“Hopefully, there won’t be anyone there,” Sadie shot back. “That’s a way better hope if you ask me. Slow down, Neil. There’s a road coming up.”
The road wasn’t what they were looking for. It wasn’t even named. CR23, a long tired strip, scattered with the previous year’s leaves and an unsettling number of zombies, was a little further on. The zombies were all over the place. The five-vehicle convoy swerved in and out among them, leaving behind a ribbon of dust that hung in the still air. It was a sign that even the dullest person could read.
“It is what it is,” Grey whispered to himself. As they searched for the airfield, he checked his weapon and ammo. He couldn’t remember whether this was the third time he’d checked since he’d woken up that morning, or the tenth. It was now a matter of habit. Next to him, Deanna started checking her own weapon. She was doing her best not to show that her hands were shaking and, for her sake, he pretended not to notice that they were.
“There’s the tower,” Sadie announced.
It was two miles away and came up fast. This time, there wasn’t the rattle of small arms fire, to greet them nor were there the bodies of zombies lying about. “These are good signs,” Grey said. “I think we can assume that the River King’s men haven’t been here.”
Neil floored the truck, heading for the third of three hangars; it was the only one of the three that looked as though it had been through a fire. It was also the only one surrounded by piles of crap. There was something deliberate about the debris strewn in front of it as though someone was sending an explicit message not to bother searching inside. It reminded Neil of the trailer park.
On the apron in front of the hangar were a couple of piles of ash and steel that had been airplanes once and, finally, there was a fuel truck that had been riddled with bullets.
Had Grey come upon the scene in different circumstances, he wouldn’t have wasted a second even glancing in at the hangar.
The River King’s camouflage was nearly perfect.
“Go around to the back,” Grey ordered. There were too many zombies in front; the last thing he wanted was to battle the undead with the River King’s men on their way.
One handed, Neil spun them around to the back of the large building; there were more zombies here as well. Neil plowed over two of them before coming to a shuddering stop at a garage-style door that was partially raised. “I’ll keep them busy out here,” Neil said. “You guys get the pontoons ready to go.”
Grey grabbed the M4 and slid out. Deanna followed him and Sadie squirmed from the front seat and hurried into the hangar first, with her gun drawn. “It’s here,” came her echoey voice.
“Go,” Grey said to Deanna, pulling her toward the door. He then waved the other vehicles forward. “Park ‘em and get in here!”
The hangar was dim but, since there were windows high up on the aluminum walls, it wasn’t fully dark. The air was hot and close and had that particular military odor that one only found in the back of a Humvee or elbow deep in the turbine engine of an M1 Abrams. The source of the smell: green-painted, five-ton army trucks. There were six lined up side-by-side. To their left were the stacked pontoons sitting on flatbeds.
Sadie was marveling at them; Deanna was more practical, she was checking the gas tanks. They weren’t just empty, they were “staged” empty. Their covers were off and there were siphon hoses jammed down into their guts.
“Spread out,” Grey whispered to the cage fighters as they came in. “Search everywhere and everything.” The building was large, however other than the six trucks and the pontoons, it was empty. The men straggled back after a few minutes, shaking their heads and again looking to Sadie for instructions.
“Stop,” she said to them. “There’s no gas here, ok?”
“Maybe it’s in one of the other hangars,” Deanna suggested.
Sadie shook her head vaguely, looking first down at the cement floor and then at the walls. “No, that would go against my father’s desire not to be obvious. Those will be empty, too so that no one would even think to come in here.”
Grey followed Sadie’s eyes. “Are you thinking the fuel is behind the walls in some way? They’re pretty thin.” They were made of corrugated steel and bolted to the joists.
Sadie picked at one of the bolts and blew out angrily. “My dad is also lazy. He would have given up after getting three of these out. No, the gas is somewhere else. Which is weird. That would’ve taken a lot of trips, you know? To move all that gas.”
“What about the planes out front?” Norman asked. “He could’ve stashed fuel in the rubble and crap.”
Grey jogged to the front of the building; behind him came the others in a clump. He could just make out one of the torched planes through a space between the two hangar doors. The plane was nothing but twisted metal and ash. If there was any fuel hidden in the charred corpse it couldn’t be more than a few gallons.
“No. He’s got it some…where…else.” He had just been turning away when his eyes fell on the fuel truck. There were holes all over the thing. Grey stopped counting at thirty. It was overkill. There was only one sane reason to shoot a fuel truck and that was to blow it to pieces. You did it either out of military necessity or because you wanted to see a big-ass explosion, but one way or another, if it didn’t blow up after five or six rounds it wouldn’t go up after thirty.
“He’s got the fuel stashed in the fuel truck,” Grey said. “I would guess in drums or jerry cans. I hope to God that it’s jerry cans.”
Sadie pushed him aside and put her eye to the crack. “It’ll be jerry cans. He would’ve done this alone and he doesn’t have Jillybean’s smarts; getting heavy drums into that truck would’ve been beyond him.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking,” Grey said, pulling the hangar door back so that there was a gap big enough for him to poke his head out. The zombie threat in front had abated; the sound of Neil driving around in circles out back was drawing them away. He turned to the others. “Sadie, try to signal to Neil that we need him to keep it up. Everyone else with me.”
He started running toward the fuel truck and almost didn’t make it. His head went light and incredibly enough he was winded after thirty yards. The beat of his heart was like a rabbit’s, quick and light. He knew the meaning of his symptoms: moderate blood loss. The trickle that had been going on all day was starting to affect him.
“Norman, get up there,” he ordered, not daring to point for fear that his hand would shake. What would the men think of him if they saw? He was astounded at himself. Wasn’t he the tough as nails Army captain? His identity was bound up in that concept. The very notion of frailty in this hard world secretly frightened him; injury so easily led to death.
The big man didn’t look happy at being ordered around, but regardless he scrambled up and then pulled back the roof hatch. It came up with a low screech. Norman’s eyes bugged. “It’s all here, and there’s a fuck-load.” He reached in and hauled up a green can that held five gallons of diesel. “Man, you can smell it. I used to hate the smell of diesel, but right now it smells like gold.”
The men were grinning ear-to-ear as if the hard part was over. Grey clapped his hands softly to get their attention. “Ok, let’s get them up and out. I want everyone to move quick with no bull-shitting. I’m going to find a donkey-dick,” he said, referencing the military slang term for the flexible metal hose that fits the five-gallon can. He had just turned, when Norman cursed.
“Motherfucker! Grey, they’re coming!”
The captain spun around ignoring the zing of pain in his neck. Norman’s long arm pointed back the way they had come where the air was made dirty from the passage of many vehicles.
“Back to the hangar,” Grey yelled, making a split decision. They had minutes, only, meaning there was no time to get the fuel and mount a spur of the moment defense; it was one or the other. The men ran, while Grey walked, turning his head back and forth, feeling new blood seep from the wound in his neck. He ignored it.
His eyes were taking in everything, seeing the lay of the land, seeing where his enemies would seek cover, where they would shoot from, where they would try to flank him.
There was a lot of open ground around the hangar; an attack would be costly for the River King’s men. Grey knew that if he had just a handful of his soldiers from Colorado, he could almost guarantee they’d be able to hold out but with this motley crew he was stuck with…well, he was extremely nervous. There were two main issues involving untried soldiers: they either fired too much, shooting at anything that moved, emptying their guns in seconds, or they froze and didn’t fire their weapons at all. Either way it would leave gaps in their defense.
Another problem was their refusal to move while under fire, which meant he would have to station them expertly. “Raise your hands if you’ve had military experience,” he said, coming into the hangar.
Salvatore raised his hand. “I was in for three years.” This was a shock to Grey and it must have registered on his face. Sal smirked, “Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t no senator’s son. I only joined for the college money.”
Only one other man raised his hand. The other men called him ‘Crutch’, but what significance that held, Grey didn’t know. “I served two tours in Iraq,” he said. “I only fired my weapon a couple of times.” He sounded apologetic.
“It’s ok,” Grey told him. The thrum of the approaching vehicles came to them louder now. They were still distant but the group began to squirm. “Alright, listen up. First thing, we need all the gear from the trucks out back, and I mean every bullet.”
He set them running back and forth. While they did so, he opened the hangar doors to their fullest to increase his angles. When Grey turned back, he saw that the men were rushing about, plumping everything in one great big pile in the middle of the hangar. He could see their desperation and fear. They had fought in the cage where death was always imminent but it was never chancy. You were either better than the man in front of you or you weren’t. It was a horrible thing to live under that sort of death sentence but at least it was concrete. There was never that feeling of rolling the dice, of dying on a whim.
Untested men were always thinking about that “special” bullet with their name on it. Grey had never considered such a thing, not for a second. For the skilled, battle was dangerous but not as chancy as some thought. As long as you did the simple things, you were trained to do: you never fired from the same spot twice in a row; you always fired at angles, never straight on; you used cover and camouflage and only moved when friendlies were laying down fire; you learned to get the feel and timing of battle.
The untried man, and the ignorant moviemakers in Hollywood, saw battle as mayhem without rhyme or reason.
Instinctively, Grey knew the tempo, the timing of war. To him it was a dance. The bleeding wound in his neck was a fine example. A newbie would’ve caught a bullet square in the chest, but he had heard the tap-tap, pause, tap, tap, tap; he knew where and what was “safe” and what wasn’t. The wound he’d received wasn’t “the” bullet, it had simply been a ricochet, a speck of nothing that was little more than a nuisance.
“Let’s spread that shit out,” he barked. Under his direction, the ammo was placed in three small caches behind the rows of 5-ton trucks. “Now, get the water. Battle can get warm, boys.”
A few of the men were staring at the SUVs parked in back and Grey saw in their eyes the indecision: do I grab the heavy jugs of water or do I hop in one of these trucks and get the hell out of here? The River King’s trucks were closer now; the dust plume was higher and thicker and the sound of their engines was heavy in the air.
“It’s too late for anything but fighting now,” Grey barked. “It’s go time, boys! Crutch, take three men and find a good position on the far truck. Show them their fields of fire. Sal, I want you and two others on the last one on the left. Tell me you know something about overlapping fields of fire.”
Salvatore’s look wasn’t all that encouraging. “I was in the Air force,” he said as an excuse.
“Well I guess that explains it,” Grey said. “Firing straight out in front of you is only done in the movies. It exposes you way too much.” Grey went on to waste two minutes explaining what should’ve been elementary.
With his flanks secured, Grey positioned two men in the center and he was just about to clamber up onto one of the trucks when Neil came bustling in through the back door, sliding it down behind him. In his good hand he was trying to wield a shotgun.
“Leave the gun, Neil. I need three people to run ammo. You, Sadie, and Deanna. Your station is here.” He pointed behind the truck he was about to climb up.
Neil made a face at the idea. “What? I can fight, you know.” The truth was, even when he was healthy Neil really couldn’t. Sadie was only better because she was small and quick, and Deanna was the least able shooter of the three. Grey had enough tact not to say anything close to the truth.
“Sorry, but you’re injured, and Sadie and Deanna are both quick and nimble.” The two women seem to believe the excuse, Neil on the other hand, started to protest. “Stop it, Neil. Remember you put me in charge of this sort of thing. Now I wish you wouldn’t have to fight at all, but you’re going to, eventually. The three of you are my reserve force. You’ll fill the gaps when they occur.”
“Here they come,” someone hissed in a carrying voice.
Grey’s eyes went to slits as he stared out. A train of six Humvees came barreling toward them; two of them with mounted .50 machine-guns. They could turn the walls of the hangar into Swiss cheese. Grey took a steadying breath before commanding, “Do not fire until I do. When you fire, make sure you fire at angles and by all means don’t blow through your ammo. Fire in bursts, get down, and then move to a new position. If you keep firing from the same spot they will get you. Keep that in mind.” As he was speaking, he went from man-to-man, pointing in one direction or another showing them where to shoot and, more importantly, where to move next.
With the trucks and the pontoons there was plenty of cover. On the flipside, they were in a confined space where the enemy fire would be funneled in at them. It would be tight and the margin of safety slim as hell.
When he had done all he could, he climbed up onto the center truck and gave a last order, “Call out your initial targets, boys. We want to drop as many as we can on the first go.”
Then it was too late for anything else. The Humvees were crossing the airstrip at right angles, heading right for them, while in the back of the building there began a steady banging; the zombies were behind the hangar, cutting off their escape. The beasts began to beat on the walls searching for any weakness.
“Fuck,” someone said, drawing the word out. The word said it all. Enemies before and behind. It was enough to make even Grey’s skin crawl.
“This is it,” Grey said in a loud whisper. The Humvees were coming up. They stopped forty feet in front of the wide-open hangar doors and men began piling out—a lot of men. Grey did a quick count and came up with twenty-eight.
And then the M4 was on his shoulder and the scope at his eye. His breath slowed as the man in his sights grew to the size of a giraffe. Grey corrected for his broken hand, took a soft breath and caressed the trigger of his M4. He felt the gentle push against the shoulder, heard the snap of his weapon, and saw his target jerk, while all around him weapons erupted in a nearly simultaneous thunderclap.
The River King’s men were falling, spinning. Some were dodging, strangely, their bodies reacting to the sound but in queer ways.
Nine of Grey’s men had fired their weapons, killing and wounding seven across the open space between the hangar and the Humvees. Then, there was a pause of about a second, as Grey knew would happen. It always did. One side assessed the damage done, while the other side took a fraction of a second to recover from the initial shock.
Grey didn’t hesitate, he was already lining up another shot. The scope limited him in one respect: he couldn’t spray bullets like the situati
on warranted. Yet he was faster than anyone else; he picked a target in a split second and caressed the trigger, seeing with a perverse pleasure, the man flinch inwardly as though a hammer had struck his chest.
And then both sides interrupted in fire, and smoke…and screams.
Chapter 29
Sadie Walcott
Sadie wasn’t new to gunfire; she’d lived with it practically day and night for the last year. She was simply new to the terror of battle. It was one thing to shoot the undead who came plodding forward with all the guile of a wind-up toy car, it was quite another to be on the receiving end of twenty machine guns firing full bore in your direction.
Lead skipped and whined; the air shivered and hissed; the truck tire she hid behind vibrated against her cheek and gradually sucked in on itself as it was pierced again and again. She cringed into a ball that slunk lower with every passing second, as the 5-ton absorbed bullet after bullet. To Sadie it seemed to be slowly collapsing.
Shrapnel flew everywhere. Pieces of black rubber and green metal littered the floor. Glass shattered, twinkling in the light as though someone had thrown a handful of diamonds in the air.
Then there was blood spraying. It was a brief geyser of bright red drops that seemed to be held suspended in midair for an impossible amount of time. It floated in slow motion allowing Sadie to witness every last flying drop. Then it hit the dull grey concrete and immediately lost the richness of life and turned old and dark.
A moment later one of the cage fighters reeled backward into view, one of his hands pressed against the side of his face. His hand was large, his long fingers were stark white, outlined in the brighter blood. There was a gold band on his ring finger. He’d been married at one point and probably had lost his wife in the usual horrible manner and yet he still loved her enough to wear the ring. But all Sadie could dwell on was the amazing contrasts of color: the soft, shining of gold, the bright white fingers, like bleached bone, the unbelievable crimson.
The Undead World (Book 5): The Apocalypse Renegades Page 31
