He turned and left without waiting for a reply. The ladies grinned at each other. Old Cobb treated everyone like he was still the First Sergeant. In reality, they supposed he was. Always would be.
Cobb had a lot on his plate. He’d just left from Wire Bender's workshop, Gunny and Griz had failed to take out Casey and his band of cannibals. They hadn’t had a backup plan, and when the house turned out to have bulletproof windows, all they could do was run. Damn hotheads. They should have known better. Now they had who knew how many cars and trucks chasing them to ground. The Lakota crew were heavily armed, but General Carson had seen evidence from the satellites that a lot of national guard armories had been broken into. So far, no one had been brave enough to attack regular military posts, they were completely overrun with the undead. The soldiers had been hit the hardest with the tainted meats, tall fences were surrounding every base, and thousands of the undead milled around inside. The national guard armories were hit and miss, some had heavy weapons, some didn’t. Either way, it was safe to assume the Raiders had machine guns, maybe grenades and rocket launchers.
He’d been getting a few disturbing reports from Jessie, too. The kid was doing a great job, he’d come across quite a few settlements they hadn’t known about. He was setting up communications, trade routes, and letting them know how the dams and major river crossings were looking. Hell of a kid, doing something no one else had volunteered to do, but the farther north he explored, the more stories he heard of some new tribe taking over. Apparently, they weren’t bloodthirsty killers like Casey’s men, but they were taking everything that wasn’t nailed down. They had a formidable army, they were well armed, and they conscripted everyone they came across. Join or die. It was all tied to some weird religion, but that was all he knew. All he could do was wait for Jessie’s next report and the kid was bad about checking in. He’d turn his radio off and they wouldn’t know if he was alive or dead for days on end. No amount of bitching at him changed anything, either. Damn kid was too much like his old man.
39
General Carson
Carson was getting low on a few things. Clothes, mostly. The men there only had what they were wearing when they reported for duty, and odds and ends they found in the cleared areas. They had plenty of zombies to strip, but their uniforms were disgusting no matter how many times they were washed.
Cheyenne Mountain had a long tunnel running through it, with the fifteen buildings in the center. They were three stories tall, all connected by breezeways, and had been completely overrun with the undead. Only a small contingent locked away in the secure communications center had survived. Over the past six months, with only a handful of men, they’d managed to clear one of the buildings and established secure pathways to the generators, turbines, and the water supply. There were enough emergency rations to feed fifteen hundred people for a week on hand. When only twelve men were eating, it would last for years, without skipping a meal.
Carson was basically helpless in the mountain. He couldn’t launch weapons, he couldn’t send a missile into Casey’s headquarters, and he had no control over where the satellites flew. He couldn’t control them, all he could do was download their data and try to analyze it.
He no longer had contact with the Russians, it had thawed out enough for them to leave the mountain and they were going to join with a large group that had fortified an unused military outpost.
The Germans had decided to rescue everyone they could and live on the ships. The roving hordes were massive, no wall could hold them out. They numbered in the millions and shambled around without purpose, there were no more living things to eat. The few thousand survivors had cleared a mostly empty cruise liner that had been in port and was now anchored at sea. They planned to wait it out in their floating city, the undead were deteriorating and in a few years, they could start taking back their outlying islands. They had enough food to last, had turned decks into vegetable gardens, and had used the helicopters to bring in livestock. Chickens, rabbits, and sheep roamed the lido deck.
The Israelis had taken in all of the American soldiers that could make it to their walls, and most of them had boarded the Navy ships to get back home. Gunny had given them autonomy to do what they wanted, basically told the ranking Admiral a hundred billion dollars’ worth of ships were now his personal property. There was no government to maintain them, he could do with them what he willed. If they could make it back to the States, he’d send a convoy down to one of the deep ports in Texas to pick them up. The Admiral declined, he had nearly six thousand men and women, more than enough to start a new city. He had rescued all that he could from the dead ships, consolidated his people, and had sailed for the Navy islands off the coast of California. San Clemente was officially uninhabited, but there was usually a skeleton crew there at any given time. It was a training location for the Navy Seals and had its own military airport. There may be survivors. If not, his men could clean out the undead. Carson, President Meadows, and the Admiral all agreed it was best to start a new community, not have everyone bunched up in and around Lakota. It was crucial for their survival, anything could happen in an eye-blink to wipe either one of them out entirely.
Most of the naval fleet had been lost, overrun by the undead, and were drifting aimlessly, ghost ships waiting to run aground. Some of the boats were nuclear powered and those that were lost to the zombies were sunk to the bottom of the sea. The submarines hadn’t been affected by the tainted meats. They would rise to the surface, raise the flag high on their bridge, hold a brief decommissioning ceremony, and launch torpedoes. The atomic ships couldn’t be allowed to wash ashore somewhere.
General Carson sat in his windowless office and scrolled through his wife’s Instagram feed for what was probably the thousandth time. Pictures of happier times, smiling faces, children and grandchildren. He and his few surviving men had been locked down since September, eight long months. None of them had any delusions of their families surviving outside the mountain, of a happy reunion when they finally escaped. He’d done the best he could, but their time here was coming to an end. If he could get high speed data transfer set up with the group in Oregon, they wouldn’t have to stay under the mountain, living like moles. He’d been in communications with an outpost the Meadows kid had discovered, one that had completely slipped by him and his men. The Tower was state of the art, far more technologically advanced than Lakota, and he was working with them to try to access all the data on the NSA computers. A lot of it was garbage, phone conversations, text messages, porno sites, and the like, but a lot of it was important and valuable. Critical for the rebuilding. It needed to be preserved and the information made available.
With the men from Lakota using trains to clear out the hordes of undead, with the technical expertise of the group in the Tower, they had a plan to reroute fiber optic cables so the information could be accessed. It would help immensely to ensure knowledge wasn’t lost, with the training of a new generation. If only the rest of the survivors all felt the same. Some, like Casey, wanted to watch the world burn. Some, like that weird cult up in Canada, wanted to rule over it with superstition and religion. Lakota was his muscle; the Tower was his brain. He needed them both to rebuild this country, and the last he’d heard, Meadows was off on some foolish mission down in Mexico.
40
Gunny
Gunny glanced at his main fuel tank gauge again. Down below a quarter and the trucks on their trail weren’t backing off. They’d learned to keep their distance a few hours ago when he’d made a hasty stop, pulled out a LAW, and blew up the lead elements. They backed off, but they still kept coming. He caught glimpses of them every once in a while, saw the massive dust cloud they were kicking up. They were pacing them, letting them run until they had to stop for fuel, or one of them ran out. He’d seen tanker trucks back in San Felipe and he’d bet his bottom dollar that the chasers were falling back to refuel whenever they got low. There was no way to outrun them, no way to outlast them, and no way to los
e them unless they split up, let one car lead them away so the others might survive. The roads were covered in sand, sometimes it was hard to even see where they were, so they had an easy to follow billow of dust behind them. They’d run out of fuel long before they were out of the desert.
“Alright, Plan B,” Gunny said over the radio.
“Yeah, cuz this plan A pretty much sucks,” Scratch came back, his Buick lower on fuel than anyone else’s.
“Remember that ranch house where I had that firefight on our way down?” he asked.
“The one where you thought you were the Duke boys in a Honda?” Hollywood asked.
“That’d be the one,” Gunny answered. It was going to be a while before they stopped ragging him about it. “It has good cover and concealment, you can hide the cars in the garage and the barn. Let’s pick up the pace a little and when we get there, you guys peel off and get yourselves hidden. I’ll lead them away.”
“Then what?” Griz asked.
“Then you’ve got about a half hour to get an ambush set up,” Gunny said. “You know that dry river bed? I’ll go up eight or ten miles and drop down in it, cut back to you. Have your claymores and LAWs ready to go.”
“It might work,” Griz allowed. The desert was too rocky, too strewn with crevices and small boulders, to try to negotiate at speed but the river bottom was smooth, sandy and dry. It wound back and forth under the road a few times before dumping out into the Gulf and running in it would make a huge cloud they couldn’t miss. They roughed out the basics, got their assignments, and by the time they passed the smashed-up Toyota Gunny had run down, they had a plan. Hollywood, Griz, and Scratch braked hard and turned onto the long drive, going slow to keep the dust down. Gunny put two of his wheels in the sand at the berm, stirring up a bigger dust trail. He kept it at eighty miles an hour and flew over the first bridge. Bridget told him to go to the third, which it would put him about twelve miles out, plenty of time for them to get set up and all of Casey’s men to get past them. He glanced at his gas gauge again, it was down to an eighth. He flipped the switch for the pump and started transferring fuel from his reserve tank in the trunk. That would give another twenty gallons, but he was only getting six miles to the gallon, running at these speeds. It would be enough. He watched the road, drifting over to the side occasionally to stir up more dust and watched his fuel gauge climb.
“We’ve got the cars stashed,” Bridget said over the CB. “The convoy is still flying by, and the boys are hiding, waiting to get across the road. So far, so good.”
He saw the concrete bridge coming up fast and hit the brakes, looking for a way down. It wasn’t a deep cut, but he couldn’t just jump down in it at speed. He couldn’t risk breaking something. It turns out he didn’t have to worry, years of off-roaders had the same idea, to use the dry river bed to play in. He stopped at the top of the path leading down and waited for a few moments. He had to be sure they took the bait and followed him. The matt black fifty-five purred, her oil pressure holding steady at thirty pounds, the temp gauge hovering at two hundred. He could hear the electric fans on the radiator keeping things cool, over the growl of the headers and the whine of the blower. He waited until he saw their dust, less than a mile off, before he dropped it in gear and slid into the river bottom. He took off fast, kicking dirt in the air, and hit the smoke generator switch for a few seconds. Raw diesel was dumped on the exhaust pipes in a fine mist, causing a thick white cloud to pour out from under the car. They were close enough, they would see it and think he was overheating and was desperately trying to hide in the desert. They would think they had him. With no dust trail ahead on the road, they would assume all the cars were trying to get away in the river bed.
Gunny got back up to speed quickly, the sands washed smooth with the receding waters. Tumbleweeds were littering the path, blown over the edge with the winds, and trapped. He ran them down, sending bits of dried weeds flying. He tapped the smoke generator occasionally, keeping up the illusion of a crippled car with its cloud of white smoke mixing with the clouds of dust.
Most of the time he couldn’t see over the edge, he didn’t know how close he was getting to the ranch house. When he rounded a bend, he could see the cloud from Casey’s men was getting closer. They were pushing hard, running him to ground. Ready to pounce and make the kill. You’ve got another thing coming, Gunny thought, and feathered the gas through a curve, drifting through a pile of tumbleweeds.
“I’ve got a visual,” Griz said. “Keep ‘em coming, we’ve got a kill box set up.”
“I know those tankers aren’t chasing me down the river bed,” Gunny said. “Did you get a count on how many fighter trucks in the convoy? We going to be able to take them all out?”
“No way,” Griz came back, binoculars to his eyes, trying to determine how many were actually giving chase, and how many were waiting on the road. “They’re battalion strength, we barely had time to get across the road to set the claymores. The convoy was endless.”
“I lost count around one hundred,” Hollywood said. “That was just their armored cars and trucks. There was a lot of support vehicles following them, including the tankers and mobile repair trucks.”
Gunny felt his stomach sink. Casey had been recruiting all winter, must have cleared the whole town, and brought everyone with him. A battalion was maybe five or six hundred people. All of them fighters. The reports from Jessie said he’d had run-ins with roving bands way up north, too. Casey might have another five hundred or thousand men, spread out all around the country.
“Find any fuel at the ranch?” Gunny asked. “We can’t keep heading north, we’re going to have to backtrack.”
“No,” Griz said. “Nothing. But Bridget has a route mapped out for us. If we can break off engagement here, if we can get away clean, we’ll be able to make it up to Delta. They’ll have fuel, it’s a decent sized town.”
“Let’s just hope we get lucky and Casey is in the kill box,” Gunny said, powering through another wall of tumbleweeds.
“Hopefully,” Griz agreed. “He was in Sammy’s Mustang, about six or eight cars back from the lead truck. He's playing it safe, not leading the charge.”
“Why am I not surprised,” Gunny said. “He’s a coward. Wish we knew what coms they were using, it would give us an edge.”
“You’re getting close,” Scratch interrupted. “Once you pass the Honda, you’re out of the kill zone. There’s a path up to the road on the left. Hit it and get it, I’ll be right behind you.”
It wasn’t much of a plan, Gunny had hoped to neutralize the Raiders, have a little firefight mop up if there were only thirty or forty of them. They had the rocket launchers and the element of surprise on their side, but against hundreds, they didn’t stand a chance. They’d slow the Raiders down, that was all. Hopefully long enough for them to make a clean getaway. The road heading back the way they came was mostly cleared of dirt and sand after the hundreds of cars flying down it. Maybe they could disappear, the afternoon sun would be in their favor, blinding anyone looking west for a dust trail.
Gunny spotted the wrecked Honda, upside down in the ravine, and pulled his foot off the gas. The path up was just past it, right before the low bridge. Hollywood’s Cadillac and Scratch’s Buick were on the road, machine guns aimed, waiting for him to clear. He shot up the incline, the Raiders only a few hundred yards behind him, when Stabby and Bridget lit them up. Bullets shot through radiators and windshields and punched holes in engine blocks. The lead truck skidded to a stop spewing oil and smoke, the second one plowing into his rear, sending men in the beds flying through the air. They landed in crumpled heaps. Shoulda wore your seatbelts, Bridget thought and lined up the next truck, letting loose with a burst from the machine gun. The rest of the vehicles hit their brakes, slid to a halt and men started jumping out, taking cover and attacking, firing toward the cars on the bridge as they ran. Scratch already had the safety flipped up on the remote controller and pressed the button. The riverbed erupted in a fre
nzy of noise and smoke, a dozen claymores going off simultaneously and killing everything in their path. The sound was deafening, and the bridge shook. Spewing fuel hit hot exhausts and shorted out electrical systems and one after another, fireballs and more explosions sent shrapnel and rocks flying. The afternoon was blindingly bright for a few moments, before being replaced with a massive cloud of smoke, dust, and debris.
Hollywood and Scratch hit the gas, following Gunny and Griz down the road, trying to get away and get hidden. They’d put a hurting on Casey, but it was only a small one. He’d lost five, maybe six, trucks and maybe twenty men. He had hundreds more. It would take them a while to move the crumpled wrecks out of the way and get back on the road, but it would only slow him down, not even come close to stopping him.
“Find us the fastest route to that gas station, Bridget,” Gunny said and checked his gauges as they cut through the sandy wastelands.
They were outnumbered, outgunned, out of options, and a long, long way from home.
He held the wheel with his knees, kept it at a steady ninety, and started rolling himself a smoke.
41
Casey
Casey was at the rear of the convoy, beside the tanker, getting refueled. He hadn’t followed them down into the river bed. He knew better. He didn’t know what those bastards had up their sleeves, but he knew enough not to blunder into a trap. He watched the black cloud curl up in the air, small from this distance, but visible. Lucinda had the binoculars and handed them to him. They didn’t do much, only brought the roiling cloud in a little closer, let him see the flames licking up. Let him see his failure a little clearer.
Zombie Road: The Second Omnibus | Books 4-6 | Jessie+Scarlet Page 28
