The expression on the doctor’s face was a mixture of panic and anger. “I do not have a drinking problem. Everyone in this room has a drink or two from time to time.” He pointed at Pops. “I see you drinking beer almost every night.” He turned and searched the faces at the table, then pointed at Buck. “He drinks straight bourbon.” He pointed to Marie Bronson. “She has a glass of wine every night.”
Pops looked genuinely sad. “Yes, Doctor. And that is why I made certain that we were stocked with spirits when I set up this place. Under these circumstances, it is helpful to be able to drink a beer or two or have a glass of wine now and then to help us relax and deal with this new world condition. But, Doctor, you’ve gone through an entire case of gin since you got here. You’re always drunk. Always. That’s the truth of it. From now on your access to liquor will be controlled by myself and Sharon and that’s all I have to say on the matter. If you find those conditions unacceptable, you are free to leave and make your way on your own.”
Pops sat back down, pulled his bowl close and crumbled up a handful of crackers into it.
Tashnizi balled his fists and glared at Pops, then at each one of us in turn and stomped out of the room.
✽✽✽
James Schofield joined Arlo’s army shortly after they showed up at the air force base. No one forced him to participate in their actions; he just liked the idea of taking what he wanted with no real effort or work.
When Arlo ordered the attack against the small enclave of survivors, Schofield thought it was going to be easy, just like all the previous ones had been. One of the noncoms assigned him to the group that was to approach the survivors from the north, going down Fowler Avenue. He had been paired up with Benny Alison, a friend with whom he had worked in the past. Benny was excited because he had been without a woman for a long time and the scouts had reported the presence of several women among their intended victims. It was Benny’s turn to have his pick of the ‘spoils.’
Benny and Schofield had worked their way south on the street using cars and houses as cover. They’d done this before and regarded themselves to be very good at it. Everything was going fine until a sniper from one of the survivor houses blew a hole right through Benny’s chest. He didn’t even live long enough to say anything, he just died.
Schofield had never tasted defeat before. He relied upon the strength of the army to protect him and give him whatever he wanted or needed, and it had never failed to do so. But, while he was hunkered down behind an aging Volvo on a strange street, looking at his dead and bloody friend, he felt a fear he’d never known before. They were supposed to be doing this type of thing to their victims, not the other way around.
Schofield panicked, searched around and spotted an open door to his left. He darted for it hearing bullets pecking at the ground around his feet. Just as Schofield dashed inside the door a slug pierced his right calf, and he collapsed inside the house screaming in pain.
At that moment, James Schofield wanted nothing more to do with fighting, killing, raping or Arlo’s Army; he just wanted to find a place to hide and disappear. He went to one of the bathrooms in the empty house and found towels which he tore up to make bandages for his bleeding calf. The bullet had luckily passed through without hitting bone. When he got the bleeding under control, Schofield hopped one-legged up the stairs and spotted an attic pull-down access port. He had unfolded the segmented stairway and, with much effort, climbed up into the attic. He pulled the stairs back up and sat there in the dark, praying the people they had attacked did not find him and finish him off.
When the announcement was made to give up, Schofield did not believe it when the others claimed they wouldn’t kill them. He was judging the victors by Arlo’s practices. The wounded man fully expected this new group of survivors to execute the people who surrendered, so Schofield stayed where he was, peeking through the ventilation louvers. When they released his comrades, he realized he had missed his opportunity.
Schofield had hidden in the attic for the rest of the day, sweating profusely and longing for a drink of water. That night, when the luminous dial on his watch read 3:15 a.m. he lowered the stairway and hobbled down. The wounded man peeked out the window in the front door and, seeing no one, made his slow, limping escape from the neighborhood. He got just six blocks away before being caught by a bunch of guys wearing army fatigues.
✽✽✽
Lobo stood with his arms folded as he studied the wounded man sitting in a plastic chair. The man’s pant leg was dripping with blood, and he was in obvious pain.
Schofield looked up at the small man before him with tears in his eyes. The tears were from a combination of fear and pain.
“Please…I need a doctor,” he implored.
Lobo never moved except to shake his head. “We ain’t got no doctor.”
The bleeding man squeezed his eyes shut as a spasm of pain hit. He was pretty sure the wound on his leg was already beginning to fester. “But you got pain meds, right? Can I please have something? Tylenol, aspirin, anything. Please.”
Lobo shook his head again. “We keep all that stuff for our people. Why should we give it to you? You’re not part of us. In fact, you belong to a group of people who came into my town without my permission. Then you started a war right under our noses.”
Schofield saw in the little man’s eyes that he had no sympathy for him. Conversely, the man looked as if he might be enjoying his suffering. He shifted his focus to the larger man with the big belly standing beside him. “Please, sir. I just did what I was told to do. I had no choice; I was just following orders.”
Lobo started to reply, but Arturo spoke first. “Orders? Who gave you these orders?”
Schofield hesitated. He didn’t know if there was any real purpose served by keeping anything from these people, but he thought the information might be worth something. A pain pill maybe. He decided to play the tough guy. He leaned back in the chair and wiped his eyes dry. He looked at the big man. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. Just give me a pain pill first.”
Lobo smirked. He drew a fixed-blade dagger from a sheath on his belt. “How ‘bout I take one of your eyes out? I bet you’d you tell me what I want to know to save the other one? Pretty tough life out there, even for a man with both eyes.” He bent lower towards the prisoner.
“No, please. I’ll tell you anything. Please,” Schofield sobbed, having exchanged his tough guy persona for that of a sniveling coward.
Arturo held out a hand to stop his boss. “Can I handle this, Jefe?”
Lobo shot an angered look at his lieutenant. Putting a hand on Lobo was not something that he usually tolerated. Others had lost their hands for it. Lobo decided to overlook this outrage because Arturo was a man upon whom he always depended.
Lobo nodded and stepped back as Arturo knelt next to the man. He rummaged in one of the pockets in the pant leg of the army uniform and withdrew a bottle of pills. He held it up so the man could see it and shook it, making it rattle.
“Ibuprofen and codeine. Guaranteed to make you pain-free in ten minutes.” He put the little bottle in his shirt pocket. “Or not. It all depends on you and your answers.” He leaned forward until his nose was almost touching the other man’s face. “Now, just in case you’re thinking of lying to us, understand this; we already know all about your friends. If you lie, we will know it. If you tell the truth, well, you get a bottle of happy pills and a free trip back to your soldier boy buddies.”
Schofield talked. He told them the whole story about Arlo’s Army, what they’d been doing and, most importantly, where they were staying.
When he was finished talking, Lobo called Arturo to a place in the room where the others couldn’t hear them. Lobo looked up at Arturo, and the larger man could see the demon was back. Arturo gritted his teeth and prepared himself for being struck or even worse. He used his elbow to surreptitiously ensure his sidearm was in its holster at his side.
“Why you puttin’ hands on me, Turo?”<
br />
Arturo puffed his chest out. He was getting tired of situations like this. “I thought you were playing a game, Jefe. You know, good cop/bad cop stuff. I was actin’. I thought you was actin’.”
Lobo seemed to consider this while boring a hole into Arturo with his eyes. He appeared to make a decision and stepped back with a slight nod. “Okay, I’m buying it…for now.” His face changed, and he grinned, an expression which looked out of place. “I was acting, Bro and this guy almost crapped in his pants. We’re on the same page here.” He looked over to where Schofield still sat, looking miserable. “Get all the information you can from him, then give him a few pills, enough to get him ready to move. I don’t care if you overdose him; just get him out of pain long enough so he can come with us to where his friends are hiding.”
“I read you, Boss. He’ll be ready.”
Lobo’s stare at his old friend lingered a bit longer than it should have. “Thanks, Turo. You’re a pretty good actor, ya’ know? Academy award stuff.”
The leader of the Mojados walked away laughing. Arturo watched him go; sure his boss was not amused in any way.
Arturo always suspected that, at some point, he would have to kill Lobo. Those suspicions were becoming more pressing lately. The man was brilliant, but there was a sickness growing inside his mind. He used to be stable most of the time with his psychosis only rarely making itself known. That was easy to deal with. Since the Rage hit though, there was no civilization, no authorities around to challenge him and the man had surrendered a growing chunk of his sanity to the dark influences that lived in his mind. Arturo knew Lobo had almost exploded on him several times. The good part of his brain, the part that reminded Lobo of the lifelong friendship he had enjoyed with Arturo, had always pulled him back from the brink.
Arturo had watched the struggle between the two divisions in Lobo’s brain. He could see that the more rational part was slowly losing ground to the darker side. Lobo had recently started wearing the big dagger wherever the Jefe went. He also now carried a Glock nine-millimeter pistol on his belt. Arturo was now sure that the time would finally come when his boss would decide to use one of those weapons against him.
And that was when Arturo would kill him.
Chapter 14
Arlo winced as Dolores cut away the bandages from his legs with a pair of angled scissors. He looked at his damaged legs and swallowed hard. Dolores had worked in a veterinarian’s office before the Rage hit and was the closest thing they had to a medical expert. She had found a book containing photos of different kinds of injuries and pronounced him to have first degree burns on his right leg and first and second-degree injuries to his left. Arlo was sickened by the sight of large blisters that ran from his left knee to the top of his thigh.
So close to his man parts.
He swallowed again and prepared himself for the pain that would follow as she cleaned the burns and slathered them with an antiseptic salve. She was in the middle of doing this when one of the men from his personal bodyguard knocked on the door to the office.
Arlo indicated to Dolores that she should continue her ministrations. She smiled at him. Dolores was a pretty woman in her late thirties, and she had dropped many hints about her availability for sex. Her long brown hair shined, and her big eyes and sensual lips combined to make her very attractive but Arlo liked his women young. Very young, in fact. He shifted his focus from her to the short, pudgy man who entered the office.
Arlo’s scouts had located the empty motel at the corner of Herndon and Clovis Avenues. It hadn’t been totally unoccupied; there were about fifty of the infected who made their home there. They had all come running out of the motel exits with murder in their eyes and been gunned down by large caliber machine guns. The trashed rooms that the infected had been occupying were closed off, and the soldiers moved in.
The motel was big, seven stories high and containing a hundred and forty rooms. Arlo had quartered his people on the first three levels, and he took over a V.I.P. suite on the first floor. The suite had a parlor, and this was where Dolores was attending to his burns.
Pudgy came in, glanced at Arlo’s burns, and grimaced before he could catch himself. “Someone outside to see you, L-T.” He had pronounced the title ‘El Tee,’ as it was the standard contraction used in the army when one was addressing someone with the rank of lieutenant. “They brought back one of our guys who we lost in that raid yesterday.”
Arlo frowned. “They part of the group that attacked us?”
Pudgy shook his head. “Don’t think so, they said they weren’t, anyway. They said they needed to talk to the man in charge.”
Arlo pondered this news for a moment or two before arriving at a decision. “Make sure you search them, then have the boys come in. Any sudden moves and they shoot ‘em. Clear?”
“Clear, L-T.”
Pudgy left, and Arlo pointed at his legs. “Pull my pant legs back down,” he instructed Dolores.
“I’m not done,” she protested.
“Woman, do what I told you.”
Dolores pouted, but she got the pant legs gingerly rolled down before the visitors came in.
Arlo didn’t want to appear injured, so he looked up at the two men and tried to pretend he was just too important to stand up for them. One was a big, burly looking guy with a pronounced gut. The other was a squirrely little runt who broke the scale at about a buck twenty. And, wouldn’t you know it? The squirrel was the spokesman.
“Nice digs,” the little guy observed.
Arlo was bothered by his lack of fear. After all, he and his buddy were both standing in front of him with no weapons and totally at Arlo’s mercy. They were surrounded by over a hundred people, all heavily armed, yet the little guy looked like he was visiting royalty or something.
“So glad you like it, my man. You got a reason for being here?”
Lobo grinned and shot a look at Arlo’s legs. “Heard you got your asses kicked yesterday.”
Everyone in the room froze. Arlo felt the flush rising into his neck. “Be careful, little man. We killed a lot of people yesterday. Two more today wouldn’t be much of a chore.”
Arturo started to say something but Lobo held out a hand to stop him. “So what, huh? You gonna kill us because we can see what happened with our own eyes? Actually, I’m here to help you out.”
Lobo took a few steps forward before Pudgy held up a palm to stop him then grinned and continued. “See, we both have a similar opinion of how the world should work now. You’ve been running around the state doing your thing and we been staying in this area, keeping things together.”
Lobo looked around and spied a chair against a wall. Before any of Arlo’s bodyguards could stop him, he crossed over to the chair and dragged it to a spot in front of Arlo and sat down. He looked at the leader of the ex-army soldiers, crossed his legs and smiled.
“Now then, here’s how I see it.” He pointed at Arlo. “You want revenge for what these guys did to you yesterday. We had a similar event a few days ago. Like you, we want some payback.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice so only the two of them could hear what he was saying. “We need to be the wolves in this new world. We can’t allow the sheep out there or even our own people to see those guys do this to us and get away with it. If the other survivors out there see that, they might get the idea that they can stand up to us and come out better off on the other end. That kind of attitude costs us lives and treasure.”
Arlo snuck a glance over to see if his people had heard what the runt said. It looked as if they hadn’t. He put his chin in his hand and nodded slowly. “So…what? What are you proposing to do about it? Join together? That doesn’t work for me; I don’t share my authority with anyone but my non-coms.”
Lobo laughed. “Nah, man, we’d end up trying to kill each other within the first week. No, we both know a wolf pack can only have one Alpha. That’s nature, man. You don’t mess with nature. I propose we engage in a mutually beneficial exercise with you in cha
rge of your people while I direct my own.”
“Then what? What kind of exercise?” Arlo spread his arms wide. “You sought me out, you must have an idea, or you wouldn’t have risked coming here.”
Lobo put both hands on the arms of his chair and sat back. The demon was shining through in his smile. “Oh yeah, I have an idea. All we have to do is find where these guys are hiding.”
✽✽✽
Two days after the attack on Marcus’ stronghold, I was on night watch along with Jimmy. It was a clear night, a bit chilly but nice with a full moon and twinkling stars. It was autumn and the brutal heat that shows up in March and punishes the residents of the California Central Valley until September was receding. I had a long sleeve shirt on under my ammo vest and was enjoying the coolness. Lex was with me. He had taken to alternating sleeping by my bed and Pops’ and usually joined me when I had watch. I think he viewed it as one of his jobs.
With the destruction of civilization came very few enhancements in the lives of the survivors. One change was the reduction of smog in the area. Historically, the solid particulates generated by the big cities such as San Francisco drifted east, blown there by the ocean breezes until they hit the Sierra Nevada Mountain range. There, the smog clouds would sit, growing denser every day until the rain came along and washed the air clean. Unfortunately, precipitation was not plentiful in this area.
Fresno and the surrounding towns, like Clovis, were all established a little over a hundred years ago by employing stubborn human defiance of environmental conditions. The San Joaquin Valley was known as the top agricultural producing farmland in California before the Rage hit. It also led the country in supplying dairy products. Knowing this, one would likely conclude that the region was blessed with natural gifts to make such a situation possible. In point of fact, the entire area was still nothing more than an irrigated desert. Droughts in the valley were so common that the early settlers devised ingenious plans to channel water from the surrounding rivers and streams onto their farmlands. They were so successful at this endeavor that the Central Valley agriculture industry eventually supplied food and jobs to millions of people.
Virgil's War- The Diseased World Page 23
