After that, her instructions were followed to the letter. She tracked the renegades to the city limits of Wichita but soon lost them; there were just too many monsters to make heads or tails of anything.
Brad had the map open on his lap. “They’re probably trying to give us the slip in the city. We should skirt around the beltway and position men at each of the main roads heading west.”
The Duke glanced at Eve who shook her head, her eyes zipping over the map of the city. “No,” she said, quietly. “The only reason they would go into a city is to hide. They’re not trying to escape just yet. With that fuel truck they could have just shot straight west in the hope of out running you guys. No, if that had been their plan, they wouldn’t have bothered going through a city. It’s too dangerous and would slow them down. No, they’re hiding, probably to give Captain Grey time to try to fix the wounded.”
“Ok,” said the Duke. “The question is where? Do you know?”
“How could I know that?” she asked, astounded. “There are ten thousand places to hide in a city that size.” Eve suddenly grinned, a wicked grin. “But I do know where they’ll go, eventually.” She pointed at McConnell Air Force base. “I’d bet their lives on it.”
Chapter 30
Neil Martin
The mall was exceedingly dangerous. There were stiffs everywhere, slowly stumbling down the wide halls, crunching glass under their feet and sometimes gazing in through the broken display windows at this store or that.
Neil got a queer feeling when he first saw this. He assumed that it was some sort of deeply ingrained, programmed marketing scheme that had instilled the shopping behavior so deeply that even dead people couldn’t help but shop. It was sort of sickening and he was appropriately queasy right up until he looked into the first store and saw someone lurking in the corner.
The ‘someone’ wasn’t grey and nasty with the shredded remains of their last outfit hanging off their walking corpse. No, this someone was slim and pale, dressed smartly in blue jeans, a white shirt and a burgundy half-coat. In a blink, Neil broke cover and out zipped his Berretta.
“Careful, that’s a manikin,” Sadie whispered. “They bite if you get too close.” The third member of their team, Connie snorted but otherwise remained to all appearances, a proper zombie. Neil wanted to reprimand Sadie for talking while in “character” however she had that twinkle in her eyes which was becoming rarer with each passing day.
“That’s it? That’s all the harassment I get?” he asked, stowing the Beretta back under his garments.
The twinkle grew and even under all of her zombie make-up, her grin was clear and honest. “No harassment, just a question: I couldn’t help wondering if she reminds you of one of the inflatable girlfriends you had back in New Jersey?”
Neil grinned back, but only for a second, then Connie whispered a warning: “Stiffs coming, lock it up.”
The grins forgotten, the trio went back into their routines and completed their mission in a proper dour mood. The mall really was depressing. What once was open and pretty and full of life was now dark and miserable and full of the dead.
Neil stumbled to a wall-mounted map of the mall, took a mental note of the destinations he had in mind and stomped away with the other two following him ten yards back. The sporting goods store was a bust—it had been ransacked and looted of anything valuable. The first electronics store, although it was in one piece, was also a waste of their time. It held little besides computer games.
Halfway down the length of the mall was the second electronic store, a place called: Watt an Idea! Neil rolled his eyes at the sign and slipped in. The place was darker than most and perhaps because of that, the shelves were still full. The only problem was that he couldn’t tell what kind of merchandise it was, nor could he risk a light.
“Looks like this is where I come in handy for once,” Sadie said, pulling one knee to her chest and stretching out her hamstring. She did the other leg as Connie looked on without understanding.
“I’ll take your pack,” Neil said. “Try to meet us at the food court in twenty minutes. If not, we’ll meet at the truck in thirty-five.” Neil wanted to tell her to be careful, but knew the advice would not be heeded and likely would not be needed. He took her pack and squeezed her hand. Then she was back in the large open hall stretching some more in an obviously human manner. She then started skipping away toward an escalator that was frozen in place.
Connie’s eyes went even larger. “Is she crazy?”
Neil was already turning away and digging in his pocket for a flashlight. “No, she’s just fast.” He wanted to watch his daughter tearing up and down the mall, but he couldn’t act the part of proud father, he had work to do.
As Connie stared at the gazelle-like speed and grace of Sadie, Neil flicked on his light and then whistled at the full shelves. “Jackpot!” he said. He filled their packs with two-way radios, batteries of every size, and even a remote controlled car that was a sparkling red version of Jazzy Blue.
“Turn around,” he said to Connie. He unzipped her pack and shoved the car inside and as her back was to him, she didn’t see him rub a sleeve across his eyes. The car reminded him that Jillybean’s death was his fault. He knew that he had acted for the good of everyone in sending her back—she was dangerous to friend and foe alike—and yet he felt it had been cowardly of him to send her to detonate the bomb.
There hadn’t been much fight in him when she had asked to go, there had only been rationalizations.
Neil shrugged off the thought and clawed through the shelves until he found what he was really after: a radio scanner. With it he could be one step ahead of the Duke. With it there was a chance at actually escaping. He actually kissed the box before sticking it in his pack.
“Let’s get out of here,” he whispered, turning off the flashlight.
They shambled back the way they came with even more care than when they had come in. The mall was like a hornet’s nest that had been kicked over. Sadie was not in the food court, but Neil wasn’t worried. She had her Glock and would’ve used it if she had been in trouble.
The two slipped through the broken glass doors in a most unzombie-like manner but went back to lurching and limping until they reached the five-ton. Still no sign of Sadie. Nervous, Connie climbed up onto the roof of the truck and tried to peer through the darkness for the teen. Neil went to work putting batteries in the two-way radio.
When he clicked on the first one and set the frequency he was in for a nice surprise: “Possum this is Meerkat. Come in Possum. Possum this is Meerkat.”
Neil was quick to respond: Meerkat this is Possum I read you Blue. How do you read me?”
“I read you Ford Explorer. I am also in contact with Wombat and he is a five.”
This brought a grin to Neil’s face. So far the three teams who had gone out for electronics had succeeded and as each had answered with their designated code word, they were all safe. “Any from news from Rat?” This was Grey’s codename, something he had lifted an eyebrow at when Neil had assigned it.
“Negative, Possum.”
Neil checked his watch; it was early still and Grey had a lot of ground to cover at McConnell. Neil had wanted the entire twenty-seven person scouting party to hit the base, however Grey had felt a ‘twitch’ over the idea and had insisted that only his three-person team should go.
There was still plenty of time before Neil had to worry. “Gather your teams and meet at point Charlie, out.”
Neil went to put the two-way on the dash and then nearly jumped out of his skin: Sadie had climbed up into the cab of the truck as noiseless as a passing cloud.
“Scared you?” she asked, in mock- innocence. He should have wrung her neck for frightening him like that, instead he grabbed her hand and squeezed. Grey wasn’t the only one with a ‘twitch’ that night. Neil had a bad feeling; everything was going too easily.
They collected Connie from the roof top and then chugged their way back to where they had
dropped off the other two teams. One had come up short in regards to antibiotics but had found an entire pantry of canned goods. They came hustling out of the night draped in grocery bags and grinning from ear to ear. The second team had just one bag, however it rattled with the noise of a thousand pills.
“Excellent!” Neil said with a huge smile on his face. They had found both pain killers and antibiotics. Things were moving along nicely—he didn’t like it; nothing ever went this well.
Neil met the second truck at the meeting spot and the good news kept coming: five of the six teams had struck gold in some fashion or another. The bad news: no third truck and no Grey. With a growing anxiety making his insides shake, Neil decided to head toward the Air Force base, picking up the two teams Grey had dropped off along the way.
One had found radios and a six pack of coke in cans that had faded nearly to pink. The other team had found nothing in the vet’s home but walking corpses. Still, the mood was high as the teams intermingled and talked about their night. They relaxed, thinking the hard part was over.
Neil fretted, unable to relax with three of his people missing. He stared down the road where he expected to see Grey’s five-ton at any moment. Sadie was nervous as well. She hooked the power cord of the radio scanner and started searching. It wasn’t long before she started picking up traffic in the form of garbled and static-distorted words.
“That has to be close,” Neil said. “Tune it.”
It took a delicate touch to find the right frequency and then they heard: “…over here quick! Jack saw something near the airstrip.”
“Airstrip? Which one?”
“…the east side. Just like she said. We’re moving to contain them now. Get your men over here, on the double.”
A long moment went by as both Neil and Sadie stared at the scanner in disbelief. Then Neil was leaping out of the truck, yelling: “Mount up! Mount up! I think they’ve trapped Grey’s team.” The reaction of the group: only a slow look from one to another wasn’t what he’d been expecting. Why weren’t they racing into action?
“You think they trapped him?” Ricky asked. “Shouldn’t we be sure before we go running off?”
Neil’s disbelief was such that his mind took a full second to process this insane request. There were only two ways to deal with this: a calm discussion of the facts and the options open to them or a full-on screaming fit. Neil chose option two. “Either get your ass in that truck or we will fucking leave you right here. Now! Move it everyone. Right. Fucking. Now!”
His wrath was an elemental force and the group scurried before the smallest man in the group. He stood there seething until the last of them was in and the tailgates pulled up. Only then did he dash to the first truck and climb in.
“Nice potty mouth,” Sadie said.
He grunted and then pointed to the map that sat between Connie and Sadie. “Get me a route down to McConnell then to the east side of the airstrip…wait, see if there’s more than one airstrip.”
There were, however, since they were all in a row it was logical for Neil to vector toward the furthest one. He was two hundred yards out, running without lights when gunfire rippled through the night. Next to the window, Connie sucked in a hard breath. Sadie patted her knee as if she were the one who was ten years older. “They’re not shooting at us otherwise you’d see what looks like fire-flies blinking at you.”
Connie grinned, her teeth white in the black of the night. She was the coolest of the ex-whores, other than Deanna, and still her eyes were wide circles of fear.
Neil had to ignore her. His eyes and his mind were on the scene before him. There were three deuce-and-a-halfs on the frontage road bordering the airbase. Grey’s five-ton was nowhere to be seen, but Neil knew that didn’t mean much. He would’ve hidden it in the maze of houses east of them. What mattered were the ghostly shadows moving forward in the grass that grew as high as their thighs. Further on, far across the airstrip another four trucks came rushing up, disgorging forty or fifty men along the west side.
The danger was obvious. What wasn’t so obvious was the evil mind behind the trap. Jillybean was out there somewhere. Even if Neil hadn’t heard the words: right where she said, he knew the Duke wasn’t smart enough to lay a trap for Captain Grey. It was Jillybean, or, more likely, it was the evil thing that had hid in her all this time growing ever more revolting.
That evil thing was Neil’s fault. He had turned to that nasty force time and again, in order to save himself or his friends and by doing so he had allowed it to grow and take roots in the mind of the innocent creature that was Jillybean. Sadie had been right all along. He should never have relied on and burdened Jillybean.
Sadly, now it was time to right that wrong. He would kill the little girl if he could, but that was secondary to saving Grey. He drove the truck further on, looping it around the block so that he had an escape route he hoped wouldn’t be under fire. The second he killed the engine he ran to the back to release the tailgate.
“Hurry! Move!” he hissed, trying to get the renegades to move faster. The Duke’s men had been advancing into the field and it was only a matter of time before Grey, Deanna, and Travis were trapped, forced to either surrender, run, or try to fight their way out.
Grey wouldn’t surrender and he would only run as a last resort. He would fight. It was in his nature. He would kill many of them but he would die in the end and he would be perfectly happy going out in an honorable blaze of gunfire. Grey had never liked the idea of ‘using’ Jillybean and he had been correct.
Time to right that wrong.
“Gather up,” Neil said. No one was nearly as gung-ho as he was, except perhaps Sadie, who was right at his side, checking the load on her Glock. Neil found himself in an unenviable position: he had a battle to plan without the help of Captain Grey or Jillybean. He had no experience or training to guide him and his ‘warriors’ were afraid of their own shadows. He had to plan for fear.
“Here’s what I think we should do,” he said, thinking on the fly. He did a quick count: including himself there were twenty four of them. “We will split into two groups. I’ll take the first group.” here he tapped Sadie on the shoulder and then Connie, who was good under pressure. After that he simple pointed to the next few people in line.
“We will go straight out in a line, staying low, ok? When I say ‘go’ start shooting. We’ll fire for thirty seconds and then we’ll retreat. Crawl if you have to. The second group led by Ricky will take up a position on a slant…you know, a diagonal. Stay hidden until the Duke’s men come after us and then, you know, light them up.”
Ricky nodded slowly as if expecting more. “And then what? You guys run away and leave us in the lurch?”
Neil’s mouth came open as his mind went blank. The only thing rattling around in his mind was a whining: Do I have to think of everything? “Uh, no, of course not. The first group will set up a second line further back. We’ll shoot a few times to draw their fire and then we’ll all scoot out of there. That should give Grey enough time to escape.”
He looked around, basically hoping someone would come up with a better plan or at least point out the glaring flaws in his, which he was sure held plenty. All he received were shrugs and a lot of scared looks.
“Ok, then that’s the plan. Let’s go. First group, on me. When we clear these houses keep low and spread out.” They crept between the houses, staying close together. When they got to the last of the houses facing the airbase, Neil saw that luck was with them. The spotlights playing over the airstrips and the tall grass, illuminated the Duke’s men perfectly.
They were sitting ducks.
“Spread out and pick your targets,” Neil hissed. He then grabbed Sadie, who was about to scurry off. She had to feel how badly his hands were shaking but she said nothing. “I’m going to try to get closer to their trucks. If something happens to me, I want you to lead our guys out of here.”
Though she was just a shadow in black, Neil could feel her emotion comi
ng off of her in waves. “Don’t leave me all alone,” she hissed. They were the last of their original post-apocalypse group—the list of the dead between their first meeting in New Jersey and right at that moment was long and sad. Too sad to think about just then.
“I won’t,” he lied, automatically. “I’m sure I’ll be fine. Now Go.” He nodded off to their right. She gripped his arm with surprising strength and then left him, slinking low and quiet like a stalking panther. The others followed her.
Alone, Neil slunk to the left. He didn’t move with the same grace or silence. He couldn’t afford to. He had to get much closer than the rest and he had to get in position before Grey was found.
Sacrificing speed for stealth, he rushed forward, stopping when he heard a single gunshot from the field. Though he wasn’t an expert, he could have sworn it came from an M4, the same type of weapon that Grey carried. He was just stopping to try to catch a glimpse of what was happening, when there came a quick pop, pop, pop from his right. It was Sadie’s Glock!
Just like that, a barrage of gunfire erupted down the line to his right. His team was shooting. Who knew if they had targets in mind or if they were hitting a thing? It didn’t matter. Neil threw himself down and began squirming forward as fast as he could. He could see the legs of people just on the other side of the Duke’s truck. At first they crouched and then, one after another, they rushed to the nose of the truck, using it as cover from Sadie’s fire.
They were in a perfect position to die. Neil was twenty feet directly in front of them, hidden by the night and the tall grass. He didn’t even need to jump up. The Beretta came to shoulder height and his finger began squeezing off rounds right into them. Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!
Two went down screaming. A third twisted as he tried to run; he fell hard against the hood of the truck and held it with two hands as if trying to wrap his arms around it in a hug. His gun clattered to the ground and, out of mercy, Neil didn’t waste another bullet on him.
The Undead World (Book 6): The Apocalypse Exile (War of The Undead) Page 35
