scope from her jacket and tossed it to the Marine. “Would you mind? My dexterity’s not so good with stuff that tiny.”
Lavon shook her head with a smirk and reloaded the scope. “Meanwhile, they’re about to envelop us. We should stage someone up front.”
“I’ll handle it when you’re done,” Didi said.
Fortunately, it only took another fifteen seconds for Didi to receive her property. She placed the working scope to her left eye and ran to the hallway. Up front she found tighter quarters in the front offices when she remembered she had left her weapons with those poor idiots out there.
The front door burst open. Tiny beams of light cut through the darkness and settled on her.
“Get down on your knees, now,” a muffled voice ordered.
“I don’t do that anymore. Retired,” she quipped as she dropped her scope and raised her hands to her head, her options as limited as her vision.
The voice repeated itself while footsteps closed in on her, and a shadow blocked just enough of the light to reveal itself. The Grim Reaper—or something like it in a tattered brown cloak—aimed a rifle at her head, its skull staring her down while echoing the commands of the first.
“Who are you?” she dared to ask.
The reaper’s rifle barrel aimed right between her eyes. “Last warning. On the ground before I put you there perman—”
She grabbed the barrel and kicked the reaper squarely in the chest, thrusting him into the first guy and leaving her with an M-4 Carbine rifle with a fancy scope.
Two more reapers rushed in and started shooting. She ducked into an office, shut the door, and hid behind the wall in darkness. She couldn’t see her new weapon in her numb hands.
Gunfire blasted the door into Swiss cheese, the darkness now broken by dim bullet hole beams. She used the miniscule light they offered to turn the rifle around.
The door burst open, but she waited. As soon as she heard a boot crunch the metal threshold, she smacked them with the door, rounded it, and clocked one of them in their bony-looking face.
The other one reached into its cloak and pulled a knife. “I’m gonna rip you up,” its ghostly yet gravelly voice whispered.
“You won’t be the first,” she replied with her rifle at the ready.
He threw a few feints at her before lunging in at her gut. She deflected the oncoming strike, and smacked a dark eye with the corner of her buttstock, but something hoisted her off of her feet before she could finish the guy off. She couldn’t see what, and whipping the rifle around connected with nothing.
The first two were back on their feet and coming right at her.
Her head jerked to the side against her will. “One more move and I’ll break your fucking neck,” the reaper heaved amid his panting, which was when she saw a hairy Caucasian wrist through the cuff of the robe …
… and the cloth of his blouse in between. No …
She grabbed that white wrist on her neck and quickly curled herself into a ball on the ground. The cloaked mass flew over her and crashed into the guy on the left. She gave the guy on the right a quick shot to the balls, which floored him good.
The guy she had tossed, however, quickly got back up to his boot-covered feet and rushed her again with an all-or-nothing punch aimed at her face. She swatted his oncoming arm aside and bashed his head into the door frame behind her. The robed menace fell from her grasp.
The guy wailing over his balls writhed on the ground, but his buddy tried getting back to his feet. She shoved her foot through his skull mask so hard, she heard something crunch before he collapsed. The guy she bashed in the face with the rifle kept nursing his eye.
She glanced out the door and saw nothing clear or fuzzy coming her way. She stared at that dreaded pattern on her victims’ sleeves and feared for her friends, especially Cody.
*****
Gilda couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Despite freezing her tuchus off in this dead Army base, she couldn’t stop sweating from panic. “I really hoped you were wrong.”
“Me, too,” Cody replied grimly, the grave look in his eyes lamenting the lethal drop he got on four of these Mountain Men before they could reach the building.
“What does this mean?” Rachelle asked.
“It means we’re in deeper shit than we thought,” Didi said on her way back from grabbing her sword and guns from the corpses of the Gamesman’s men—the other problem they all had narrowly survived.
That’s optimism, Gilda thought harshly.
The Ford started up behind her. “Yup, it was just the fuses,” Isaac said as he got out of it and rounded the hood. “Now da’ dat’s done, we can get da hell outta here.”
“They’ll come after us,” Cody said. “They might even have the bus.”
“Well, we fucked if we stay here anyway, so we gotta try. Right?”
“How could they do this?” Lavon muttered in shock.
“I hate to say it, but it makes sense,” Cody said, even though his voice dripped with disappointment, “why they would take the young and … kill the rest.”
“Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me?” Isaac blasted.
Everybody else glared at the brute.
Isaac marched up to the nearest body, threw open the reaper cloak, and pulled up the lapel of the bloodied uniform, prominently displaying the U.S. ARMY tape on the chest. “Dis what the motherfuckin’ Army does? Dis what dey taught y’all to do in an emergency?” He released the blouse like tossing waste. “Shit, no wonder FEMA kep
t fucking us over in Louisiana.”
“I’m as sickened by this as you are, if not more,” Cody fired back, “but, if the government’s still down there, then of course they’d build up a healthy gene pool to … repopulate after all the zombies rot out. It’s awful, but it makes sense!”
The big man waved off the soldier. “What am I talkin’ to you for? Look what you went and made for yourself,” he said with a wave at Didi. “No offense,” he added for her.
“All taken, asshole,” Didi grumbled, “and, sadly, I agree with him. They were the ones who made him create the N.S.U. in the first place.”
“Wait,” Gilda chimed in, also starting to get mad. “That’s where your device came from?”
“Nuh-uh, Sergeant,” Lavon shouted. “No damn way Uncle Sam did this.”
“Hey, you weren’t there,” Cody shouted at the Marine as he stepped out, though stopping to hold himself up with it. “You weren’t the one they ordered to … experiment on zombies, let alone the N.S.U. I did what I was told on threat of death, and that included telling the chain of command … everything I learned, so don’t you dare judge me, Corporal.”
Lavon’s eyes widened in shock and disdain. “I cannot see how any of that could ever be considered a lawful order, Sergeant!”
“Why the hell are we bickering about this,” Rachelle shouted over them, “when we should be getting the hell out of here before more of those guys show up?”
The two veterans stared each other down.
“She’s right,” Gilda shouted at them like children while forcing Cody back into his seat, “and since we don’t know if these guys caught the bus yet, we’d better get back and find out. Now, let’s get going.”
“Are we sure they’re not just paramilitary?” Didi asked while sliding into the front seat.
Cody shook his head. “Same gear, solid tactics, regulation uniforms,” he pointed at the various patches on the camouflage Isaac had exposed: a parachute with wings, a helicopter with wings, a long rifle badge with a wreath, and a nametape that identified the pale corpse as REYNOLDS, all lined up neatly as if sewn on by a professional. “Definitely not para. These are actual.”
Gilda peeked past Cody. “What if they took uniforms from around here? Maybe mimicked the way you guys would do things to keep discipline or whatever.”
“Plausible, but not—”
More gunshots interrupted the debate, forcing Gilda to duck down onto the floor again.
Someone hopped into the driver seat, slammed the door, and brought the truck back to life. “Fuck if I’m-a get my head blown off arguin’ about dis shit,” Isaac muttered before shifting gears and gunning the engine.
Inertia threw Gilda against the foot of the backseat, then into the left door as the truck swerved soon after. She forced herself up and into a seat, quickly buckling up to keep from getting tossed through a window. “Please tell me we’re linking up with the bus.”
“Best plan we got so far,” the big man said while swerving left and right like an armored football player hurtling through the field of deadly play.
A glance around the truck told her they were down two people—Rachelle and Lavon—but a look back saw two bodies in the white pickup truck struggling to keep up with the Ford. Behind them, however, appeared a few tan hum-vees with reaper-garbed gunners in armored turrets.
“Got a prayer to get us out of this?” Gilda asked Didi.
The Death Doll grinned back at her with two raised pistols. “Been saying it ever since the first bullets flew,” she replied, then slithered out her open window and started shooting.
With no weapons of her own—or training in how to use any of them—Gilda stuck to what she did best and monitored Cody’s condition, glad he wasn’t joining the firefight, too.
*****
The Gamesman fumed on his throne, and facing the empty stands made it worse. His arena hadn’t been this bare since its inception. Where else did any of them even have to go? Did they forget who they were dealing with?
No, they didn’t. They just found someone else to fear. The Death Doll.
On the other hand, that shouldn’t have been a problem. He had already claimed her. All he had to do was take back his property to remind them, and he knew exactly how.
He got up and went back into his chambers, closing the glass doors behind him and absorbing the warmth from his roaring fireplace. Sadly, it brought him no comfort. Neither did his crimson carpet, his black plush couches, or his marble mantle over the lowly messenger he had tossed into the blaze. Only one thing would. He went to his mantle and rang his triangle.
Trey McQuain entered dutifully, his bare arms barely swelling with strength over his leather robes while he gave the required salute. The man was no Rockwell, Mercer, or Gallahue, but he was loyal to a fault.
The Gamesman returned the salute with a proud grin, always happy to see someone who knew their place. “Find me fifty worthy men, and arm them well. We’re going on a little trip.”
“Of course, brother,” McQuain said with a sharp bow of his head. “Where are we going?”
“To Hell,” he told his faithful new second while facing the empty stands, which would soon be full again. Oh, how they will cheer for their grand champion—and him. “I’ve got to make a deal with the Devil.”
CHAPTER 19
EXPOSED
The snow was getting heavier, and so was the oncoming night. Between the scouting party’s silence and the statistics of how long a child had been missing before the likelihood of ever finding it again, Hashim was really starting to worry. “Why did Gilda have to go with them?”
“I always wondered about you two,” Bob said with a mild grin.
Hashim blew off that remark by opening the door for their approaching Panel member.
Craig rushed inside, grabbed a blanket, and plopped down on one of Cody’s seats. “I swear it dropped, like, twenty degrees out there.”
Bob chuckled silently from his seat. Hashim watched the lumberjack’s blanket dance while the man’s hands rubbed his arms underneath it.
“Do you think Nick’s right?” Craig asked. “About the government being behind all this. Like, maybe they set off that E.M.P.?”
Hashim shrugged. “I hope not, but I can’t help wondering. I mean, the only thing I can think of that sets off an E.M.P. like that is a nuclear missile, which brings scarier thoughts to this old sailor’s mind than zombies.”
Craig frowned. “Can you imagine someone like the Gamesman having nukes?”
Bob scoffed. “Would that be any worse than the government using it?”
That thought made Hashim cringe. Nick was highly convinced the government had been sending all those signals that had been popping up, but why set off a nuclear device this late in the game? He shook his head. “If that was a nuke, the whole mountain would’ve gone up, but whatever that was didn’t even shake the snow off. This is all just too weird.”
Craig shrugged under his blanket. “Well, they’ve had two years to do something while we were cooling our heels in Iowa. Why would it just be a light show?”
Bob sighed hard. “I think we should link up with the Ford.”
Craig flinched. “You mean go to that base? What if they pop off another nuke or whatever?”
“Didi and Cody would try to find us, no matter what, so we should do the same for them,” Bob chided. “Besides, that is a mountain over there. Maybe we can find a cave or something, in case somebody fires off another … whatever. I’m not going to let my blood die in vain.”
“What if the government has the mountain?” Craig asked.
“Then they’ll answer to me,” Bob grumbled lowly, glaring at the road ahead.
Hashim had no idea how that would look if it was the case, but he patted his friend’s shoulder in hopes it would bring the man some comfort. “Let’s focus on finding the girls.”
“So, where do we look?” Craig asked. “We’re already guessing as it is.”
Hashim pulled the rad
io. “Hey, Ron, you guys seeing anything in your neck of the woods?”
No response, which worried him.
“Ron, are you there?”
Again, nothing.
“First the girls, now the tanker,” Craig said. “He’s got eight people with him over there. Does this mean they were taken, too?”
“Not all of them are young enough to fit the bill if it’s these Mountain Men,” Bob said.
Hashim grabbed another gun. “Whatever bill we’re talking about, someone’s taking our people, and we’re on their turf. We should get everyone left back on board and link up with—”
“What’s that?” Patty asked suddenly, looking all around next to the bound Paula.
Hashim only saw the falling snow, but he heard the faint hum of several engines closing in.
“That’s way more than the Ford or tanker,” Bob said.
Hashim opened the door, docked at the edge, and shouted, “All aboard! We’ve got incoming!”
*****
The air must have dropped ten degrees in the last hour, and the snow had already accumulated another half-inch everywhere Cynthia looked. The frigid wind stung her arms through the weave of her useless green sleeves like needles, and the slush soaking through her shoes threatened frostbite, all hurting nearly as much as her potentially broken hand. The pervert had it coming for trying to “keep her warm” several times, and she’d been a lot happier since he and his twin took that off-putting Paki in the opposite direction, but they got to leave with the jackets they had brought with them. She got nothing.
The head case insisted on following her. None of her yelling could get rid of him, and she needed to spare her breath to keep her hands warm. He wouldn’t be much protection from anyone out here who wanted a piece of her badly enough, but at least he didn’t try to hug her like he was daddy or something; that would’ve meant his instant death.
Her stomach growled. She cursed those hypocrites for ditching her without food like they said they did for people they banished. She needed something, and she didn’t care if she had to chase and cook it over an open fire.
Exodus Page 17
