“He’s back!” Charlie Safari yelled when Jessie walked in “Give the man a drink, scrunch up people, make some room!”
Mindful of the cameras and some of the new retrievers hanging around that he didn’t know, Jessie chose his words carefully.
“I need a crew.” He said. “High risk. Guns hot. Big payoff. We leave tonight. Right now, in fact.”
The music still blasted, the dancers still danced but every one of the hard men and women at the tables got quiet. If the Road Angel needed help on a job, it had to be serious. It had to be big. It would be the kind of job that you might not come back from. Ting Wei gripped Charlie’s arm a little tighter, they were still recovering from the animal attack at Mount Rushmore. Annabel Death studied him from hooded lids. Fat Nancy rolled her drink back and forth in her hands. Takeo blew smoke rings from his Kool at the ceiling.
How big is the payoff?” Penny the Stitch asked
“The biggest you can possibly imagine.” Jessie said and those that knew him knew it was more than money he was talking about. The Road Angel didn’t care about collecting Lakota Gold. It was something dead serious.
“What’s the job?” Applesauce asked.
“Can’t say.” Jessie replied. “We roll in ten minutes. Meet me in the parking lot.”
With that, he left and let them mull it over.
“I’m in.” Takeo said and Mizuki stood with him. The other Hell Drivers fell in line and followed him out of the bar. He had been contracted to run some 3D printed pieces down to Lakota for the water treatment plant but he had time. The engineers were still making them.
Ian the Hunter and Klondike Dan shot gunned their beers and stood to follow.
“We’ll be back.” Ian told the girl he was with. “Stay here and look pretty.”
Sugarcane Jane snorted and slid out of the booth. She wasn’t sitting this one out.
“I have a better idea.” she said. “Why don’t you stay here and look ugly. I’ll bring you back a souvenir.”
Eric the Blackhand slammed his shot and slid out of the booth. “I’m definitely in.” He said.
One by one, the rest of them made their decisions and most of the men and women who lived on the edge gathered their gear and followed. The old hands that owed Jessie a favor or two and new faces who wanted to make a name for themselves.
Fifteen retrievers and Hell Drivers met him at his Mercury and joined Macon, Marylin and the three guards already gathered.
Macon had assured him Horowitz didn’t have cameras or microphones in the parking lot but they kept behind a semi-truck just in case a lip reader with a telescope was spying on them.
“I don’t have time to tell you everything or explain much of anything.” Jessie said. “We have less than thirty minutes to make this happen so I’m going to give you the short version. No time for questions, you’re either in or out. If you trust me, if you’re in, we go to war in about ten minutes. If you’re out then stay here until it’s over. Understood?”
There were nods all around and Jessie took a deep breath before he started.
“Horowitz has a time machine in the lower levels of this building. It works, I’ve been through it, and it needs to be destroyed. He’s making time jumps every hour and one of these times he’s going to get it right. Maybe next time, maybe in a half hour everything will be gone. Before you start thinking maybe we can fix everything, go back and stop the virus, take a good hard look at me. Do I look like the sixteen-year-old you saw a few weeks ago? I don’t know how old I am, maybe only four or five years have passed for me but for you, it’s only been weeks. You can’t undo what’s been done. I’ve tried. I’ve tried over and over again and when I tell you this is the best world we can hope for you have to believe me. If Horowitz figures out how to survive a jump or even to send a warning to himself, we’ll all be dead. We have to stop him before he makes the next jump because it could be the one that changes everything.”
There were frowns and skeptical looks from everyone gathered.
“Why do you need us, Jessie?” Annabel Death asked. “If it’s just a time machine, go break it. We’ve seen you fight, what else aren’t you telling us?”
“Remember those super soldiers the Anubis cult had? Any of you ever go up against them or seen them in action?” Jessie asked.
There were a few nods. Only a few had actually witnessed what they could do but everyone had heard the stories. Nobody that went against them had survived the fight. Except Jessie.
“He has a bunch of his men down there that have been injected so they’re super strong, super fast and they’re half zombie.” Jessie continued. “That makes them the most dangerous thing you’ve ever fought and Marylin says he has a small army. I need to get through them before I can destroy the machine.”
“You know how crazy this all sounds?” Eric the Blackhand asked.
“Yes.” Jessie said. “You in or out?”
“Hell, I’m in.” Eric said. “I’d be happy to cut down some of his goons. They’re all a bunch of assholes.”
“Gear up.” Jessie said. “We go now. I’ll take a group down on the elevator, the rest go down the stairs. They’ll be ready for the team on the elevator but hopefully the others can flank them if we get in trouble.”
Once they were back across the river, they split into two groups and ran for the stairs and elevator. They didn’t know if they really believed the wild story but they believed in Jessie. Half of them owed him their lives. That was enough.
Marilyn overrode the safety measures on the elevator with her keycard. She forced the doors to stay open then punched the button for the lowest level. She showed them the camera feed on her tablet and they saw the lounging men jump to their feet or pour out of the chamber and run for the elevator opening.
“They know you’re coming. Good luck.” She said, her face pinched but determined as the crew slid out of sight, the doors still open.
Fat Nancy and Applesauce tucked in behind the opening, had their machine guns on the floor and pulled the triggers as soon as the elevator passed the bottom of the concrete wall into the sublevel. The noise was deafening inside the confined area but over the staccato of automatic weapons they heard the screams and cries of hunger from the things waiting for them. Brass skittered across the marble and as soon as there was clearance the rest of the retrievers rolled left and right out of the box as bullets started tearing into the back wall. Jessie was upside down, hanging by his knees through the emergency exit in the roof. His Glocks spit fire from both hands and tore through the half mad squad of screaming men. As the crew dashed in different directions, bullets zinged all around, ricocheted off steel and sent chunks of concrete flying. Twenty, maybe thirty of Horowitz’s goons were waiting and half were spraying rounds from their MP5’s. The others forgot they had them and ran for the fresh blood, their hunger driving them into the wall of lead. When bullets started spanging in the elevator, Jessie pulled up and fired blindly from behind the concrete. The retrievers kept moving, rolling and darting but bullets found flesh and he heard their cries of pain, saw the blood mist as a round punched through Klondike Dan’s face. Round after round found their mark in the black suited men but many of them didn’t go down. They had too much zombie in them and when the first magazines were emptied, they didn’t bother to reload. They were frenzied and screamed their rage, ran directly at the darting retrievers.
When the blasts from the MP5’s stopped, Jessie dropped to the floor, released the mags and rammed fresh one’s home. The black guns blazed, spit fire and brass and heads imploded from the ripper rounds.
Applesauce blasted a dozen rounds through the belly of one, sent gouts of blood and liver and lungs out its back but it kept coming. It jumped the final ten feet, eyes black and mouth wide open to feed. Applesauce’s smoking AR went right through the hole blown in its chest, caught a kidney on the front sight and ripped it out as the thing sunk its teeth into his horrified face. Fat Nancy had time to get to her feet and back into a corne
r, both pistols booming before she was cut down by an extended burst of fire. A dozen bullets found body armor and felt like sledgehammer blows but more found flesh and bone.
Speedway emptied his magazine, reloaded on the run and aimed for heads. Some of the goons dropped but a single lucky shot sent him sprawling, his right leg shattered at the knee. He rolled towards a wall to protect his back and died with a curse on his lips when one of the early experiments, more undead than living, tore into him.
Macon’s men fought bravely; they’d been on zombie cleanup details to the parking lot but they’d never seen anything like this. They’d never gone against day one zombies, let alone super soldiers.
Gunfire echoed around the underground chamber, smoke filled the air and the smell of spent gunpowder tickled his nose as Jessie ran for the machine. All around him was chaos and death but he ignored it. Through the window he saw the men in lab coats frantically punching in numbers as another tossed a notebook in the acceleration chamber and slam the door. They were warning themselves of the attack. He raised his Glocks and fired, shattered the window and sent the men diving for cover. He hit the door, slammed it open and broke the man’s arm who had been trying to hold it closed. Jessie shot him as he ran through the opening, sent another round into a man reaching up to push the button and both gun slides locked back. Empty.
Outside the chamber he heard a dozen guns open up from the stairwell team. Jessie thumbed the releases, sent two new magazines home and emptied both guns into the control panel. Glass flew and flashing numbers blinked out as the men in white ran from the room into the crossfire of the gun battle and the snarling teeth of their early experiments. Once blood was in the air their overriding hunger shut everything else down. They had to feed.
Jessie couldn’t help but smile his twisted smile. Even if he died two stories below ground, even if Horowitz won this little battle, he’d won the war. The world would rebuild. He spun away and ran for screams of the fight. There was some more killing to do.
There was one last snarl, the sound of sharp steel slicing through flesh and bone then silence. Horowitz’s goon squad were dead, truly dead, and the injured retrievers were being helped. Hands covered spurting wounds, gauze pads were applied and tourniquets were tied off. The best medical facilities in the world were in the Tower and if they were living now, they would probably keep on living. Some of the gunmen hurried towards the elevator when they heard it start up. They doubted the CEO had any more men who would volunteer to go into the killing fields, a handful of retrievers had just slaughtered thirty of his best men, but they were ready if some did. Marilyn had been watching the bloodbath on her tablet, knew when it was over and had medical personnel standing by. They hurried to the wounded as the bullet riddled elevator glided to a halt at the bottom. They hadn’t known about the lower levels but didn’t let the surprise slow them down.
Jessie took the backpack from Macon, righted an overturned table and laid out the supplies. It had been a while since he’d played around with C4, not since his training with the military guys that first winter in Lakota. It seemed like a hundred years ago and he refamiliarized himself with what he had to do to make it go boom as the injured were carried away and others checked out the collider. The elevator shuttled them upward to the medical facilities until there were only a few left in the subbasement.
“It doesn’t look like much.” Charlie Safari said when he followed the rest of the retrievers out of the chamber. “I thought it would be, you know, fancier. More buttons and knobs and lights.”
“Ayup me duck. Probably was.” Ian said in his harsh British accent and nursing his gun blasted arm. “Until the Jester shot it up proper like.”
Others wandered in and out of the rooms, looked in fascination at the misshapen creatures floating in preserving liquids.
“Hey, Ian.” Jessie said quietly and pulled the man aside. “You ever been to Mad Ruby’s place?”
“What? Are you daft? Nobody in their right mind would go there. Besides, nobody really knows where it is now do they?”
Jessie leaned close so no one would over hear and told him the truth of the matter. Told him about the scores of women who wanted babies and would keep him busy for night after night for as long as he could stand it.
Ian eyed him suspiciously. “You wouldn’t be pulling me leg now would you?” he asked.
“You took one for the team.” Jessie said. “They’ll nurse you back to health and I think you’ll like the way they do it. I need you to do something for me, though.”
“Name it, mate. If what you telling me is true, I’ll be owing you a lot of favors.” He said with a wide smile.
Jessie found a pencil and wrote down the address of a little strip mall.
“There’s four Asian women trapped inside here.” He said. “They’re surrounded by a pretty big horde but you can deal with them. Take the ladies with you down to Ruby’s. They’re malnourished and will need her help.”
Ian narrowed his eyes. It was too much to believe. The kid had to be running some kind of con.
“What’s the catch?” Ian asked. “Nobody gives this away for free.”
“No catch.” Jessie said, his bloodshot eyes boring into Ian’s. “The women from the strip mall are pregnant. All by the same man. You’ll meet him but be careful, he has a shotgun.”
“Sounds like he’s been staying busy.” Ian said with a grin.
“The youngest is about twelve or thirteen.” Jessie said and Ian’s lecherous smile faded.
“The other is her mother, her grandmother and her great grandmother.”
“That sick bastard.” Ian said and his face clouded. “I’ll take care of it, mate.”
One of the nurses came in and started scolding him for not taking the first elevator up with the other wounded and hurried him out.
Takeo was the last to leave, the tech fascinated him and he’d spent some time trying to figure out the basics, how it worked. He pulled a Kool from behind his ear, snapped open a zippo and lit it with a flourish.
“It really must be destroyed?” he asked
Jessie saw the two new rips blasted into his usually immaculate custom leather jacket and blood spray stained his carbon fiber pants. The Kevlar had saved him from holes being punched through his chest but he moved gingerly. If he didn’t have a broken rib, he had some serious concussive bruising.
“Yeah.” Jessie said. “It really does.”
“Shame.” He said. “Need help?”
“No, I got it. This part might be tricky.”
Takeo looked at him for a long moment, gave a slight bow of his head then started for the elevator. Jessie remembered telling him about the underground storage facility but for the life of him he couldn’t remember why or if it was important. He was trying to keep the world moving in the right direction, doing the good things he remembered doing and didn’t know if the Hell Driver needed to know about the tunnels under the mountain. Was it critical knowledge that shaped the future or something that meant nothing?
“At mile marker 30 on highway 375 north of Vegas, it you head east into the desert, you’ll find friends.” Jessie blurted out.
“But not for a few more weeks.” He added when he remembered he hadn’t been there yet. Not in this time line.
Takeo cocked his head.
“If you go, tell them I sent you, tell them to give you some of the impact cloth. It’s lighter than Kevlar and a whole lot more bullet resistant.”
Takeo studied the scarred boy who was no longer a boy and raised an eyebrow. Jessie didn’t elaborate and the Hell Driver knew he’d been given something of great value. Knowledge of something secret. He inclined his head again then sauntered to the elevator as he thumbed another Kool out of an aluminum case.
Jessie shouldered the pack and started his trek down the tunnel of the particle accelerator. Marylin had calculated how far he would have to go and by keeping track of his steps he stopped after a quarter mile. He should be directly under the McKenzie
river. He shone his flashlight up, found a good spot then attached the C-4 on the roof with duct tape. He inserted the blasting caps and spooled out the wire nearly back to the entrance. The first explosion sent glass, copper, wires and concrete tumbling to the floor and he waited long moments for the dust to settle enough to breathe. He shaped the next charge and blew the hole a few more feet towards the surface. He repeated the process three more times before the first trickle of water started oozing out. He took the remaining plastic explosives, climbed up into the hole and packed it tight. He was already running the second after he fired it off and heard the roar of water rushing in. The elevator was open and waiting for him. The river water was pouring out of the tunnel as he started rising skyward. The lower level would be the only part of the tower affected before the pressure equaled out. The machine could never be used again.
The elevator stopped at the lobby and Marylin stepped in with him.
“Is this next step absolutely necessary?” she asked. “I understand there is a prison in northern California.”
“He killed Scarlet.” Was all Jessie said and they rode the rest of the way in silence.
When the doors slid open at the penthouse, Jessie had his guns up but the CEO’s bodyguards stood there with their jackets open, holsters empty and their hands in the air. A monitor behind them showed the bodies of the rest of their friends bobbing in the water rushing into the lower level.
“Don’t shoot.” The biggest one said quickly. “We’re done. We quit.”
“Where is he?” Jessie said, his guns never wavering.
“In his apartment.” The man said and moved aside.
“Go.” Jessie said as he stepped out and motioned them in.
The men hurried inside and hit the down button repeatedly until the doors closed.
They found him on the balcony, his back to them, taking in the view of woods, river and mountains that stretched as far as the eye could see. Fireworks still shot into the night sky and sounds of the revelers and music could be heard echoing up from far below. He was in his best suit, his shoes polished to a shine, his hair carefully combed.
Zombie Road | Book 8 | Crossroads of Chaos Page 3
