by Vohs, J. W.
Orvil would be guiding the others in spite of his fears; he’d watched his wife and oldest daughter fall to a pack of infected two weeks after the virus hit the Gulf. That he was able to keep himself, three other children, and two grandkids alive after such a traumatic loss proved his mettle to Jack and Carter. Whether he realized it or not, Orvil wouldn’t crack under pressure.
At sixteen, T.C. was almost as tall and more powerfully built than his famed uncle, and the boy had killed plenty of hunters under very dire circumstances. His father had proved to be an indisputable hero, and T.C. was definitely his father’s son. He was carrying the same equipment as Jack and Carter, except his firearm was the Kel Tec 12-gauge loaded with double ought buck. He had fourteen rounds in the barrels and one in the chamber. His job was to follow orders without question and to provide covering fire if the team needed to extricate itself from a firefight or overwhelming hunter attack.
Orvil had been allowed a silenced .22 pistol, body-armor, and several edged weapons he was comfortable with. Other than that, he was carrying nothing but water and trail mix. The three soldiers wore packs filled with explosives and the materials they needed for improvised shaped-charges. They would be carrying sixty pounds apiece during the trek into the refinery, but T.C. was strong enough physically to carry the load, while Jack and Carter were still, body and soul, the Rangers they’d been a decade earlier.
The days following the Whitesboro event, commonly referred to among the troops as the McDonald’s Massacre, saw the development of the first post-apocalyptic, combined arms military force in the world. First Sergeant Logan and his soldiers had been so impressed with what they’d witnessed in Whitesboro that they wanted to provide a demonstration of their own. The soldiers from Preston followed their own specialized training routine, and it wasn’t until Luke’s regular troops saw the guns in action that the grumbling about the addition of soldiers seemingly exempt from regulation training came to an abrupt halt. When the rank and file watched the flames burst from the barrels, heard the deafening din of fifty cannon discharging as one, and felt the earth tremble beneath their feet, they finally understood the magnitude of destructive power now working on their behalf. That was even before they saw the scores of shredded homemade mannequins planted in the frozen ground at intervals ranging from fifty, to one hundred and fifty meters in front of the guns. The closest targets lay in pieces strewn across the entire field, while those at the farthest distances were perforated with quarter-sized holes.
Luke held a special meeting with his leadership team after the artillery demonstration. “I actually invited everybody here this afternoon to discuss tactics now that we have an artillery unit in our growing army.” He looked at Sergeant Logan. “Am I right that we have an artillery unit?”
Logan looked surprised. “Of course—why else would we have spent all this time and ammo trying to impress you?”
“In that case, you are now a captain in the Allied Resistance Army.” Luke paused for the smattering of applause around the table to subside. “I’ll need you to pick battery and gun-team leaders ASAP.”
Logan grinned. “Hell, Luke, do you have to make me an officer? I’m used to actually working for a living.”
Luke pretended to look thoughtful. “Hmm, I guess I might be able to find some kid with a year or two of college ROTC under his belt to lead your unit. You could be his first sergeant.”
“No thanks, I’ll take the job.”
“Good—the artillery will be contained in its own company, just like the cavalry, and we need a commander. Now, I need ideas on how to use your guns in action.”
Zach’s eyes lit up. “Can you shoot down helicopters with any of those things?”
Logan laughed. “If they passed over at fifty feet, and hovered while we took aim.” All of a sudden Logan’s face seemed to pale and he grew deadly serious. “Lord almighty . . .” The gathered officers silently watched Logan, worried that he might have bad news. Then his face broke in to a wide smile. “I almost forgot—we have three Stingers in a garage back in Preston.”
Everyone in the group began talking at once. Luke held up his hand for silence. “There has to be a story here.”
“Yeah,” Logan confirmed. “When we lit out of Fort Sill, we found ‘em in the back of a Challenger; that’s basically a Hummer with boxes full of missiles on each side. I figured anything that made a loud boom might come in handy against the zombies someday.”
Luke was thrilled. “Joe, you just made my day.”
“Glad to oblige,” Logan offered, “we’re also good at defending fortifications.”
“I can see that,” Luke replied. “But since we’re an army on the move, and intend to stay that way, we need to figure out how to integrate your guns into our formations. They need to be able to form up quickly, and be prepared to retreat even faster.”
“Retreat?” Logan scoffed. “Your soldiers are the deadliest bunch of killers I’ve ever seen; I’d hate to see what we’d have to retreat from.” He drummed his fingers on the table while he thought about the issue. “Listen, I think we can haul a gun behind a Hummer with no problem, even with the fighting trailers attached—those things don’t weigh much. All we’d have to do in a retreat is lift the tongues, hook them to hitches, and light out with everyone else.”
Luke considered the proposition, working to picture the formation in his mind. Gracie saw the first problem before her husband did. “Right now we’re able to chain our vehicles together so they make a wall against the hunters; we need to figure out a way for your guns to fire through that wall.”
“How about sheet metal gun-ports?” Wyatt suggested. “We have the materials to make them in Denison. Attach one side to the back of a fightin’ trailer’s cage, and the other to the front of the next Hummer in line.”
“They’d have to be high enough to keep the hunters from making an easy jump of it,” Maddy pointed out. “They can climb over our laager now if they reach it in one piece, but we don’t want to make it easy for them.”
“I’m sure we can do that,” Logan replied. “It won’t take too long either. How soon before you want to hit the road?”
Everyone looked to Luke. “Two weeks should give us enough time to get our rookies up to speed. Let’s aim for two weeks from today.” The new recruits could certainly use the time to continue their training, but that wasn’t Luke’s only consideration. After Whitesboro, he’d given Will and his companions a mission. He’d told Gracie that Will and his pack were heading west, to be his eyes and ears regarding what kind and how many hunters their army could expect to encounter on the way to Utah. That was true, but it wasn’t the whole story. Luke believed that if the rest of his plan worked out, it could change the entire dynamic of the war.
CHAPTER 27
Will had once again become an undisputed pack leader, but this time he had a fellow alpha at his side—a second in command who was intelligent, loyal, and beginning to gain awareness of his former humanity. Free hadn’t been experiencing specific memories of his past life, but he clearly understood that he’d once been human, and that he, and others like him, had been manipulated to serve as slaves to an unseen master—one who used sickness, pain, and machine-birds to control them. His strongest memories were of the horde, and how his instinct for self-preservation had overcome the buzzing fog that was compelling him to follow his brothers and sisters in a frenzied charge toward Food. It had been a mindless rush to certain death. Free felt as if he’d awakened as he was being driven to slaughter, but those around him still slept as they moaned and snarled and rushed forward to their demise. In the days and weeks that followed his escape, Free had grown stronger, and his mind, clearer. He’d discovered that he could resist the machine-birds, yet he still yearned to be near others of his kind. He’d still craved Food, but he wasn’t controlled by his hunger. Words had begun to accompany the images in his mind, and with them his thoughts grew more focused and reflective. When he first saw Will, he’d recognized a kindred spir
it, and something more. Through Will, he found clarity and direction. Through Will, he followed the path of the Strong One.
The other hunters in Will’s pack were no longer susceptible to Barnes’ methods of control, but they were followers by nature, and they craved the security of strong leadership. They often found their growing self-awareness to be confusing, and sometimes even frightening, but they were comforted by the order of their pack and their connection to Will and the Strong One. They also found an unusual solace in the undercurrent of righteous fury that carried them westward and sought to unite their kin.
Will and Luke understood each other, and Luke accepted that he could harness Will’s thirst for vengeance in a way that was beneficial to both of them. Will still thought of Luke as the Strong One, even more so now that they had grown close. Luke was a link to the past, a tie to a lost existence. He was the strength of the present, an alpha of alphas, restoring justice to two worlds. In that sense, he also represented hope for the future. And the future Luke envisioned would arrive much more quickly if the emerging transformation could be managed and accelerated. Will and his pack became missionaries of sorts, spreading the seeds of awakening while pruning away any dead branches in their path.
All members of the Norco team were wearing NVGs as they set out toward the refinery and the tanker fueling area at the docks. Surprisingly, there were plenty of trees along the bank of the river despite the massive industrial build-up around the area. The route to the target was also filled with buildings, a walking trail, and several roads. The night had grown overcast and dark, but the men could see reasonably well with their optics. Still, Carter, with Orvil’s assurances that they were headed in the right direction, led them from cover to cover as they slowly made their way downstream.
Everyone was surprised by the roving patrols they were encountering; electric golf carts were plying the roads near the facility, each of the small vehicles occupied by two men in some sort of uniform. After the third such encounter, Jack ordered everyone inside an abandoned building and held an impromptu conference. “Orvil,” he demanded, “what’s up with the golf carts?”
“I don’t rightly know, sir, but those uniforms look like the ones regular security guys wear around places like this.”
T.C. offered an explanation. “My guess is that they like the carts ‘cause they’re quiet. I bet there’s still hunters around this town, a few at least, and running a gas-fired motor could be like ringin’ a dinner bell.”
“Plus,” Carter added, “they got plenty of power to keep the batteries charged up.”
“Good enough,” Jack decided. “Did any of you see signs of weapons on the guards, or anywhere else in the vehicles?”
When nobody answered, Carter offered his opinion. “We know there ain’t a whole lot of ammo left in America today, but if anyone could scrape up the crumbs from the war it would be Barnes. I doubt he’d give these folks grenades, or any type of rifles that fire rounds powerful enough to damage the structures ‘round here, but handguns, maybe ARs, count on it.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Jack agreed. “Okay, if we have to fight our way to the targets, this mission is whacked. Any of them see us, you kill ‘em and we head back upstream and get J.J. in here on the double.”
He tried to look at faces in the darkness, but it was impossible to discern expressions through the NVGs and headgear. He needed to know something. “T.C., Orvil, if you even suspect that you might hesitate before shooting these bastards, tell me right now.”
T.C. turned his head and spat with disgust. “Barnes’ humans are the ones who sicked the hunters on us back in Tennessee and killed my Dad; killed a lot of my friends, too. You ain’t gotta worry ‘bout me; these sons-of-bitches picked the wrong side.”
Jack wasn’t surprised. “Orvil?”
The older man was quiet for several moments, but then seemed to make up his mind. “Seems a waste to kill humans these days, but the young-un here’s right; they picked the wrong damn side. I want my kids and grandkids to have a chance at a life.”
Carter summarized his position, “Boys, don’t even think about it; you light those fellas up if they see any of us.”
T.C., uncharacteristically, was very serious as he joined Orvil in reply. “Yes, sir.”
Jack still had doubts about the two rookies actually pulling their triggers on human beings, but he and Carter had been new recruits once. They’d killed when they had to. He had to believe that Orvil and T.C. would do the same. They headed back out into the night.
Carter and Orvil soon led the team to within a hundred meters of the huge tanker connected to pipelines that stretched away into the refinery complexes surrounding the area. Everything was bigger and more complicated than Jack had pictured as they’d planned the mission. He realized, with more certainty than ever before, that Orvil and J.J. had been the only two who knew what they were up against. The older man had been reluctant from the beginning, but, Jack mused, Orvil didn’t know what a couple of former Rangers could do with over a hundred pounds of various high explosives. Nevertheless, Jack realized that he wouldn’t be blowing this entire complex into piles of burning rubble. He finally waved everyone together behind a cement block supporting a network of rusting pipe and suggested a plan of attack.
“I’d hoped we could do more damage to this place when we were making our plans, but obviously the complex is massive.”
“We can only hit a coupla key locations,” Carter concurred before turning to Orvil. “Where can we cause the most trouble?”
“Destroy the pipes where they feed into the ships, those fittings will be the most difficult to replace. I mean, they’ll scavenge others from around here eventually, but you’ll put them out of action for a month or two.”
“Hardly seems worth the risk,” T.C. mumbled under his breath.
“Well,” Orvil argued, “these refineries ain’t exactly runnin’ at peak efficiency. We blow this tanker, and take out the fuel already loaded on it, we might set Barnes back for months.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Jack revealed. “This ship has been moored here for weeks, and I think it’s a safe bet to assume that the refinery is producing the fuel slowly at best. Just getting organic materials here to make the fuel has got to be a challenge.”
“Hell, it may take Barnes months to recover from a hit here” Carter decided. “As soon as the snow melts, we’re gonna find Barnes and kill ‘im anyway, but if we can slow ‘im down ‘fore that we’ll be savin’ lotsa people’s lives.”
“Carter’s right,” Jack said decisively. “Orvil, you show us the key places in this operation, and me and Carter will blow ‘em up.”
Within the hour, the team had safely navigated its way to the selected location, having easily avoiding detection from the few patrols that puttered by. Jack and Carter were working as quickly as they safely could to attach explosives to the refinery pipelines feeding fuel to the ship. Nobody was certain what the explosions generated by TNT from dynamite would do to the location beyond the physical damage wrought by the blast. There was a chance that flames would ignite the fuel and set off secondary explosions on the tanker and within the refinery. If that happened, the homemade shaped charges Carter had formed with explosives and old wine bottles would be unnecessary. They weren’t taking any chances. Another hour was spent placing the armor-piercing devices just above the water line along the side of the ship. Nobody saw the team in action, the security chief apparently content to patrol the perimeter of the refinery and trust that nobody could get by the guards in their golf carts. Finally, Carter gave an excited thumb’s up to Jack, who had already rolled det-cord out more than a hundred meters upstream.
Five minutes later, the team anxiously knelt behind cover, counting down the interminable seconds until they could set off the explosives. Carter’s greatest concern at this point was that the shock-wave of the first explosion would interfere with the second, so he and Jack tried their best to synchronize their detonations.
The explosives would be triggered by mechanisms similar to those used on claymore mines, so there would almost certainly be some time-lapse between the detonations. But the two veterans were old hands at these types of operations. More than once, they’d both wished that they had Bobby Crane with them on this mission, but they’d learned a great deal from the explosives expert over the years they’d served with him. Carter finally looked at his trusted buddy and mouthed, “Three, two, one,” before they both set off their triggering mechanisms.
The team never knew if the shaped charges exploded as planned. Carter had known all along that he would blow the TNT planted where the pipeline affixed to the holding tanks on the ship a split second before the shaped charges were fired; they had to destroy the specialized equipment at the end of those pipes. That explosion was their first priority. Even hiding behind solid cover a hundred meters away, the flames, heat, and shock wave of the first blast rolled over the team like a fiery hurricane. Jack had somehow managed to trigger the shaped charges before being knocked flat on the ground, but again, there was no way to know if those explosions ever occurred.
The reason none of the men could know if the shaped charges had any effect was because the tanker blew up, literally. Later, Carter speculated that the flames generated by the TNT exploding managed to ignite the fuel that spilled from the ruptured lines at the moment of detonation. Through either fumes or by following a liquid trail into the ship’s holding tanks, fire found a way to ignite the gas inside the massive freighter. The blast opened the boat like a can of soup hit by a heavy caliber rifle round. Burning fuel rapidly flowed from the shattered tanks and set the Mississippi afire. Flames also rolled along rivulets of gas on the concrete embankments. Jack grabbed T.C. and Orvil roughly by the shoulders as he pushed them from cover and shouted, “Run!”
