In the early days of their mission, it was standard operating procedure to turn the looters over to DHS for processing. After a couple of firefights where wholly unprepared refugees were slaughtered, the four-man squad decided to let the perps go, along with their salvaged goods. They’d given the looters a stern warning in exchange for their promise that they wouldn’t return to loot again.
Repeating their mission day after day was taking mental and physical toll on them all, but especially on Big Mike, who was the largest member of the squad and had to lug around at least fifty more pounds of muscle than his battle buddies.
The heaviest burden he had to bear was the knowledge that his mother and sister were still unaccounted for. They’d lived north of Orlando in the Sanford area, miles from Big Mike’s area of operation. Mike saw the crime and disease that had enveloped the west side of town, and he worried that his family was in peril. But there was nothing he could do about it, other than have John’s girlfriend, Natasha, check the roster of refugees in Florida. The raven haired, blue-eyed Natasha worked at DHS headquarters, processing the new agents as they arrived. But more importantly, she monitored the camps and their progress in processing the citizenry into the nation’s new system of government. She had a line on the area’s activities and promised to let Mike know if she ran across his family’s location.
Big Mike’s fireteam consisted of himself, two Marines, and a Navy Corpsman. The other three retired from active service and all had combat experience. Mike, though by far the youngest and largest, was the least experienced of the four. At 6’4” and over 260 pounds, Mike towered over Cynthia Terrones, who was the most qualified. The staff sergeant had retired a couple of years back to start a private security company, specializing in counter-terrorism and marketing herself to the many resorts in the area. She had begun her career in the Marine’s Military Police but moved up to a Special Reaction Team. She then distinguished herself as a member of a Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team before retiring after twenty years in the Corps. Now pushing forty, she ran rings around the three men she had been teamed with. Mike quickly learned from Cyn that speed, agility, endurance, experience, and brains were far preferable to brawn. And if it weren’t for the cocky and condescending attitude of their DHS bosses, she would be giving the orders rather than taking them.
“Come on, Mike,” Cyn said in a low voice. “Keep your elbow in.”
Big Mike was trying to hide behind a faux marble pillar on a concourse at Disney’s Caribbean Beach Resort, aiming his M-4 toward a restaurant a few hundred feet ahead. Mike had a bad habit of aiming his battle rifle with a “chicken wing,” his left arm flared at a ninety angle from his body. The appendage would stick out from behind cover, presenting his enemy with a target. Cyn liked to remind him that a bullet to the arm was just as likely to put him out of the fight as a gunshot to the gut.
Roving gangs had been pillaging Disney’s stores, and their squad had been sent in after game trail cameras, which had been placed strategically throughout the theme park, confirmed that there was activity in this area.
Moving toward the sound of voices ahead, Cynthia and Mike were performing a bounding overwatch maneuver with the other two agents, Joey Phillips and Alan Taylor. As the other pair moved forward on their left, Cyn and Mike aimed down the alley, covering their squad mates’ advance.
Mike tucked his left arm tightly against his body as Taylor and Phillips paused on the left side of the walkway. A hand signal from the pair indicated that they were in position, and Cyn moved up and put her left hand on Mike’s right shoulder, initiating their move forward to their next area of cover. They walked heel to toe, both weapons aimed downrange at the threat, and took a position behind a large planter. Cyn left Mike and swung further to their right, advancing under an overhanging roof, passing several ransacked souvenir shops. She took a position about twenty feet ahead of Mike, behind another pillar and to the right of Mike’s lane of fire. Waving her hand side to side, she signaled the other pair to advance as she and Mike covered their movement once again.
Within a few minutes, the four were positioned outside the entrance to a restaurant from which the sounds of crashing furniture and laughter emanated. Cyn gave hand signals initiating their final assault. Phillips and Taylor advanced to the left side of the entrance. Taking a mirror from his front shirt pocket, Phillips scanned inside the building without presenting himself as a target. After watching for over a minute, Phillips pulled the mirror back and gave Mike and Cyn a signal that there were four bingos inside, each with a weapon. His final signal was that they were gang members and not a desperate family.
Cynthia had come up with the novel signals for what they were facing. An open hand with wiggling fingers represented a family, while a fist violently thrust into the air was a group that needed to be taken down. Mike felt the adrenalin course through his system. He needed to kick some butt after several frustrating weeks. He smiled at Cyn and was surprised to see a sinister grin in return. It seemed that she needed to dole out some good old-fashioned ass whooping as well.
Cyn and Mike advanced to the right side of the entrance and stacked up against the wall. Cyn held up her hand and counted down from five to one. Making a fist at “one,” she peeled into the room and turned to the right, while Phillips mirrored her movement on the left. Mike entered and took center right, finding cover behind a pillar and an overturned table. He saw Cyn advance and stop about ten feet ahead and to his right. Her hand signal initiated the others to move, and after two more leaps, Mike found himself less than twenty yards in front of the four thugs, while Phillips and Taylor were in a flanking and supporting position on the left wall of the large dining area.
“Do we give them a chance to surrender?” Taylor whispered into his neck mic, which broadcast to the other three team members.
“Negative,” Cyn replied. “You see the five-point crown on their arms? They’re Latin Kings. They won’t give up.”
She repositioned herself, leaning against the pillar, and took aim at the group.
“Taylor, take the left one. Phillips, you’re on the one with the yellow shirt. Mike, you take the playboy, the one with that stupid fedora. I have the one on the right.”
The four took careful aim as Cyn gave final instructions.
“Countdown from three,” she commanded.
“Is that on one or after you say one?” Taylor joked.
Cyn had drilled into them on this a million times. Taylor and Phillips were constantly trying to get her goat by asking that same question, on and off, over the last few weeks. Mike, who had a deep respect for her as a retired Marine, decided not to join in. Even though he had at least a hundred pounds on Cyn, she was quick and knew just the right places to strike a man’s body. He would give himself a fifty-fifty chance of surviving a fight with her. She wasn’t to be messed with.
“Shut it, Phillips. On my mark.”
The four took aim at the men, who stood by a table full of canned goods and other looted items from the adjacent stores.
“Three…two…one!”
At “one,” four rifles spat out their 62-grain, green-tipped .556 bullets. The penetrators roared out of their barrels and, like a scythe cutting down grain, put the gangbangers to the ground in one fell swoop. With the slugs moving at over three thousand feet per second, the four men were dead before the sound of the gunfire ever reached their ears.
Cyn advanced on the bodies, weapon up, and scanned the room.
“They’re gone,” she whispered. “Move up and clear the kitchen.”
The portholes in the double door entrance were lit with a dim glow, indicating that there was a light source inside. Few of the Disney buildings had skylights. It was most likely a lantern or flashlight illuminating the room beyond.
“Assume hostiles,” Cyn said. “On my mark.”
Neither Phillips nor Taylor joked this time, not with potential armed gangbangers waiting on the other side. Cyn counted down again, and they rushed the room,
each breaking into their assigned lanes of fire. The squad, pumped for another fight, was met with silence. Scanning the room, the four advanced into the large, L-shaped area. Pots and pans were scattered over the white tile floor, and the detritus of months of abandonment were strewn among the discarded utensils.
“Shit. Over here.” Taylor said.
After ensuring that their side of the room was safe, Cyn and Big Mike quickly moved to the other men. The other two were standing with weapons slung down to their side, facing away from the corner of the room that they had been assigned to clear.
“Oh, no,” Cyn groaned, as Big Mike followed closely behind.
Lying on the floor, tied down to the legs of a metal prep table, was a young girl, naked and very dead. Her blank eyes stared up in terror and her mouth stood agape in a silent scream. Taylor found a tablecloth and covered the nude corpse. He knelt next to the victim and, closing his eyes, began whispering a prayer.
“Glad you didn’t give ‘em a chance to give up.” Big Mike said.
“With this corpse,” Phillips added, nodding his head toward the covered body. “They’d never have let us take them alive.”
“They were dead men walking,” Cyn said. “They just didn’t know it. Too bad they didn’t suffer.”
“I’ll call it in,” Phillips announced as he moved out of the kitchen to radio their findings back to headquarters.
Cyn and Mike followed Phillips back into the main dining hall. As their squad mate continued outside to send his report, they stopped by one of the four corpses. Cyn squatted next to the dead man and stared for nearly a minute at the lifeless body. Then, in one swift and nearly invisible move of her hands, she drew her Ka-Bar knife from its sheath, grabbed the corpse’s hair, and removed the man’s head.
Big Mike stood in stunned silence. She had decapitated the body in a little more than a second. As she threw the head to the tile floor and walked away, he recalculated his chances in a one-on-one fight with his battle buddy.
Nope, he thought. I ain’t messing with her…ever. 50/50 was a pipe dream. He now put his odds at less than one in four.
CHAPTER 12
MAITLAND, FL
“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis.’ One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger—but recognize the opportunity.”
— John F. Kennedy
ALMOST FOUR WEEKS HAD GONE by since Beker saved our butts. What I thought was going to be a day or two of laying low to avoid the white supremacist gang turned into weeks of lying low. It seemed that one of the mansions, just on the other side of the wall from us, caught Taurus’s eye. Within an hour of leaving our street, dozens more of the Nazi gang members had arrived to join Taurus in the neighboring subdivision. With the wall preventing direct access from our street to theirs, we at least had a buffer.
However, as the battle between the various rival gangs encroached on our neighborhood, vehicles began driving up and down the main road, bringing men and supplies from the area where we first saved Beker. As Taurus consolidated power over the area, the distant sound of gunfire could be heard throughout the day, most of the battles coming from across the lake and occasionally from the north.
We were now relegated to sneaking about at night, walking the two blocks down to the lake to get water and fish in the pre-dawn hours. We didn’t want to use up our valuable pemmican, and Harley had rigged up a solar oven using mirrors to cook what we caught. As long as we didn’t burn the fish, there was no smell nor smoke that would give our position away. We also used the solar oven to boil and sterilize our water rather than burning the remaining propane supply. Harley and Ashley still held out hope that the thugs will move on so that they could stay with their house. But with the arrival of Taurus and his gang, they had at least prepared bug-out bags in case they needed to accompany us to Doc Kramer’s house.
Tonight, I was going with Harley down to the lake. He’d rigged up a bunch of empty bleach and laundry detergent bottles as floats. We had tied off fishing lines to the handles with a rock wrapped to the line’s end to create a small anchor. Harley had sprayed the floats with a black-matte paint, and our plan was to place them off shore as a primitive trotline. Hopefully, with multiple hooks attached to the ten-foot anchored wire, we could harvest more food and minimize the danger of exposing ourselves to unwanted eyes.
After dinner, I did my typical nightly field strip and reassembly of my trusty rifle and hit the sack. It was well into spring now, with the smell of orange blossom in the air fading and the nighttime temperatures starting to warm. By June, sleeping indoors would become impossible, so we had to be out of here by then.
The last thing I remembered as I drift off to sleep was the sound of Jarrett—my semi-affectionate nickname for Janice and Garrett, in the style of Brangelina—doing more than snoring. I frowned, wishing I had someone to make noise with too. The next morning, Janice woke me for the trip to the lake. She was on overwatch, obviously not too tired from her and Garrett’s escapades just a few hours before. They tried to be quiet about it, but sound travels in a machine-free world.
I stretched and silently put on my boots and battle belt, the nylon strap snapping in place with its brass cobra buckle. I adjusted it slightly, trying to evenly spread the weight of my Glock and multiple spare magazines on my hips. It didn’t take long since I’ve been wearing a gun on my waist since “the darkness” began. Grabbing my AR-15, I slung it over my shoulder and then slid out the door.
The walk to the Rikers’ place was uneventful, and Harley and I were soon working our way along the shoreline, well away from our white gang neighbors. We had to go slowly even though we were sheltered in a cove. Homes on the lake could have become occupied since we last fished here, so stealth was needed.
I took the lead, my red-dot sight beginning to dim as its battery started to die. I had found a couple of spares, but they were hard to come by. It used one of those disc batteries like you find in a camera or car fob and not a standard AA or AAA battery. I kept those two little energy discs in my utility pouch attached to my battle belt. The red glowing dot was still bright enough to see at night, but the daytime washes most of its visibility away. In the daytime, I used my flip-up iron sights (even though they are made of plastic) to help me aim. Jorge said that the sights were “co-witnessed” with my red-dot. I had no idea what he meant until I turned on the Aimpoint and flipped up the front and back sights. There was my red dot, hovering above the front sight, right in the middle of the rear sight’s frame. The red dot and front sight were perfectly aligned. I was “co-witnessed!” Now that made sense.
“Here’s a good spot. We need to clear that house,” Harley said, pointing with his rifle to the dark mansion ahead.
I slid along the side of the hedge that bordered the mansion’s backyard. Most of the homes on the lake had been, at one point, manicured horticultural masterpieces. Now, the earth was reclaiming its own, as the St. Augustine grass had been overtaken by weeds and wild plants. Still, I didn’t want to march right through the lawn since I would leave a trail of broken stems that would show our passing. Better to stay to the side, where overhanging branches would hide our movements.
“Shit!” Harley hissed.
I snickered. The only thing that set Harley off was spiders, and the webs of Florida’s many eight-legged critters were everywhere in the overgrown trees and bushes.
“Screw this,” he said as he strode out a few feet from the overhanging branches. “I’ll lead.”
Harley began walking up the side of the lawn, bypassing the tangled matt of wild vegetation and dreaded spider webs to our left. With no sound nor light coming from the house, it was a pretty safe bet that we were fine. We cleared the house anyway. Ten minutes later, we were pushing a small aluminum boat out of the weeds and into the lake. We quietly paddled out into the cove, and stopped thirty or so yards into the deeper water.
“This is about eight to ten feet deep.
This should work.”
We grabbed the floats and began to unwind the fifty-pound test line, tying off a baited leader about every two feet. Fish eyes from previous catches, as well as worms dug from our backyards, were speared onto the hooks. With four or five hooks attached to the main line and ten floats set, we had almost fifty chances of getting some fish.
As we turned and started paddling back toward shore, our boat was jarred, almost like we had run aground, except that we had barely started moving.
“What was that?” I asked.
“A gator!” Harley said with a level of glee that didn’t seem to fit our situation.
“You’re afraid of spiders but excited that an alligator almost tipped us over?”
“Gators have a lot of meat,” Harley said. “And I’m tired of fish.”
“And how’re you supposed to get that meat? Jump in and spear it with your knife?”
“Same as with the fish, only a bigger hook.”
“I can’t wait,” I replied sarcastically.
“Neither can I,” Harley said—except he was serious.
“Your brain’s not right,” I replied, shaking my head.
Harley just chuckled, which was the creepiest thing he could have done.
The next evening, we re-traced our steps. This time we brought a bigger float and hook set-up. Harley had three, one-gallon plastic jugs tied together with the fifty-pound line, and about four or five yards of twelve-gauge stranded electric wire hanging from the bottom which he had salvaged from a convenience store. He had two hand-sharpened coat hooks attached to the main cable, about three feet apart from each other, down near the end of the industrial line.
“I hate to ask what’s in the garbage bag,” I said.
“Squirrel,” Harley replied. “I’ll bait each hook with half of the carcass.”
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