No Sanctuary Box Set: The No Sanctuary Omnibus - Books 1-6

by Mike Kraus

  Linda had mentioned her military service previously, but Frank had completely forgotten about it until she mentioned the name of the massive military operation that had taken place several years prior. “Oh hell.” Frank’s frustration instantly evaporated and he ran his hands through his hair. “You were part of the Liberation operation? Not just the invasion itself?”

  Linda gave a bemused snort. “Yeah.”

  Frank sat down quietly across from Linda and watched her closely for several seconds before speaking again. “My grandfather was a veteran. So is my dad. My mother always said that asking them about their service, because of what they’d seen and done, wasn’t the best idea, so I won’t ask you. I’m sorry, though. For everything you went through, whatever it was, and whatever you’re dealing with now. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize, but I apologize regardless. I—”

  “Frank. Shut up and listen.”

  Frank closed his mouth and stared at Linda as she took a deep breath and spoke.

  “I told you I was abandoned by someone who I thought was my best friend. That… wasn’t quite the truth.” Linda looked up at the ceiling and bit her lip, closing her eyes as the sights, smells and sounds of the past came rushing back. “My squad was together from boot camp and special training exercises right through when we deployed. We lived together, breathed together and we knew each other inside out. We were part of MARSOC – Marine Corps Special Operations Command. The Marine Raiders. Think SEALs but for the Marines instead of the Navy.”

  “That sounds insane.”

  Linda chuckled and shook her head. “Yeah it was. And I was even more insane for joining up.”

  “Heh.” Frank cracked a slight grin as Linda continued.

  “We went through everything together, us eight. When we deployed, we were given a modified Bradley IFV and sent in to secure the western side of the river.”

  “The government and administrative buildings, right? You had mentioned that before.”

  “Yep. Then the mortars started coming in from across the river, right in the heart of the residential buildings. The Iranian army was taking over people’s homes and setting up smart mortars on the tops to target us. Three other squads went down before we got the okay to move across the river.”

  “Right into the residential area?”

  “Right into the heart. We moved past the apartments and directly into the thick of the neighborhoods. It was a terrible choice for all the reasons you can imagine but we didn’t have a choice. Smart mortars can punch through an IFV’s top armor like a hot knife through butter and there’s no way to hide from them except to get out of range or get right on top of them.”

  Frank shook his head. “So you drove right into the heart of them.”

  Linda nodded slowly. “We fought for sixteen hours straight. Cleared probably three dozen mortar nests. That was before they punched a hole in the side of the Bradley. Then we had to move out on foot. I think we went on for another twelve hours and a dozen more mortar nests before we got pinned down.”

  “Was this when…” Frank trailed off, not wanting to ask the question.

  “Yeah.” Linda steepled her fingers and took a deep breath. “It was a beautiful neighborhood. Most of the war hadn’t reached them yet, so aside from the odd tank track or three it was actually gorgeous. Like most of the country, before the war.” She took another deep breath before continuing. “We had been hearing mortar fire all morning from a nest that was well hidden. Turned out to be in a small park. They had set up sandbags and camouflage in between some swing sets and stuff.

  “We were moving through houses and porches, using the roofs to mask our approach from the air so the mortars couldn’t target us. We took out the nest easily enough but as soon as the last man went down we started taking suppressing fire from all sides.”

  “A trap?” Frank’s eyes widened.

  “You got it. It wasn’t an ordinary trap, though. They were using us as live target practice for some nasty new weapons.”

  “Who, the Iranian army?”

  “Sort of.” Linda’s upper lip curled in disgust. “His name’s Farhad Omar, director of the Iranian army’s special weapons division.”

  “Special weapons?” Frank raised an eyebrow. “What kind of special weapons?”

  “Name something that’s not a conventional weapon and Omar’s probably had his hand in it. His specialties, though, are chemical and biological weapons.”

  “I thought Iran was staunchly against the use of chemical weapons.”

  “That was decades ago.” Linda shook her head. “Omar used some sort of connections or blackmail or voodoo magic to convince the government to sanction the development of new biological and chemical weapons. The speed at which he developed them made it obvious that he had been working on them in secret for some time.”

  “Holy shit. So your squad…”

  “Four of us died in the first thirty seconds from the gas. I don’t know how half of us survived long enough to get our masks on. Maybe Omar engineered it that way. We couldn’t move for the gunfire, though, and we knew that there would be something else coming in soon. I radioed in for backup, but they wouldn’t be able to get birds on our location for another ten minutes at least.” Linda stopped talking for a moment and closed her eyes.

  “You really don’t have to talk about this, you know.” Frank spoke gently.

  “We… uh… we were pinned down. No reinforcements. Then Chad got a rocket off at one of the emplacements to our west and made an opening through one of the houses. We were able to move out of the park and into the cover of the house. That’s when the shit hit the fan. They tossed these weird orange canisters into the house and our masks started beeping warnings about the filters being compromised. We moved out to the back of the house into an alley with decent cover and had to decide whether to move or stay and defend our position until reinforcements could arrive.”

  “What happened?”

  “I had command of the squad but panic was running rampant among everyone else. I made the call to stay and… the other three fled. They didn’t make it beyond the end of the alley before they were cut down. Two minutes later reinforcements showed up in the form of half a dozen IFVs. Those were two minutes of my life I’ll never forget. I used a dumpster as cover from one end of the alley and laid down fire on the other end. They tore me up pretty good before the IFVs rolled in.”

  Linda spoke so matter-of-factly about the situation that Frank began to realize how much of an effect it had really had upon her. “Were they able to help your squad?”

  “No. All of them died. The IFVs secured the area, recovered the bodies and then we got out of there. A few weeks later the doctors got around to looking at tissue samples from the ones who died to the gas and started putting two and two together. It was a while before I got word through the grapevine about Omar being the one responsible.”

  “Linda. I’m sorry for what I said.” Frank shook his head as he put it in his hands.

  “It’s okay. You didn’t know. Just… understand that it’s not about you, all right? Like I said before, you’re one of the good ones. But so were they. And when the pressure was cranked to eleven they snapped and ran.” Linda took a deep breath and stood up, shaking her head and chuckling. “Anyway. Way more details than you wanted or needed. You’re not my therapist and we barely know each other. I’m going to take a leak then we should get going. Could you grab my stuff and throw it in the car?”

  Frank nodded and watched Linda as she limped across the barn and out the door. The sum of all she had shared with him filled his mind with a cacophony of noise so loud and violent that he had trouble processing it all.

  Chapter 8

  While Frank busied himself with cleaning up his and Linda’s effects from the barn and packing everything up, she relieved herself out of sight nearby. When she returned, Frank was loading his and her backpacks into the back seat of the car. Once he finished, he took the keys and popped open the trunk just to check
and see what was inside.

  “Holy mother of pearl…” Frank whistled as he lifted the trunk, marveling at the flat trays of fuel that were stacked in the trunk, nearly completely filling it up. A coiled length of tubing was on top of the packs and as he gently jostled them, he could hear a large quantity of liquid sloshing around.

  “What’ve you got?” Linda strode over to the back of the car, then whistled just as he had. “Damn! Nice find! This should get us all the way to Pigeon Forge and then some, you think?”

  Frank nodded slowly. “Absolutely. Makes you wonder, though, why they would have so much fuel in one of their cars.”

  “Mad Max purists? Maybe this was their ‘tanker’ that they were planning to use for something?”

  “I’m still amazed at how fast these people degenerated into… this.”

  “Opportunists are everywhere.” Linda looked inside the car, then back at Frank. “You ready to go?”

  “Yep, all set.”

  “Good. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Where are we heading to now, anyway?” Frank helped Linda into the front passenger’s seat before slipping behind the wheel.

  “I don’t know about you, but I could use some clothes. Most of my stuff was burned up in the truck.”

  “Any suggestions on where to go?” Frank pulled around the barn and headed back out to the road. Once there he turned towards the south and began cruising down the back country highway.

  “Someplace… out of the way. No shopping malls or big cities, obviously.”

  “What else do we need?”

  “Food would be good. I had more than enough but again… fire. Burned up. Poof. Gone.”

  “At least you were able to hang on to your bag of extra ammunition.”

  “Thank goodness for small favors.” Linda turned around and patted the bag in the backseat. “I wonder how they made out in that wreck.”

  “Who knows. Hopefully we never find out.”

  Linda nodded quietly and they lapsed into silence. As the day wore on, the weather took a turn for the worse as dark clouds rolled in over the horizon. The oscillation between warm and cold weather seemed to be waning as the temperature steadily dropped to the point where Frank had to switch the car’s sorry excuse for air conditioning off and switch on the heater.

  Most of the rest of the day was spent winding through the back roads and trying to guess at where they were based on landmarks, road names and what type of road surface they were on. By the time they realized that they had left the state of New York and were well into Pennsylvania, the darkened sky was becoming rapidly dimmer as night set in.

  “Where do you want to stop for the night?” Frank yawned as he spoke and rubbed his eyes. “It’s nearly seven and your bandage needs changing.”

  A worried look crossed Linda’s face as she studied the road ahead of them. “I don’t know that we should stop just yet. We still need to find some spare clothes and food of some sort.”

  “Well unless you want to go back to the national park we just went through, kill a bear and skin it, I don’t know of anywhere nearby where we can go.”

  Frank eased the car to a stop at a T-junction and looked at the sign standing next to the road. “Ever heard of a town called Brockway?”

  Linda shook her head. “Nope.”

  “Good. Hopefully it’s small enough that nobody will have looted it.”

  Linda laughed as Frank turned to the right, following the sign. “Yet.”

  “What do you—oh. Hey, no, I’m no looter. I’m…” Frank wrinkled his brow. “I’m a strategic acquirer of necessary supplies.”

  “You’re a scrounger.”

  “Call me whatever you like if we make it out of this town with some clothing and food. Besides, we won’t need to steal anything. If anybody’s left there we can trade them some fuel for what we need.”

  “I hope they’re as polite as you’re imagining.”

  Linda and Frank remained silent for the next few minutes as they drove towards town, until Frank finally slowed down and stopped the car. “There it is, up ahead. Looks quaint.”

  Though difficult to see with no stars or moon to offer light, the bright beams from the car illuminated the close side of the town with ease. It appeared to be extremely small, with one main road running down the center and small clusters of homes and businesses branching off to the side. Two large school buildings sat on the far western side of the town, visible only because there were bright lights illuminating their exteriors and because Frank and Linda’s car sat atop a slight rise just outside town, affording them a view of the entire place. No movement was visible inside the town, and the only lights appeared to be those at the middle school and high school buildings.

  “Quaint and creepy.” Linda shook her head and raised an eyebrow. “Do you really want to drive down main street with the lights on?”

  Frank shut off the lights on the car and eased forward down the road, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness before speeding up. “What I’d like to do is turn around and go somewhere else, but my stomach is telling me that we need to stop here.”

  “All hail Frank’s mighty stomach.” Linda deadpanned the joke before giggling. “Sorry. I’ve got a bad habit of cracking jokes at the worst possible times.”

  “Beats the hell out of getting grumpy, I guess.”

  “Well, if you want to go through town and see if we can spot a dollar store or grocer or something I’m game. I wouldn’t mind just leaving a flat pack of fuel on the counter for trade and avoiding all contact if possible.”

  “I’m okay with that.” Frank nodded. “Looks like the clouds are breaking up some, too. Should make things easier.”

  Frank increased the speed of the car and he and Linda both began scanning to the left, right and front of the vehicle as they crept towards town. The engine noise was quiet enough that Frank felt confident it would be masked by the distant booms of thunder, but he and Linda still remained vigilant.

  After passing by the first few rows of houses, the buildings turned from strictly residential into a mix of residential and light commercial. A small flower shop was on the left, followed by a BBQ stand on the right, then a laundromat on the left nestled in between two single-story rows of apartments.

  Linda used her flashlight sparingly, pointing it out the window and turning it on in brief intervals to look down streets or into shops they passed by, but never leaving it on long enough to easily give away their position. The quintessential small town was filled with mostly two-story houses painted white with large porches and sharply angled roofs.

  Most of the lawns were large and covered with a layer of leaves that had fallen from the storms passing through, and none of them looked raked. A few cars were parked along the side of the road, but none of them appeared damaged in any way. Frank was beginning to think that the town had been spared from the destruction wrought by the attacks when Linda pointed at a small muffler shop they were driving past.

  “Looks like the whole place went up in flames when that tractor-trailer exploded. Sheesh.”

  Frank shook his head. “Damn. And here I thought these folks might have been spared from all this mess.”

  “What I’d like to know, though, is where everyone is.” Linda frowned. “The whole town seems deserted except for the lights at the schools.”

  “We’ll know soon, I guess. I think they’re coming up soon.”

  “Mm. Hey! Stop for a second!” Linda pointed out to the left and Frank hit the brakes.

  “What?”

  Linda smiled and motioned with the flashlight for him to look. “Jackpot.”

  Frank turned and saw a large glass front to a small shop with the name “Angel Wings Thrift Store” written on the front and grinned. “Want to stop?”

  “Hell yes. Pull around back and kill the engine. We’ll see if the back doors are unlocked, then check the front, then break in through the back if we have to.”

  Frank shifted in his seat. “Not sur
e I’m entirely comfortable with breaking and entering.”

  “Desperate times, Frank. I’m not the B and E type myself, either, but it’s getting cold as hell around here and we—well, mostly me, but you do too—need clothing.”

  “Fine.” Frank sighed and pulled around to the back of the shop. He backed into an empty space near the back of the building that would afford them a fast escape if that became necessary, then cut off the engine. He got out of the car first, shivering involuntarily as a gust of cold wind caught him by surprise, then went over to Linda’s side of the car. She was trying to get out on her own and he extended a hand, which she begrudgingly took.

  “Thanks. I hate relying on people for basic stuff like this.”

  “You’ll be fine soon enough. Speaking of that, don’t you need a fresh bandage soon?”

  “I’d rather wait till we’re out of town.”

  Frank shrugged. “Fair enough.” He headed for the back door to the thrift store and pulled on the handle, finding it locked as he had expected. He glanced at Linda who was still limping towards the door. “Locked up tight. Hang here with the car while I go around front and check to see if it’s open, okay?”

  Linda reached into her waistband to check that her pistol was still there and nodded. “Sounds good.”

  Frank walked slowly around the building, keeping the noise from his footsteps to a bare minimum. He kept his rifle low, the barrel pointed at the ground and his finger away from the trigger, not wanting to appear like he was being aggressive just in case there was anyone friendly around. He was halfway around the side of the building when he realized that his flashlight was in the car, but he pressed onward, using the light from the moon to guide his path.

  When Frank arrived at the front, he looked in through the main window before turning his attention to the door. He stared at a sign hanging in the door for a long moment before nearly laughing out loud. He pushed on the door and it squeaked open, a small bell hidden above tinkling as he went inside. Once in, he grabbed the sign off of the door and crept through the shop floor and into the back, where he quickly located the back door thanks to the faint light streaming in through a pair of skylights.