A young woman picked up a worn glass carafe from a coffee maker and filled a mug. She brought it to Snow without a word and placed it in front of him on the table. He looked at it for a moment before blowing on it and taking a sip, then set the mug back down and grasped the mike again.
“Hilltop, be advised we have some skin in this game also. If you guys go down, we don’t stand much of a chance against those fellas. We know what those people do to folks like us, and we’ll fight to the death before we let them take our wives and daughters.” He paused to take another sip of the brew. “Sitting back and letting your people take all the risk just doesn’t suit us. Is there any way we can help?”
“I would think you and your people have enough of a problem with the infected, Snowman.”
“Well…not so much anymore. They seem to be dying off down here. We rarely see ‘em much, and when the pitiful bastards do show up, they’re so weak that we just take ‘em out with baseball bats. I think the disease is finally finishing them off.”
This time there was a long pause before Snow’s transmission was answered. “Snowman, give us a few minutes here to do some figuring. In the meantime, it might help if you were to gather up all your people who are capable of fighting and get them outfitted and armed. We’ll be in touch.”
“Roger that, Hilltop.”
Snow pushed back from the table and turned to the young woman who had brought him the coffee. “Call a meeting; everyone attends except those actually on watch. Assemble here downstairs in fifteen minutes. Tell them to bring their weapons and any other combat gear they might have. Then tell Billy and his crew to open the locker and pull out all of the stored ammo we have.” He stood from the chair and stretched his back, then headed for the stairs. “Looks like this whole thing is going to be solved today…one way or another.”
✽✽✽
Lobo strutted into Arlo’s Stryker like he owned it. He fixed the rogue army officer with an accusing stare while he rocked back on his heels.
“What the hell is happening here?”
Having located his misplaced pills, Arlo shook a few loose from the bottle into his hand and swallowed them dry without even counting them. He replied to the Mojado leader without looking at him. “What’s it look like? We’re going to war.”
“Uh huh.” Lobo’s hands went on his hips. “And when were you going to tell me about this? Are we partners or what?”
Arlo sighed as he wrestled himself into his ballistic vest. He was so tired of having to explain himself to this megalomaniacal dwarf. He put all of his powers of self-control to work, calming himself. It helped to remind himself that he was almost to the point where he could put a bullet into the little man’s ear.
“Actually, I was just coming to get you and, of course, we are partners. We’ll need each other for this. I intend to send every fighter we have against that castle simultaneously. I want to swarm over their defenses before they know what’s happening.”
Lobo frowned as he considered his ally’s words. Neither of these men trusted the other, but it was true that they would need every single person who was capable of firing a gun if they were going to be successful against the Hilltop people. Past encounters with them had demonstrated their capabilities and tenacity. These people would not be fooled into meekly giving themselves up. They would fight to the death, believing (correctly) that surrender would amount to being slaughtered.
“Yeah, right,” Lobo responded. He tried to intimidate the former lieutenant with a glare, but that didn’t work, so he dropped the attempt. “Well, I have about forty-seven people outside who are ready to fight. What do I do with them?”
“I thought I’d just leave that up to you, Lobo.” Arlo strapped on his holster, picked up the big stainless steel revolver and opened its cylinder. He twirled the mechanism, watching the thick cartridge rims spin around, then snapped it shut with a flick of the wrists. Arlo thought the action looked cool and professional even though any real professional would tell him that it would ruin the timing of the cylinder rotation and eventually render the gun inoperable.
Sliding the magnum pistol into the holster on his thigh, Arlo secured the thumb snap and grinned. The heavy weapon always made him feel powerful. “They’re your people, Partner. If it were me, I’d tell them to join in among my people and help us when we make our attack. We’ll be using machine guns and rocket launchers mounted on our trucks, but the main push will be from an infantry attack. Kind of a blitzkrieg type of thing.”
The gang banger clapped his hands in front of him and grinned widely. “That’s more like it. I’ll have my guys hop onto the trucks with your people. How about the tank? When does it join in?”
Arlo’s grin grew wider. “I have a special plan for the Stryker.”
✽✽✽
Smoke from the exploded bullet cases and the superheated gun lubricant wafted into my eyes forcing me to stop shooting and clear them. The first wave of Ragers had fallen to our barrage very quickly. That was the good news, at least a hundred of them were now dead or dying at the bottom of the glen. The bad news? When they first came over the rise, the horde was mostly packed together in a way that made killing them in large numbers an easy task. After our ambush attack hit them, they quickly started spreading out widely, almost as if they were reading the situation and adapting to it. It was an interesting phenomenon, and if we had more time, it would be important to study it more closely. That would have to wait. The dispersing of the shambling bodies made it necessary to seek them out individually or in small pockets. That took time; too much time. I could see the white thermal signatures of our attackers in my scope scattering all over the rolling hills around us.
I saw dozens of Ragers swarming around the positions occupied by my teammates and switched my focus in that direction. The glowing fireflies pinned to the hats of my friends kept me from committing a ‘friendly fire’ mistake, and I was able to pinpoint the infected as they drew near my friends and take them out in ones and twos.
As I was struggling to keep my teammates from being overrun, I became vaguely aware that I was ignoring the situation around my location. I knew the mindless afflicted would be homing in on the noise and flash of my weapon because they had already demonstrated that peculiarity in our past encounters. However, the glowing silhouettes closing in on my four friends below me were so thickly clustered that I didn’t see any hope of switching my focus without allowing my team to be overwhelmed.
I was so busy congratulating myself on doing a good job of keeping the Ragers off of my team that I barely heard the soft growl coming from my left. I took my eyes from the glowing scope and barely had enough night vision to see the snarling ghoul approaching my fox hole. He was tall…basketball-player tall, and thin as a reed. His eyes held a hatred that I could never adequately describe and those eyes were focused squarely on me. His lips were curled up in a snarl just like one would expect to see in an attacking wolf.
I swung my weapon in his direction and cut him in half by catching him with six rounds across the midsection. He kind of exploded, and I saw that the shots I expended had passed through him and impacted on two more of the human-things. I became aware of movement taking place all around me and started spraying bullets left to right, taking out a swarm of infected bodies that was forming around my foxhole. In the back of my mind, I realized that the main horde had spread out so far to the sides of the little valley in which we had set up that they were now able to come at us from every direction. The ones bearing down on me were being lured in by the sound of my big gun.
My attempts to shoot my way out of my situation was working pretty well until my weapon ran out of bullets.
The press of bodies moving in on me showed that I had no time to affect a reload, so I frantically patted the ground around me, searching for my M-4. The transition of switching from the bright electronic sight picture to the actual darkness was still making it hard for me to see. I had placed my rifle close to me but for some reason could not fi
nd it. The outlines of the approaching ghouls clued me in that I had run out of time to locate it, so I yanked my Glock from its holster and did my best to aim. The blast from my first shot didn’t help my night vision, but the hulking shadow in front of me stiffened and fell as my bullet struck him high in the chest.
I began swiveling right to left, picking out targets and putting them down. I knew every shot was critical so I calmed myself enough to take careful aim for each shot. The slide on my handgun locked back, and I pressed the magazine release and flicked the weapon to the side just like Buck had taught me. The mag flew clear, and I grabbed another, jamming it in and hitting the slide release with my thumb. The slide rammed forward with a ‘snick,’ and I barely stopped an infected woman from getting into the hole with me. I had been aiming at her heart but my shot went high, and the bullet caught her in the forehead sending her tumbling backward.
As I stood there fighting for my life, I became faintly aware that I was hearing gunfire coming closer to me. I reasoned that my teammates had been overrun and were now trying to make their way over to my position as we had previously planned to do in this type of eventuality. But all that figuring was taking place as I focused on staying alive and keeping these crazed Ragers away from me. My slide locked back again, and I performed my reload on instinct.
I heard a woman scream, not in pain but in fury. I assumed it was one of the Ragers, but when I turned to look, I saw Dee. She had fought her way to only twenty yards from my hole but was now surrounded by three of the demented infected. All three were male, and they were swarming her. I couldn’t get a clear shot without hitting her, and I barely had time to swing back around and pop a large black man in the abdomen. He screamed and fell face first into the fox hole with me then started pushing himself up with his hands, so I reached over and shot him in the back of the head. Another three crazed attackers, two men, and a woman, loomed in front of me and I shot each one. Two went down, but the third must have been military when he was infected because he was wearing body armor, a Kevlar helmet and a web belt with a pistol and extra mags. Luckily he wasn’t sane enough to use the handgun against me, but he was carrying a length of tree branch like a bludgeon.
Buck and the Major had trained me in how to deal with an armored attacker. I dropped my sights and focused on the man’s hips. I put two rounds into him there, and he fell like a shotgunned duck. An afflicted person may be able to ignore the pain of a shattered pelvis, but his ability to use his legs would still be taken away. As he fell forward, he exposed the top of his head, and I put two more rounds directly into the Kevlar. The first one dented the helmet but skidded off, the second one penetrated and the man stopped moving.
Taking out the last three Ragers bought me a smidgeon of time, and I stole a look over to where I had last seen Dee. There was a larger knot of bodies there now. At first, I thought the Ragers, had engulfed her, but then I saw the hulking form of Isaac among them. He had come to Dee’s aid, and was now hacking away at the pack with his sharpened entrenching tool, using it like a medieval battle axe. I caught a brief glimpse of Dee who was now swinging her long-bladed knife from side to side. She was bent over and holding one hand to her abdomen, obviously hurt but refusing to go down. I estimated eight infected Ragers clustered around my two friends and leveled my Glock to take out two more crazed attackers as they staggered their way over to join the assault.
As I fired my second pistol shot, I heard and felt a body fall into the hole with me and whipped around to see a horrific sight. A young man, maybe eighteen years old, was in the trench and coming at me. The left side of his head had been shattered by one of our bullets. The slug had missed his brain but had exposed it and also blown away his eye on that side. I was momentarily transfixed by the sight of the shattered skull and bared grey matter, but I got myself under control and raised my weapon.
The click told me I was out of bullets.
Chapter 27
“All stations be advised, they are coming.” The Major’s voice was steady and calm over the radio receivers. “It looks like a full frontal vehicle assault from the west. We’ve trained for this, people, and we are ready for them. Be ready for an infantry assault also. Keep the radio free unless you see something urgent. This is it, people, the big one.”
All around the walled compound, men and women were in frantic motion. Weapons were clacking shut on loaded chambers, heavily-loaded wagons were rattling their ways across the cement floors, and steel gates were rolling shut.
Pepper was still on station at the drone table, operating one of the helos with Mona sitting next to her. Both of the girls were wearing nine-millimeter pistols cinched around their waists.
“You girls can go below and take cover in the warehouse level. Bring in your bird and take off.” The Major patted Mona on the shoulder when he said it.
The two young women shared a look and arrived at an unspoken agreement.
“We’ll stay here. We can keep the bird in the sky and continue feeding you info on how the enemy moves their people.” She pointed to a corner of the wall where Dwayne was bent over, servicing his beloved fixed-wing. “He’s ready to launch if and when things get hairy; you might need another set of eyes up there.”
The retired Army officer started to protest, but he knew they were right. No one could operate the drones as well as these three youngsters, and their equipment might just spell the difference between success and failure here. Besides, if Dragon’s Lair was overrun no one would be safe, no matter where they hid.
He nodded to Mona and Pepper then turned back to face the west. The rolling topography would keep the approaching army out of sight until they were five hundred yards away. That distance could be covered by a vehicle in less than a minute and didn’t leave much time to stop them. It was in recognition of that fact that the Major and his wife, Emma, Pops, Jimmy and Marie Bronson and Gayle Teller had spent the previous night working to improve their ability to slow down the attack.
Pops had a few more surprises stored away in our warehouse and had put Gayle’s capabilities as an electronics engineer to good use. Now it was just a case of waiting to see if their preparations were worth the effort.
The Major put the walkie to his mouth. “Cop out, you read?”
The whispered voice came over the speaker low and muffled from former Jacksonville police officer Marie Bronson. “Hilltop, I read.”
“Any activity?”
“I see the first vehicle approaching now. Am I weapons hot?”
Major Morrison felt a strong wave of concern for the woman. She was alone and outside the protection of the walls, where things could go very wrong, very fast. “Roger that, Cop out, you are weapons free.”
Marie had never been in combat but her time policing on the streets of a large Florida city had prepared her better than most to operate under tense conditions. She was now hunkered down in a shallow ditch that she’d dug out behind a row of shrubs. Her hideout was two hundred yards from the driveway leading up from Academy Avenue, just over the lip of a hillock. If she needed to do so, Marie could scoot backward for ten yards and hide from view behind the natural swell in the landscape. From there, she hoped to be able to scoot along with her head down for another hundred yards before accessing her dirt bike which she hid behind a pile of rocks. The key word in that sentence was ‘hoped.’
The first vehicle came around a sharp curve in the hills. It was a red four-door Dodge diesel dually. The big truck was packed with people, in the bed as well as the cabin. A light machine gun had been crudely affixed to the cabin roof with duct tape, and a woman was standing in the bed, clutching the weapon and ready to operate it. The people in the truck bed seemed wary as they came around the turn. The next vehicle in line was another Dodge truck, this one a white four-wheel drive model. It too was filled with enemy soldiers.
The Major and Marie had chosen this particular stretch of driveway because of the natural features around it. To the north side was the wall of a hill rising shar
ply. The south was a drop off of approximately ten feet. The small ridge ran along the road for fifty feet.
Marie took a deep breath to steady her nerves. On the ground in front of her, she had laid out four cheap walkie-talkies, the kind that could one could find in any sporting goods or department store before the collapse. The packaging on the devices boasted a range of up to ten miles, but the reality was that the radios were only reliably useable for about five hundred yards and that was if the topography was flat.
Each of the walkies in front of her had been spray painted a different color. Gayle Teller had rigged up this particular surprise for the Hilltop Group to employ against an enemy surge. The inexpensive radios had dials which allowed them to use one of sixty frequencies that the government had set aside for public use. Marie had set each of the radios to a different frequency.
The former police officer settled lower behind the bush’s concealing branches and picked up the blue walkie-talkie. As the second truck came around the curve, she pushed the ‘send’ button.
A small team from the Hilltop had buried the half-brick of C-4 plastic explosive into the side of the hill, level with the pickup truck’s bed. They had slathered the entire package with plumber’s putty into which they stuck dozens of nails, nuts, bolts and ball bearings. Marie had known exactly when to trigger the improvised shrapnel mine because an innocent-looking patch of blue flowers had been planted just above it. When the truck drew even with the flowers, she acted.
The hardware packed into the putty shot forward like a hundred jagged bullets. It penetrated the sheet metal of the truck and the bodies of its passengers. It wasn’t an easy thing to watch, and Marie had to force herself to keep her eyes open.
The concussion from the bomb rocked the truck sideways up on two wheels. Marie had hoped that the vehicle would tumble over the side of the ridge but it was too heavy and it slammed back down on all four tires before that could happen. None of that mattered to the people who had been riding in the bed of the pickup. At least half of those had taken fatal wounds from the shrapnel and others had suffered injuries which were serious enough to render them combat-ineffective. Marie saw only three people who appeared unharmed. The truck itself was now a smoking, spewing mess with steam radiator fluid spurting out of the engine compartment.
Virgil's War- The Diseased World Page 42
