“The corn field,” she pressed. “It’s all we have.”
Riker nodded and gripped the wheel two-handed.
Tara waved at Steve-O. “Get in,” she hollered, hooking a thumb over her shoulder as she slammed her own door shut.
A solid thunk sounded as Steve-O clambered back into the rig and closed the door at his back. Words dripping with disappointment, he said, “I’m sorry, guys. I tried my best.”
Riker draped his right arm over the seat and looked over his shoulder, past Steve-O and out the back window which was filled up with all of the obstacles he had so delicately avoided on the way in. “Yes you did,” he said. “Everyone hold on.”
Tara’s hands flashed to the grab bar by her head.
There was a solid click as Steve-O fastened his seatbelt.
Chapter 46
Drive it like you stole it was going through Riker’s head as he worked the gas and brakes and steering wheel in unison. He knew that even one bale of hay broken and spread about would be akin to spray painting on the lot WE ARE HERE along with a giant neon arrow for the helicopter pilots to follow. So he kicked out the negative thoughts and drove like he’d been taught during the comprehensive three-day class in the desert.
Passing by outside the windows, the bales were a blur of muted yellows.
The cutout Halloween characters were reduced to technicolor forms leering in the windows as Riker expertly whipped the SUV through the gauntlet in reverse.
“Just good ‘ol boys,” crooned Steve-O.
“Great Waylon you got there,” Riker said as he stood on the brakes and spun the steering wheel hard to the left, whipping them around in their second bootlegger’s reverse of the day.
This time there was no tail of dust to give the SUV away as Riker straightened the wheel and cut a laser-straight tack north across the paved lot.
They passed the flatbed work trucks first off. Up ahead on the left was a garishly painted building made of plywood. Roughly the size of a Winnebago, the building was adorned with a sign featuring ears of corn and pumpkins. The vegetables were wide-eyed characters sprouting stick-thin arms and legs and wearing wide, toothy grins. The top edge of the sign was irregular because of the smiling characters and rose seven or eight feet above a sliding window. A six-foot-long shelf jutted out a foot or more below the lip of the window. To the right of the window, painted on the outside wall, was a basic menu containing ten items at most. Just beyond the snack shack, maybe a hundred feet or so, two wide chasms had been cut into the corn. Both entrances led west into the maze. Riker guessed one was for participants entering the maze. The other he figured was where the cornfield conquerors would emerge victorious and wanting a steaming libation or sticky sweet.
Driving by what looked to him like one of the plywood fruit stands ubiquitous to any rural road in middle America, Riker slowed the Chevy to walking-speed. Roughly fifty feet beyond the snack shack, he steered the SUV into the maze entrance. Once the Chevy had penetrated a dozen feet into the maze, he steered hard left into the wall of corn. Instantly, the stalks parted. As Riker applied more gas, the stalks bent and disappeared underneath the front end. There was a continuous barrage of noise, the screeching and slapping of corn against sheet metal echoing inside the cab as they cut a southbound path just inside the corn and parallel with the parking lot’s frost-heaved outer edge. The cacophony continued for a few seconds until Riker brought the SUV to a stop broadside to the RV-sized snack shack.
Steve-O stopped singing when Riker cut the engine.
Remaining tight-lipped, Tara tilted her head back and stared up through the moonroof’s smoked glass.
Riker swung his gaze between the side mirrors and saw that some of the corn in the SUV’s wake was slowly returning to attention. He reveled in the relative silence and cocked an ear toward his open window. Rotor blades were still churning air up there somewhere off the left front fender. Thankful the truck’s panels were no longer ringing with the nails-on-chalkboard keen from corn raking against them, he relaxed his body for the first time in a long time. Felt the tension between his shoulder blades beginning to abate. The wickedly painful drumbeat behind his eyes was lessening in tempo and intensity. He rubbed his temples and stared into the mirror where he saw an obviously terrified Steve-O—jaw clenched, lips pursed, and head on a swivel—slowly becoming one with the upholstery.
“Fishing for coins back there, Steve-O?” joked Riker.
“I saw children in the corn,” was what he got in response.
“They’re the least of our worries,” Tara said. She clicked out of her belt and spun to face Steve-O. “You must watch a lot of television.”
He nodded.
“There’s no children in this corn,” she insisted. “They’re make-believe. A byproduct of a guy named Stephen King’s twisted imagination.”
“I saw them,” he insisted.
Face upturned to the mostly pewter sky, Riker suddenly found himself on the receiving end of a cyclonic blast of warm air carrying with it a hint of kerosene.
“They’ve made us,” said Riker, shouting to be heard over the turbine whine and rotor chop. A half-beat after stating the obvious, the corn stalks for a dozen feet all around the SUV bent and swayed and then remained supplicant as the vicious down-blast of rotor wash held them near horizontal to the dirt. Louder than ever, the noise of corn stalks battering the truck’s slab sides was back.
The helicopter was painted a shade of matte green that looked black in the flat light of early autumn, that much was clear as it hovered a dozen feet above the Suburban. What really struck Riker as odd was that it was unarmed and bore no markings to distinguish it as belonging to any branch of service. The American flag that should have been stenciled somewhere on the fuselage was also missing.
Visible through the chin bubble, the right seater’s boots were at work on the pair of pedals there, sending minute adjustments to the tail rotor. As small and nimble as the Hughes 500 was, it still cast an imposing figure—and shadow—as it hovered with the narrow skids dancing just a few yards overhead.
“Who are they and what are they trying to accomplish?” asked Tara.
“Good question. They’re not Army or National Guard. I figure they’re trying to intimidate us so we’ll come out with our hands up.”
Steve-O said, “Why? What the heck did we do to them?”
“It’s not personal,” replied Riker. “Assuming it’s one of ours”—which he was beginning to doubt—“they’re just following orders. Which aren’t always the best. Especially if the politicians are the ones calling the shots.”
“Were the soldiers in black following orders?” spat Tara.
Riker didn’t have time to formulate an answer, let alone come up with a calming word or two, because an amplified male voice rose over the cacophony of rustling corn and mechanical din of the chopper. The orders were clear: “Throw out any weapons and exit the vehicle with your hands up.” However, the man issuing commands threw another piece of information into the mix by indicating there was a squad of soldiers en route that would let them all go free as soon as they relinquished any and all recording devices.
Tara shuddered at the thought of the consequences they’d face should they not comply.
Sensing his sister’s unease, Riker put a hand on her shoulder and opened his mouth to put into words what the gesture could not wholly convey.
When Tara diverted her gaze from the helicopter to acknowledge the gentle pressure on her shoulder, a whole lot of things registered simultaneously.
Two closely spaced gunshots rang out off her right shoulder.
Immediately the turbine noise increased overhead and the chopper, now belching smoke, tilted sideways and dipped its nose in the direction of the parking lot. As the craft Lee had called a “little bird” was in the midst of the evasive maneuver, a man-sized form with arms outstretched was filling up her side vision.
“Malachai!” cried Steve-O as he fell away from the window and drew his le
gs up onto his seat.
Turning toward the window, Tara heard another gunshot and witnessed the figure’s pallid face and right hand dissolve into a multicolored spritz of dermis, muscle, and bone all traveling faster than her eye could follow.
It was instantly clear to Tara the zombie-looking man had come through a nearby break in the corn. And judging by the ringing in her right ear and gore deposited on her wing mirror, the lick of flame responsible for its destruction had come from the right, near the SUV’s wide B-pillar, the same direction Tara’s attention was naturally drawn by the dual blasts preceding the chopper’s hasty departure.
Her eyes focused on the circular opening at the end of a gun barrel. From less than a foot away it was impossibly large.
Licks of smoke spilling from the dark muzzle curled lazily skyward.
Beating Tara to the punch, Riker said, “Now I really wish I had taken the Beretta.”
From the back, Steve-O said, “I told you I saw children in the corn.”
“I thought you were talking about the movie, Steve-O,” admitted Tara. “I owe you an apology.”
The gun barrel was tapping lightly on her window. The smoke was gone. The menace the gaping muzzle represented was not.
Tara walked her gaze the weapon’s entire length, past the abbreviated black forestock, over the split and wrinkled knuckles of the pale hand clutching it, to the face of the man brandishing what she guessed was a shotgun. The only thing she knew of that could blast skin and flesh and everything else off a person’s skull like that.
The gunman’s face was as craggy and lined as his hands. As beat up, too. There was a goose egg on his forehead. An inch-long horizontal gash wrapped the bridge of his nose, which was clearly broken, the narrow, vein-addled tip making a sudden and unnatural right turn. Tara was no good at telling people’s ages. So, considering he was likely a farmer and hadn’t aged well due to all the early rising and days full of hard work, she placed him somewhere between fifty and sixty-five. A boomer, she’d heard people her mom’s age called.
And hell if he hadn’t lived up to that explosive generational title.
Keeping both hands on the wheel where the man with the weapon could see them, Riker looked sidelong at Tara. In a low voice, he said slowly, “Sis. Might be wise to run down your window.” Then, turning toward Steve-O, he assured the man for the umpteenth time in a very short while that everything was going to be okay.
Chapter 47
Heeding her brother’s advice, Tara feigned a smile as she looked the grizzled gunman up and down. She noted the mud on his boots first. Then she saw the spattered blood on his shirtsleeves. Finally, her gaze settled on the boxy pistol in the holster on his right hip. Not wanting to argue with one gun, let alone two, she hit the button to start her window buzzing down, then placed her hands on the dash.
At once, easily overpowering the earthy smell of mineral-rich soil recently churned by the SUV’s tires, the metallic stink of spilt blood invaded the cab.
“A couple of shotgun blasts at close range sure can do a ton of damage to a whirlybird,” said the man, barrel unwavering. He looked to the sky. “I don’t reckon they’ll be back any time soon. But you can bet friends in Humvees and MRAPs will.” He stepped to his right. The gun barrel followed his gaze as he scanned the corn for more threats. Back facing Tara’s open window, he added, “And when they do come, there’ll be no stopping them.“
Tara asked, “They … the Guardsmen, I mean. They did that to your face?”
The man shook his head as he turned to face the Suburban. “Wasn’t the Guard that did this to me.”
She saw bruises beginning to form under both of his slate-gray eyes.
“I went to the roadblock over on the county road. Parked my Jeep broadside to the barriers they had just put up and started asking questions. I was real calm. Just being inquisitive. Then a fella dressed in all black fatigues comes over”—he cast a furtive glance at the corn. Held it there for a beat, listening, then turned back—“this man in black tells me he has the authority from the highest levels in government to close any roads he needs to in order to contain the ‘threat’ … which I guess is mil-speak for the bug or virus or whatever it was that created these things wandering my corn field.”
“Man in black,” Steve-O said, then started singing a lyric from Folsom Prison Blues.
Leaning forward, Riker looked past Tara and locked eyes with the older man. “You must be Peter.”
The man nodded. “This is my farm. You can call me Pete, though.”
Riker introduced himself first, then the others.
Eyes actively scanning the corn, Peter nodded and indicated he wished they were meeting under better circumstances.
Like you in the window of that snack shack and pouring me a hot cider, thought Tara as another hard shiver wracked her small frame.
“Pleasure,” said Riker. “I appreciate you running off the contractors in the 500.”
“After what they did to my face,” said the man, “the pleasure was all mine.”
Back to the business at hand, Riker asked, “You said ‘things’ … plural. You mean there’s more like the one you just shot out there in your corn?”
“Been coming in from the road since morning. First one or two at a time. Had a group of four wander onto the lot an hour ago. Something or someone had gotten to all of them. Hunks of flesh missing here and there. Obvious bite marks on most. Hell, a couple were dang near disemboweled. Had their guts eaten right out of ‘em.” He braced on the Suburban and rolled the corpse at his feet over with the toe of one boot. “This one got it on the back of the arm.” He bent close and rolled the arm back and forth, inspecting it. “Yep,” he went on. “A human mouth did this one, too.”
Though he thought he already knew the answer, Riker asked, “So how do they die? I mean … dead for good?”
Shifting from foot to foot, Peter said, “I learned by trial and error that they don’t die from normal stuff that’ll kill you or me.” Like being gutted, thought Riker. “Once they go cold like this slogger here, they do not bleed out and die. Hell, they don’t bleed at all. Even if you sever an arm or shoot ‘em in the chest. Tells me their hearts ain’t beating in there. So I figured you treat them like a snake and go for the head.” His head jerked around in response to a rustling in the corn.
Riker thumbed the door lock button just in case. Hearing a solid and satisfying thunk, he asked, “Where’d you put the bodies, Pete?”
“In the barn, for now. I kept a couple alive just to prove I’m no stone cold murderer.”
Tara said, “Alive?”
“Don’t know what else to call it. The soldier in black didn’t offer any answers. Lord knows I pried. Tried to get him to tell me something. Got me the rifle buttstock to the face treatment as a reward.”
Eyeing the fleshless skull staring up at her, Tara said, “The things are still in the barn?”
“Yes,” replied Peter. “But not the one you all were trying to hide in. I locked a pair of the them in the barn by the house. Damned if they didn’t worm in with the chickens and kill and try and eat every last one of them.” He shook his head. “Feathers everywhere.”
Still staring groundward, Tara asked, “Did the chickens turn into one of these?”
“What was left of ‘em stayed dead.”
Riker told Peter about their run-in with the soldiers in black on I-69. He held nothing back and finished by asking, “Any idea who they are?”
Before Peter could answer, Tara interrupted. “And why the ones who beat you had no interest in the sloggers in your barn? Surely someone from the CDC or something like that would want to study them.”
“I’m guessing the men in black are mercenaries, so to speak.” He went on to detail how his son did two deployments to Afghanistan. How he rotated out and immediately attached himself to Blackwater for six figures a year. “Contrary to what you hear from the media, those Blackwater boys … my boy … were doing a great thing. Especially co
nsidering the politicians were juggling the issue like a hot rock. As for the ones we tangled with. Today, things are real different. Folks aren’t allegiant to flag and country any longer. It’s this side or that.” He went quiet for a beat. “Whoever is in power holds the cards and deals the money out to the highest bidder willing to do their dirty work.”
Riker’s brow furrowed. He said, “And you figure these ones are working for the current administration.”
“Affirmative,” said Peter. “But unfortunately, I have a sinking feeling this thing is so out of hand that we’re looking at more than just a CYA operation.”
“CYA?” said Tara. “Cover your ass?”
“Quarter for the swear jar,” shot Steve-O.
Tara wanted to frown but couldn’t. Instead, she kept her eyes locked with Peter’s.
Peter went on, “I was fiddlin’ with my HAM set and talking with a fella in Maine. He says one of the shiny new towers that replaced the ones taken down in Manhattan on nine eleven is burning.”
Riker asked, “Terrorism?”
Peter shrugged. “I’m not so sure about the cause. Nobody is. There’s other problems, though.” He turned an oblique angle to the corn. Leveled the stubby pump gun at a spot a dozen feet beyond the SUV’s right front fender. A second or two passed before the corn parted and a disheveled elderly man staggered into the open. He stood there amidst the recovering stalks, wavering to and fro. A fist-sized flap of pale skin and shiny, purple-red muscle hung down the side of his face. It looked as if it had been torn away from the cheekbone with brute force. Dual pickets of poorly cared-for teeth were clearly visible as its jaw pistoned up and down.
Riker couldn’t help but think the oldster was somehow convinced he was chewing a mouthful of Filet Mignon.
Showing no fear, Peter stalked toward the geriatric interloper.
Closer to fifty, thought Tara, as the shotgun came up and roared again.
And still a boomer.
“Let’s go,” Tara said, looking Riker square in the eye. She was visibly shaking.
Riker's Apocalypse (Book 1): The Promise Page 23
