Judgment Day -03

by Arthur Bradley

“See?” he said. “I told you we find something.”

  “Yeah, but you forgot to mention the part where we’d be spending the night in the forest.”

  “It wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head, “I guess not. Besides, when I get back to school, I’m going show my class some of the cool tricks you taught me. Like you said, everyone should know that kind of stuff.”

  “All right then,” he said, marching ahead. “Onward.”

  They pressed across the open farmland that lay fallow and neglected. Rye grass and weeds were slowly taking over patches of fertile soil. After about twenty minutes, they came across a small two-lane highway that meandered its way into town. The road was surprisingly clear of abandoned cars. Even though it wasn’t a straight shot into town, they opted to walk the highway because they were tired of pouring dirt out of their boots.

  A few hundred yards ahead, they came across two signs. The first welcomed them to Bland County, Virginia, and the second identified the road as Highway 656. The middle digit had been painted over with red paint, so that the sign now read “666.”

  Samantha stopped and studied the highway marker.

  “In church, they said 666 is a bad number. Have you ever heard that?”

  Tanner dodged the question, saying, “It was probably just kids having fun with a can of spray paint.”

  She paused to study the small buildings several hundred yards in the distance.

  “Maybe we should skip this town.”

  “You itching for another night in the woods?”

  She shrugged.

  He looked over at the interstate to their west.

  “If we run into those motorcyclists again, I’m going to need a way to thank them for their hospitality. Unless you have a better idea, I think we’re going to have to chance it.”

  She hesitated and then nodded reluctantly.

  They walked for another ten minutes before arriving at the edge of the small county seat of Bland. There was a large elementary school to their left, with a matching gymnasium adjacent to it. Both buildings had been badly burned by a fire that looked to have originated from inside the school’s cafeteria. Like the highway, the parking lot was empty except for a couple of school vans, both of which had been destroyed by the fire.

  The road ahead of them forked. Highway 656 veered right to intersect with the main thoroughfare, and Jackson Street went off to the left.

  “Which way?” she asked.

  “Let’s go right up to the main street. Better chance we’ll find something we can borrow.”

  “Borrow? Is that convict code for steal?”

  “The way I see it, anything not nailed down is up for grabs.”

  She didn’t argue the point. Samantha had long since abandoned any notion that taking from those who had passed was morally wrong. The world had become a giant abandoned flea market, and rummaging through what had been left behind was the only way to survive.

  They turned right and hiked for another long block. They passed a small house, easily a hundred years old, with a mobile home parked out back. The house looked like it had already been ransacked, its front windows and door both broken in. A beige pickup truck, with its hood propped up, sat in the front yard. Tanner took a quick look inside the vehicle. The floorboards had been eaten away by rust and chicken manure, and sharp springs poked up through the faded vinyl seats. He shook his head, and they continued on.

  When they reached the main intersection, they turned left and headed deeper into Bland. Another half-block up, they found a pontoon boat sitting on a small trailer in the center of the road. Whoever had been pulling it was long gone.

  “I don’t suppose that will get us very far,” she joked.

  He chuckled. “Not unless God decides to bring down another flood.”

  Samantha looked up at the cloudless blue skies and shook her head.

  Tanner walked around the boat, giving it a quick once-over. It was in fine shape, not that that made any difference one way or the other. The only weapon he could find was a fiberglass-handled fishing gaff, about four feet in length. The hook felt sharp enough, and he figured that it could do some damage with enough force behind it. He lifted it out of the boat.

  Samantha eyed the gaff warily.

  “What’s that for?”

  “You hook fish with it,” he explained.

  “I know that. I meant what are you going to do with it?”

  He flipped it hook side up and began using it as a walking stick.

  “Anything to help an old man on his way.”

  She made a face that said she wasn’t buying it but said nothing else.

  Another fifty yards up, they came upon another old white house on the right. This one didn’t appear to have been broken into.

  “Let’s check it,” he said.

  As they walked up the front steps, Samantha pointed to a white “S” that had been painted on the glass storm door.

  “What do you think that means?”

  “Don’t know,” he said, trying the knob. It was locked. “Maybe the ‘S’ was used to mark homes that were safe from the virus.” He peered through the small window in the door but couldn’t make out much inside. “Let’s go on a bit further. I’d hate for them to return home and find us munching on their goodies.”

  “Like what happened before,” she said, thinking back to Professor Callaway and his daughter, in the town of Hendersonville, North Carolina.

  “Hey, that worked out okay.”

  “Yeah, after you blew up the entire town.”

  He shrugged. “It wasn’t the whole town.”

  They continued on, checking other houses spread out along the street. A few of the homes were marked with the same “S” painted on their doors. Those that weren’t marked had been broken into and cleaned out of anything useful. The only logical explanation was that the townspeople had marked the homes still inhabited, and scavenged from people who had either passed or simply left their property behind.

  A little further up, they came to small church. The same white “S” was painted in the middle of its bright red door. The sounds of people speaking in unison were coming from within.

  “Should we go in?” she asked.

  Tanner hesitated a moment, looking around. He shook his head. They had yet to see a single living person on the street or in any of the homes, and something felt off.

  “Let’s move through, quick and quiet—grab a car and a weapon, and then get back on the road.”

  She stepped back from the church door as if suddenly realizing that something dangerous might be inside.

  “Right.”

  Across from the church was a large brick building with massive white columns. At the top of the pillars was a sign that read Bland County Court House. There was a flagpole out front, but nothing flew on it. The building itself looked to be in relatively good shape, with its doors and windows intact. The same white symbol was painted on a large granite marker resting beside the walkway.

  “Why would they mark a court—”

  She was interrupted when the church door suddenly opened. Before either of them could decide what to do, people began spilling out. When they saw Tanner and Samantha, they stopped and huddled together, as if afraid of the strangers. They seemed especially surprised to see Samantha, perhaps because she now looked rugged enough to be the daughter of Crocodile Dundee.

  After some hushed deliberation, a heavyset man, wearing dirty white pants and a blue suit coat turned and hurried back into the church.

  “So much for quick and quiet,” Samantha mumbled under her breath.

  Seconds later, a tall gaunt man clad in a black suit and top hat gently threaded his way through the parishioners.

  “Hello there, strangers,” he said, walking toward them with a hand extended.

  “He looks like Abraham Lincoln,” whispered Samantha.

  Tanner stepped forward. H
e shifted the gaff to his left hand, which would enable him to shake the man’s hand or hook him through the eye, depending on what the situation dictated.

  The remaining parishioners reluctantly stepped from the church, slowly fanning out into a large semicircle facing the town’s visitors. There were at least two dozen of them.

  “I’m Brother Bill Lands,” the tall man said, shaking Tanner’s hand. The man’s grip was soft, and his skin cold and clammy, like he had spent the night digging in a graveyard.

  Tanner offered what he hoped looked like a friendly smile.

  “Tanner Raines, and this is my daughter Samantha.”

  Samantha looked up at him, not at all surprised by his lie. Tanner had used such introductions in the past, explaining that it kept questions to a minimum.

  “Are you folks from around here?” Lands asked, smiling with teeth that seemed impossibly big for his mouth.

  “Just passing through. Our car broke down yesterday, and we’ve been forced to hoof it.”

  “Oh my, that’s awful. I hope you’ll allow what’s left of the good people of Bland to help you in some small way.”

  Tanner shrugged. “What we really need is a car.”

  Brother Lands smiled. “I believe we can help you with that. We’ve moved all the cars that still run over to the transformer plant.” He looked over at the fat man who had fetched him from the church. “Brother Carl, would you see what you can find for these good people? And put a little extra gas in it too.”

  The man nodded, offering a nervous smile.

  “It’ll take me an hour or so to get over there and back.”

  Lands turned back to Tanner.

  “Can you suffer our company that long?”

  “We’ll take an hour of waiting over a day of walking, anytime.”

  Lands chuckled and motioned for Brother Carl to go ahead and retrieve the car.

  “Would you care to come inside and wait for a spell?” A nervous murmur sounded from the crowd of worshippers behind him. “Across the street in the courthouse would probably be most comfortable place,” he clarified.

  Tanner glanced at the huge T-shaped brick building off to his left. He couldn’t remember a single occasion when anything good had ever happened to him inside of a courthouse. On the other hand, he could find no logical reason to decline the invitation and risk insulting someone who was trying to help get them back on the road.

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  CHAPTER

  11

  Something warm and wet slid across Mason’s face. He jerked forward and reached for his Supergrade. Bowie stared at him, smacking his lips together, as if trying to decode what flavor of dirt and sweat had collected on his master’s face.

  Mason yawned and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep, and the sun was already starting to show in the eastern sky. Whether or not Bowie had slept or kept watch, he couldn’t say. All he knew for sure was that nothing had found them in the night, and for that, he was thankful. Unfortunately, Nakai was still no closer to being caught.

  He studied the highway below. Even at a distance, he could see the bright red stains of blood covering the cars and asphalt. It had been a massacre, plain and simple.

  “What do you say?” he said, scratching Bowie under his chin. “Should we go and have a look?”

  Bowie yawned loudly.

  Mason stood up and slowly worked the kinks out of his back. He had slept on the ground more times than he cared to count, but the older he got, the more his bones reminded him of the benefits of a mattress. He took a moment to stretch his shoulders, arms, and hands. Then he pumped his legs up and down a few times to get the blood flowing. Bowie stood watching him with his head tilted.

  “I realize I must look like I’m getting ready for an early morning jog. But I’m not going down into that mess at anything less than one hundred percent.”

  He practiced drawing his Supergrade a couple of dozen times, making sure that the entire motion was fluid and once again ingrained in his muscle memory. Mason could put a single round on target in less than half a second, but that only held true when nothing went wrong. And as he had told his students at Glynco many times, the key to nothing going wrong was practice. He smiled, remembering a student’s question on the subject.

  “Do you have to practice every day?”

  “No,” Mason assured him. “Only on the days you want to live.”

  Mason had gone on to explain that, if a lawman were lucky, he might only have to draw his firearm a few times in his entire career. Of those, he might discharge it once. But the outcome of that one encounter would likely be dictated by the hundreds of hours he had spent preparing for it.

  When Mason was satisfied with his warm-up, he picked up his M4, checked it, and started slowly descending the steep slope toward the interstate. Bowie walked beside him, occasionally stopping to sniff traces of gunpowder still swirling in the air.

  Daylight brought with it a disturbing clarity to the carnage. Bodies were strewn in every direction with gallons upon gallons of blood spattered on the cars, asphalt, and concrete dividers. Arms had been torn off. Heads had been bashed in with such brutality that brains had been expelled through the ears. Bodies had been eviscerated, with long cords of guts strewn about like strings of Christmas garland. It was as if bloodthirsty Vikings had decided to prove that, with enough brutality, hand axes could win out over modern weaponry.

  Mason had witnessed the horrors of war before, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he had found that the only way to keep from being overwhelmed by the gore was to develop an almost clinical detachment from those who had suffered. They were dead and gone. The piece parts that remained were no different than meat in a butcher’s shop. That rationalization only went so far, though, when he found himself slipping on entrails and tripping over severed heads. Butcher shop or not, it was an unsightly mess.

  As he arrived at the far end of the bridge, he spotted two figures dressed in black fatigues cautiously working their way up the on-ramp. One was a short, dark-skinned man, Hispanic or perhaps American Indian, and the other a giant African American who looked meaner than Kimbo Slice. No doubt this must be Nakai and his fearsome partner, Jeb.

  Mason ducked behind one of the tractor-trailers and quickly surveyed the area. There were plenty of places to hide, but hiding wasn’t what he had in mind. The odds had greatly improved, thanks to a horde of maniacal zombie-like monsters, and the interstate was as good a place as any to make a stand. But even if he could win a ranged firefight with two trained mercenaries, which he doubted, it wouldn’t get him what he needed. He sought more than justice for his fellow marshals; he sought information. And that was something that couldn’t be extracted when trading bullets.

  An idea came to him, and he turned to Bowie.

  “Stay here.”

  The dog looked at him and squinted, like a child testing to see how serious a parent really was.

  “I mean it. Don’t you move.”

  Bowie reluctantly lay down and flopped his head on his front paws.

  Mason rose to a crouch and hurried down the freeway until he got to the first of the two HMMWVs equipped with a .50 caliber machine gun. Two soldiers lay nearby, one a lieutenant and the other a corporal. Both looked like they had been put through a blender.

  Mason climbed up into position behind the heavy weapon. It had been more than ten years since he had last stood behind a Browning M2, and it took him a moment to remember the ins and outs of operating the weapon. The M2HB was by all accounts one of the finest heavy machine guns in the world, air cooled and able to put out nearly six hundred rounds per minute.

  The ammunition had been torn away from the weapon during the melee, so he would need to ready it for operation. He checked that the feed tray cover was down and the bolt forward. Quietly lifting a long string of .50 BMG ammunition, he inserted it into the feed tray until the pawl engaged the first round.
Then he pulled the retracting slide handle rearward and released it. It made a distinctive clunk as it flew forward. He cycled it a second time to chamber the first round. He double-checked that the gun was set in automatic mode and locked down the bolt-latch release. Ma Deuce was ready to rock and roll.

  Mason swung the M2 in the direction of the on-ramp. The two men were not yet visible, so he squatted down and stared out through the broken windshield of the HMMWV. Less than three minutes later, he saw them. Nakai and Jeb moved carefully from one point of cover to the next, one man bounding ahead and then waving the other on. Professionals, he thought. Not to be underestimated.