“I’ll be in the Suburban with my people. We’ll attack the raiders who are still in their vehicles and just waiting for Marcus to be too busy with the other attack elements so they can surprise him with a rush. We are going to get there before that happens and take them and their vehicles out of the equation.
“In the meantime, as soon as we are staged and ready to move, Marcus will shift all of his assets to cover the bad guys who are advancing on them from the backyards and fences to the east. With the ability to use all of his forces against one direction, Marcus should be able to make short work of those guys.
“When Marcus and my team carry out our objectives, we will then shift our attention to the raiders coming from the north down Fowler. With Dan pushing them from the north, we will engage them from the south, catching them in a pincer move.”
The Major cleared his throat. The sounds of shooting were still reaching us. “Those are our friends down there people. Let’s saddle up.”
I was terrified. I mean bone-chilling, chin quivering terrified. We had just survived a major shootout with a bunch of outlaw gang bangers on the previous day, and here we were going right back into battle again with what sounded like an entirely different group. I could still hear the buzzing of the bullets as they zipped by my head in the phone store. The Major’s words, however, had fired up a conviction that I never knew I possessed. He was right; Marcus and his people were our friends, and they needed our help. Someone had to stand up to people like the Mojados and others who thought the world belonged to them now.
✽✽✽
“Damn it!”
Arlo Washington instinctively ducked his head and wiped at the blood and tissue that had just sprayed his face and the insides of the red Ford pickup truck bed. They had parked on Shields Avenue, near where the road meets Fowler Avenue. Arlo had been sure they would be safe here because he figured the little group of survivors they had been targeting should not have been able to shoot them from so far away.
He wiped his face with his sleeve again and was dismayed to see the amount of gore that came off onto his uniform. He was even more dismayed to realize that this particular smear was a piece of Corporal Dawson. He peeked over the side of the truck bed to see the headless remains of said Corporal Dawson lying sprawled across the painted yellow lane markers on the street.
Arlo yelled into the radio handset, “Get us out of here, everyone back up another two hundred yards.”
There was much squealing, and smoking of tires as the rest of his team scrambled to get out of range of the damned snipers. Two trucks slammed into each other and held up everyone else as the drivers cursed at each other and urged the other to give way. One truck finally went over the curb and accomplished the turn in the front yard of a burned out bungalow. With the obstacle removed, the other fifteen trucks sped east until they reached Armstrong Avenue. The rear window of the last vehicle in line exploded as it sought to escape. Arlo peeked cautiously over the roof of the pickup and was happy to see they were out of sight of the sharpshooting nest of survivors. He still wasn’t confident enough to stand up in the truck bed, but he did bring his walkie unit to his mouth again. “Okay, all vehicles line up behind me again. Sherman, bring the SAW up here.”
Arlo’s people had possession of five machine guns, but he had decided only two were for this operation which had given every indication of being minor in scope. He was already rethinking that decision as well as a few others such as only bringing half of his crew.
A scout team had brought back word three days ago about activity on a small street near the intersection of Shields and Fowler Avenues. The crew reported seeing dozens of men and women carrying guns and looking well fed. Such information was enough to inspire a raid. The firearms were tempting, but the food was especially enticing. And the women; ah yes, the women.
As he waited for the arrival of Sherman and the Squad Automatic Weapon, he reflected on how he had arrived at his current situation.
Arlo Washington was a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve. He had spent five years in the regular army and then decided to transition into reserve status upon completing his hitch. The money was good, one weekend per month and two weeks out of the year brought in enough money to buy the extras that made life fun. As a civilian, Arlo had been employed as a shift supervisor in a large retail chain department store in San Diego. The work wasn’t hard, but Arlo had never gotten used to the lack of respect he received from his bosses and crew. It seemed to him as if he was always catching crap from above and below and there was very little he could do about it. The level of disrespect from his subordinates was hard for him to take.
Arlo dreamed about going back into the army where, as a commissioned officer, he commanded respect and deference from anyone ranked lower than himself. He had made several attempts over the past two years to re-enter active duty but had always been told the slots just weren’t available. Then came the uptick in the endless problems of the Middle East and Arlo found himself back in camouflage and in charge of a contingent of soldiers bound for Afghanistan. They had hopped a massive cargo plane in San Diego and had piggy-backed from there to Ireland and on to Kuwait.
Arlo’s squadron had no sooner arrived in Kuwait than the situation with the Rage sickness started blowing up back in the States. The entire regiment had been turned around and sent back the way they came. The rate of infection in England, Scotland and Ireland had progressed to the point where Arlo’s brigade had been sent to Budapest and found themselves marooned there for two weeks. There were plenty of airplanes available to take their unit back to the States, but the surviving Hungarian government was keeping them all locked down. No planes were being allowed out or in.
Arlo’s first act of open rebellion and disregarding orders was when he led a squad of soldiers into the control tower in Budapest and threatened to start shooting people until two fully fueled international airliners were warmed up and sitting on the tarmac. When the bureaucrat in charge of the airport calmly told Arlo in heavily accented English that he didn’t think would carry out his threat, Arlo shot him in the face. Two hours later the two airliners took off to the cheers of the homesick soldiers on board.
To Arlo, the killing of the airport supervisor was no big thing. He had long been aware of his inability to feel emotions, at least when it applied to others. He had done a lot of research on the subject in college and knew he was a sociopath. This reality concerned him at first until he read that some of the most heroic military commanders in history were also sociopaths. Once he understood the psychological facts relating to his condition, the whole thing made sense to him. After all, only a sociopathic personality could look at a battle plan and decide to take an action that would send hundreds or even thousands of people to their deaths without winding up catatonic with guilt.
The men under Arlo’s command were worried about their families, and they all wanted to get back home. Their respect for their officers was eroding, and they were on the verge of doing something even more horrible than what the second lieutenant had done. Arlo reasoned to himself that his actions were a small sin designed to avert a larger one.
After entering American air space, Arlo wanted to land in San Diego because he had been living there before being deployed. He had no particular attachment to the city; it was just a place where he could feel comfortable. As fate would have it, the entire U.S. Military had disintegrated by that time and the only airport still operating on the Pacific Coast was in San Francisco.
Both jets landed and disgorged their weary passengers. Arlo had the soldiers carry their weapons and gear to one of the big hangars while he tried to arrange transportation for his people to their various hometowns. They slept on the floor of that hangar for three days before the men and women started drifting away. Concern for wives, husbands, children, and parents drove the soldiers into trying to make their individual ways home. Soon, out of the original five hundred people under Arlo’s command, only one hundred and twelve were left.<
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Arlo had his plans to wander off until the other men and women came to him asking what he wanted them to do. These were people who had no close family ties and no place to go. The fact that these soldiers looked to him as their leader was sobering to him. After all they had gone through; they still respected his rank.
So it was that Arlo wound up commandeering seven school buses from a nearby high school and leading his men out of the airport. After fighting their way through several hordes of infected, Arlo knew that the ammunition the men had carried with them out of Kuwait was insufficient. If he were going to keep all of these people alive, he would need more of everything: more ammunition, more guns, more vehicles, and more food. Travis Air Force Base was located between San Francisco and Sacramento. Arlo took the buses to that base and found it empty. The ten-foot anchor fence gate protecting the main entrance had been torn down, and brown stains on the roads and sidewalks were evidence of a lost battle. Spent cartridge cases lay strewn everywhere. It was apparent that the uninfected Airmen had fought bravely, but the swelling ranks of the infected overpowered them.
Arlo’s group found the armories at Travis and loaded up with as much as they could carry. They abandoned all but one school bus in favor of fifteen Humvees, two with gun turrets and two Stryker vehicles. These massive Stryker war machines were simply tanks with oversized tires instead of treads. They did not carry cannons like tanks, but they had revolving gun turrets designed to accept a fifty caliber machine gun.
When Arlo’s army rolled out of the ruined Air Force base, they were equipped to take on anything they encountered.
With civilization crumbling around them, the men under Arlo’s command started out trying to live up to their military oaths of protecting the country from all enemies, foreign or domestic. They would find pockets of survivors and use their weapons and numbers to kill off the roving Rager packs in the area. These actions would usually result in a grateful gift of food, liquor and a safe place for the soldiers to sleep for a while. They even started to gather recruits from the people they had helped. Arlo now counted one hundred and forty-six men and women that he could rely upon to fight plus another thirty or so women who had hooked up with his men.
Having a large number of people to fight off the Ragers was a plus. The logistics of feeding those people was a minus. Even the gratitude of the survivors whom Arlo had rescued was limited. Most pockets of survivors had considerable stores of food now, which they gathered from the supermarkets and distribution hubs. But that food would be needed to sustain the survivors for an extended period. To become self-sustaining, they needed to clear land, till it and get crops planted and livestock herds gathered, all while evading or fighting off mobs of crazed Ragers. After a few days of feeding such a large group of soldiers, some survivors started to balk.
Arlo tried negotiating, he tried trading, and he tried threatening. Eventually, he started allowing his people to take what they wanted. Few survivor communities were able to resist an army of almost two hundred people. Like in Budapest, Arlo told himself it was all for the greater good.
Once that line had been crossed, it became easier just to be honest about their intentions. They all rationalized their actions to each other. They were the last remnants of the U.S. Army, they argued, and the people owed them food and liquor and whatever else they saw and wanted. Eventually, their self-serving attitudes moved them into darker places. The men decided they needed and deserved women to stay happy and continue their service to the country. When the women they encountered resisted, they were dragged away, considered now to be possessions.
Arlo knew their actions were ugly. He hated some of the things he witnessed happening, but he also knew his men were no longer soldiers, no matter what they called themselves. Arlo, himself, had indulged in the taking of young women that they encountered. He realized he and his people had permanently transformed themselves into a band of takers…marauders.
Arlo argued with himself for a long time. He knew he had to either leave the people he led or embrace this new reality. In the end, the former soldier accepted what they had all become. He was no longer a proud commissioned officer in the greatest army in the world. He was an outlaw — a marauder.
Arlo’s reverie was interrupted by the arrival of a white Toyota Tacoma pickup. The driver was a woman with wild red hair, and Sherman was standing in the bed of the truck. Earlier, he and another soldier had taped the SAW’s tripod to the roof of the vehicle with mounds of duct tape. It looked ridiculous, but when tested, it worked.
✽✽✽
“Dan, be advised I am on site at Shields and Temperance. I can see the vehicles of the aggressors lined up on Shields, all the way back to Armstrong.”
Pops picked up the radio handset. I could see his hand was shaking even from my position in the tailgate. “Roger that, Major. We’re on Fowler back by Ashlan. I can’t see anyone other than the occasional person darting across the road ahead. I can hear the shooting, though.”
The Major came back. “Same here, Dan. It looks like those snipers of Marcus are preventing the marauders from swarming over them but, listen up; I see at least one mounted machine gun. It’s on a white Toyota Tacoma. It’s possible they have more, so be careful, Dan. Don’t get into any fair fights with these guys. Cheat. Sneak up on them, shoot them in the back. If you start taking fire, flee. We need you and your people alive when all this is over.”
Pops nodded unconsciously. “Roger that, Major. We’ll certainly try.”
“Negative!” The Major’s reply was a shout over the airwaves. “Hear what I’m saying, Dan. We need to do everything in our power to help Marcus and his people, but if these guys turn out to have overwhelming firepower, we need to think about our people. They need us, too and they are our priority.”
Pops took a second to rest his head on the steering wheel with his eyes closed. Then he took another second.
“Dan? Do you read?”
Pops lifted his head and cleared his throat. “Yeah, I read, Major. You’re right. We’re ready to move out on your order. If you tell us to disengage, we’ll disengage.”
I observed the anguish in Pops’ face in the rearview mirror. Knowing his mindset, I knew he was going through his private little hell right then. The thought of abandoning Marcus and our other new friends was unthinkable to him, but the Major was right. If we fell, who else would be left to protect our people?
We waited for a tense ten seconds. Then the Major came over the radio again.
“I’m moving out now, Dan. Wait until you hear an explosion, then start your advance.”
“Roger that!”
Pops looked in the rearview until he caught my eye. “Be careful, son. I love you.”
“I love you too, Pops.”
A second later the unmistakable sound of an explosion reached us.
✽✽✽
The Major left the truck and started making his way cautiously toward the intersection of Shields and Armstrong Avenues. In an effort to stay out of sight, he was hopping over privacy fences and going through backyards. An emaciated German Shepherd growled at him but then started wagging his tail at the presence of a human. The dog had a choke collar attached to a chain and the Major took a moment to remove it. He then slid the dry water bucket over to a spigot and turned it on. The dog licked the Major’s face before slopping up the water.
He opened the gate in the dog’s yard so the animal could run free, then allowed himself a ten-second pause to catch his breath and resume his trek. It was slow going, but there was nothing he could do about it. His only concern was that the line of trucks would start their advance before he could reach them. Ten yards past the shepherd’s house, the Major slipped over a tall wooden fence and found himself looking directly at a Toyota truck. It was sitting on the road on the other side of the privacy fence. Also on the road was a Ford four-door pickup with a big eight-foot bed. There was a hulking African American man in the bed yelling into a handheld radio. To the Major, anyone
shouting orders over the radio was a prime target. Cutting off the head of the snake usually caused the body to die, but that would have to wait. The immediate danger now was the machine gun mounted on the Toyota.
The Major clicked the safety off of his RBG grenade launcher. He had staggered the grenade loads, alternating each high-explosive canister with an incendiary shell. Three of each were at the Major’s disposal without reloading. He could fire the grenades as quickly as he could pull the trigger. Over his shoulder was a nylon bag with six more shells. He looked around and spotted an empty dog house by the fence that was hidden from the view of the truck occupants by a large leafy bush. The Major quietly stepped up on the dog house and laid the grenade launcher on one of the limbs.
He took a deep breath, let it out then did it again. Waiting was always the most challenging part for him; delaying the initiation of action. He forced his shoulders to relax and found the weapon’s sights. His finger tightened on the trigger.
✽✽✽
Private Sherman was excited. He had never been selected to operate the machine gun before, and he thought of this as an opportunity to finally have Arlo move him up to the position of Corporal. Higher rank meant better everything in Arlo’s Army. Better food, better liquor, and better women. If someone of lower standing had a woman that he wanted, then he could just take her. Sherman already had one such woman in mind, and he unconsciously grinned as he thought of what this night might bring him. It all depended on how much he impressed Arlo.
Sherman was tired of standing, but he didn’t want Arlo to see him sitting, so he used the time and the height of his position to look around himself. He gazed down toward where they had encountered resistance. The former soldier could still hear gunshots coming from the survivor’s stronghold, but none were coming his way. He looked right and noticed an abandoned industrial area with a line of white dumpsters. He looked left and spotted a man’s head peeking over the fence. Sherman frowned. What was that thing he was holding?
Virgil's War- The Diseased World Page 17
