V 11 - The Texas Run

by George W Proctor (UC) (epub)

  “Mark?” Sheryl Lee questioned without turning. “Is that you?”

  “Huh? Sher—” the unseen man stammered. “Sheryl Lee?”

  The redhead turned. “Does it look like anyone else?”

  “I thought that . . The pressure of the barrel on Rick’s neck lessened.

  “I know what you thought, but you were wrong. Put that pistol down; these are friends of mine. We need to see my mother now,” she said before the man could complete his sentence.

  The pistol barrel eased from Rick’s neck. The Californian turned around. A tall bear of a man—one man, not four—stood behind him. The hulking giant stammered again and cleared his throat before stepping from behind a bushy shrub that had concealed his bulk in the night.

  “Sheryl Lee, Brad’s in charge now.” Mark’s voice was barely a whisper.

  “Brad? Why?” the redhead asked.

  “It’s your mother, Sheryl Lee. She’s . . . she’s dead,” Mark managed to say.

  “Dead? How?”

  Even in the dark Rick saw Sheryl Lee stiffen under the impact of the stranger’s words. He heard her breathing

  quicken and the tightness in her voice. He wanted to reach out and touch her, but Charlie stood in the way.

  “A couple of nights ago she led a raid on the processing center in the Cotton Bowl,” Mark explained. “She was hit by three of the lizards’ energy bolts.” “Then we need to see Brad,” Sheryl Lee said, her voice quavering as though she was struggling to hold back tears and sorrow.

  Mark stepped from the shadows, lifted an arm high, and waved. A guard stepped from behind a hedgerow beside the electronics warehouse and returned the signal.

  “It’s clear,” the bearlike Mark said. “Jace will take you to Brad.”

  As Sheryl Lee turned, Rick moved to her side and reached out to take her hand. “Sheryl Lee, I . .

  She pulled from him; her head jerked around to reveal tear-misted eyes. “Not now. I haven’t time to mourn her now.” She looked away and continued across the street.

  “Let her be, son,” Charlie whispered while the guard Jace led them inside the warehouse. “She’ll handle it in her own way and time. It’s a matter of priorities.” Rick sucked in a breath and nodded. The task at hand was for the living. Tears for the dead, even one so loved, must be set aside until there was time for grief.

  The Brad Sheryl Lee had asked to see was a lean, balding man in his late thirties who sat behind a littered desk in a small office lit by three candles. He offered his sympathy for the young woman’s loss, expressed his own sorrow, then got down to business. “Where’s Jo Bob? Who are these two? And most importantly, where in the hell are the medical supplies you were to bring in?” Slowly, her voice threatening to break with each word, Sheryl Lee answered his questions one after another, ending with a question of her own: “What can you do to clear a way for us into the city?”

  The Dallas resistance leader leaned back in his chair and ran a hand through his thinning hair. “The first thing

  is you don’t bring the pickups into Fort Worth. The Visitors have been unusually active for the past twenty-four hours. It’s plain to see why. They’re expecting you to make a run in from the west. What you’ll do is come in to Dallas from the south.”

  “Dallas?” Charlie arched an eyebrow.

  “Dallas.” Brad tugged open a desk drawer and pulled out a road map, which he spread over the papers on his desk. His finger found a dot on the map west of Fort Worth and traced downward. “You said the tracks are waiting in Mineral Wells. Then what you’ll have to do is drop south to Stephenville along U.S. 281. From there swing east on U.S. 67 to Midlothian, then Highway 287 will take you to Interstate 35E.”

  Rick followed the man’s finger while it moved over the map. What might have been an hour’s drive into Fort Worth grew to at least five hours along an indirect route that was all open road.

  He paused and looked up at the trio. “Once on the interstate you turn north and it’s a straight shot into Dallas.”

  “And right up to the Visitor roadblock at the city limits—that is, if we get that far,” Sheryl Lee said.

  “I can’t help you with gettin’ past the roadblock. You’re on your own there. Although with the skyfighter you have, you’ll be carryin’ a damn sight more firepower than we have. ” Brad paused and rubbed at his head again before jabbing a finger at the map. “Here’s a shoppin’ center just off the interstate a mile past the roadblock. I can have enough cars and drivers waiting there at, let’s say two in the morning, to unload the medical supplies from the trucks.”

  He looked up at Charlie. “That way your friends will have a shot at startin’ back to their homes before the sun comes up. No need gettin’ them stuck in the city. Not when the whole purpose of our operation here is to evacuate Dallas.”

  “They’ll appreciate that, friend,” Charlie answered. Brad continued, explaining that once the medical supplies were loaded into the cars the drivers would take their cargo to various locations in Dallas and Fort Worth to be hidden and distributed.

  “What about diversions to draw the Visitors’ attention away from the roads?” Sheryl Lee pressed. “All this plannin’ is no good unless we can get to Dallas with the trucks.”

  “I was cornin’ to that,” Brad replied. “We have a little surprise planned for the snakes tonight. We’re goin’ to hit the processin’ center up at the old speedway. That should help divert their attention a mite. Other than that, there’s not much else we can do.”

  “Yes, there is.” Tnis from Charlie. “That is, if you’ve got a pilot among your men. There’s another skyfighter just sittin’ and goin’ to waste back on the Brazos. If we could get it in the air, it could be put to good use.” Brad smiled. “Mr. Scoggin, I like the way you think. Jace, the man who brought you in, used to be stationed at Carswell over in Fort Worth. He flew B-52s. Will he do?”

  Charlie nodded. “He’ll need a tailgunner with him.” “Mark’s a hell of a shot,” Brad replied. “Anything else?”

  “Yes,” Rick finally said. “I thought this area and the land to the west was beyond the Visitors’ safe zone. Yet there’re snakes crawling all over the place. What’s going on? Have they developed an immunity to the red dust?” Brad shook his head. “It had me fooled for a while too. This is Texas, friend. The summer’s are long, hot, and dry. This summer and fall we’ve had a double dose of all three. The bacteria hasn’t had the cold spell it needs to regenerate. ’Til a blue norther blows in from the Arctic, just about all of Texas is a safe zone for the snakes.”

  “This is no time to be discussin’ the weather.” Sheryl Lee glanced at Rick. “We need to move if we intend to make our two o’clock appointment.”

  Brad stood and let his gaze drift over the faces of the three standing before his desk. “I don’t need to tell you how much those supplies are needed here. And I don’t need to tell you to be careful. All I can do is offer a wish for the best of luck.”

  He took and shook each of their hands before they turned and left the cramped, candle-lit office. A few minutes later four men and one woman wove their way through the night back to the waiting station wagon.

  Chapter 18

  Mark pushed from the cedar break, arms piled high with Visitor uniforms and helmets. Sheryl Lee and Rick watched while the man walked to where they stood and carefully deposited the burden at their feet.

  “Four of ’em are usable,” the bear of a man grunted. “The others were pretty messy. Sheryl Lee, I wish your friends had been carryin’ something other than shotguns. Snake uniforms are damned hard to come by. I hate to see four blown to hell like that.”

  Rick swallowed any reply to the Dallasite’s grisly comments. Stripping dead Visitors wasn’t his idea of how to spend the evening. But running a convoy of drugladen pickup trucks halfway across Texas straight into a Visitor roadblock wasn’t either.

  Nor did the Californian question what purpose Mark had for the alien uniforms. As the man said, Visitor unif
orms were hard to come by, and in a city overrun by lizards they would be put to good use.

  “Wish Brad and the others had these,” Mark continued with a sad shake of his head. “Might make gettin’ close to the processin’ center a bit easier tonight,” “And I wish Charlie and Jace would get back,” Sheryl Lee answered impatiently. “How long have they been gone?”

  Rick checked his wristwatch. “Twenty minutes. Not long, to teach a man the controls of an unfamiliar aircraft.”

  “It’s twenty minutes we could have been on the road,” the redhead snapped. “It’s a long way to Dallas, and we have a two o’clock appointment to keep.”

  Rick ignored the razor sharpness of her tongue. She had more than ample reason to be on edge.

  “Here they come.” Mark pointed to a pale white form that slid beneath a waning moon toward the small clearing.

  Rick watched the alien vessel as it shot over the tops of the stunted oaks and cedars. It wobbled from side to side, but was far less erratic than the first flight he had taken with Charlie a few hours ago. The ship slowed, stopped in midair above the sandy clearing, then gently sank to the ground beside the second ship squatted on the ground. The craft’s side door opened, its halves swinging up and down.

  “So much for formal instruction,” Charlie said when he stepped from the skyfighter. “Jace has just moved into the earn-while-you-leam phase of his flyin’ career. Anything else about this baby, he’ll have to pick up while in the air.”

  Jace exited the craft just behind the older man. “She’s enough like our own aircraft. I can handle her.” “Now if you two are through pattin’ yourselves on the back, can we get the hell out of here?” Sheryl Lee nudged Rick aside and strode toward the nearest skyfighter. “We have six trucks to get into Dallas.” Charlie’s head swiveled toward Rick. The older man arched a questioning eyebrow. The Californian shook his head, indicating that the pilot should let the young woman’s irritation pass. Charlie pursed his lips and nodded.

  “You heard the liT lady, boys,” Charlie said. “Let’s get this show on the road!”

  Gathering uniforms and helmets from the ground, Mark hastened into a ship with Jace, while Rick and Charlie entered the second craft. They found Sheryl Lee

  waiting in the co-pilot’s seat, staring out the ship’s window. Without a word the two men took their seats fore and aft. Seconds later, Charlie lifted into the air and banked the skyfighter toward Mineral Wells.

  Silence hung heavy in the ship’s cramped interior. Like a statue, Sheryl Lee rigidly sat in her seat, her gaze never leaving the night outside. On the flight from Dallas, both men had tried to talk with her, tried to console her, and received icy glares in return. Now they allowed her to cope with her grief in her own way, although Rick worried that she wasn’t handling it at all but only letting it gnaw at her. In spite of the task at hand, her reaction wasn’t normal.

  It was her mother who was killed! Rick sensed the pressure that built in his companion as he studied her taut profile in the ship’s dim interior lights. There should be tears. She has to release some of what she’s holding back before she explodes.

  When that explosion might occur tripled his worries. Tonight of all nights Sheryl Lee needed to be in total control of her senses and emotions. One slipup, no matter how small, could endanger the caravan and the precious cargo it carried—not to mention the lives of the men and women who had volunteered for the hazardous journey.

  The skyfighter’s engines whined down. Rick glanced out the craft’s window to see Jace nearly overshoot them before he managed to slow the ship he piloted. Together the alien vehicles floated down to the junkyard.

  Only when Charlie opened the door to his ship and called out did the others reveal their hiding places. One by one six motors rumbled to life among the shells of wrecked cars and trucks. The pickups trundled before the skyfighters, their doors opening and the men and women inside stepping out.

  “Folks, we’ve had a minor change in our plans for tonight,” Charlie began, and quickly outlined the planned route for the run.

  Here and there Rick heard a few mumbles, but no one openly questioned the route. When Charlie finished, the survivors of the cross-Texas trek turned back to their trucks.

  “I’m goin’ with them.” Sheryl Lee appeared beside Rick at the exit of the skyfighter.

  Reaching out, the Californian grasped her shoulder. “You can’t. You’re supposed to remain with us.” “Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do, Surfer Boy.” She pivoted and stood facing him. “Those supplies out there are mine, not yours. I’ve brought them this far, and I intend to ride with them all the way into Dallas. Hell, you wouldn’t even be here if Joe Bob hadn’t saved your backside in Los Angeles.”

  Rick stared at her, uncertain what to say. The sudden savage verbal attack took him completely off guard. “But I thought it was understood you were to ride with Charlie and me?”

  “You misunderstood. I’m staying with those supplies. And that is all there is to it. Understand that?” She turned again to leave the ship.

  Rick reached for her again; Charlie’s arm interceded. “Let her go, son,” the older man said. “She’ll be just as safe with the trucks as she would be in here with us. Maybe safer.”

  Rick watched the redhead climb into the convoy’s lead pickup and slam the door after her. He glanced at Charlie and sucked at his teeth in disgust. “I don’t like it.” “At the moment I don’t think she gives a damn what either of us likes or doesn’t like.” He tilted his head to the tailgunner’s seat. “Come on, we’ve got a long night ahead of us, and it ain’t gettin’ any shorter with us standin’ here.”

  * * *

  Nothing. Garth listened to the reports of the recalled ships. The search had been a waste! For a whole day he had disrupted normal processing traffic from both Fort Worth and Abilene and had nothing to show for it. The bitch’s offspring is as cunning as her mother!

  The Houston Mother Ship commander rubbed at the comers of his eyes in an attempt to relieve the irritation of his human-imitating lenses. It didn’t help. He needed to remove them and give his eyes an opportunity to breathe.

  “All the Abilene ships have returned to base,” Major Lawrence said from Garth’s right. “As soon as their crews are relieved, they will resume transporting captured humans to the Abilene Processing Center.”

  Garth nodded, suppressing the urge to order the ships to resume the search. He couldn’t afford to divert men and equipment from their assigned duties any longer. The processing centers would have to work double shifts around the clock for the next week to make up for today’s delay.

  He grimaced. Only last night he had allowed himself a moment of pride in the dramatic increase in his command’s production rate. Tonight he faced the realization that with the destruction of the two centers in Dallas and Fort Worth as well as the time spent in his search, he would be hard pressed to meet this month’s quota.

  My search, he tried to reprimand himself for the wasteful expenditure of his troops’ energy. He couldn’t. The human female meant too much to him; she would bear him a star child. There was more than simple revenge for a lost hand at the root of his actions. With a star child at his command, Earth would be his—for the greater glory of the Leader, of course.

  Where could she have hidden? The question that had haunted him all day refused to be pushed from his mind. A woman and an airplane load of medical supplies just didn’t vanish into thin air. Of that he was certain.

  And they hadn’t. Reports from searchers early that morning told of deep automobile-tire tracks cut through wheat fields seventy-five miles east of where the wrecked transport plane had been brought down. The woman had found someone to aid her in transporting the medical supplies into the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Of that he was almost certain. There was no other logical conclusion that fit the facts.

  And she’s on her way here to Fort Worth. She has to be, he told himself with less conviction than he had felt that morning. There is now
here else for her to go.

  Yet, where was she now? Had she and her cohorts continued on a westward path, they would have reached Fort Worth by now. And there was no way into the city except through his roadblocks.

  “Commander,” Major Lawrence’s voice wedged into his thoughts, “two of our Fort Worth sky fighters haven’t reported in.”

  “What?” Garth’s eyes narrowed when he turned to his fellow officer.

  “Two skyfighters assigned to search the Mineral Wells sector have not reported in,” Lawrence said. He paused to clear his throat. “The last communique from them was four hours ago.”

  “Four hours?” Garth stiffened. “Four hours have passed without hearing from two ships, and you’ve just received word of this? It was my assumption that you were in command here, Major.”

  “Commander, my crews have attempted to coordinate an aerial search of three hundred ships today. That two skyfighters somehow—”

  “Major!” A sergeant seated at the communications console swiveled around in his chair. “I think you’d better listen to this! We’ve got a resistance assault on our blockade across Interstate 20.”

  “Put it on the loudspeaker,” Major Lawrence ordered. The sergeant flicked a switch. A panicked voice

  crackled from a speaker hung near the ceiling of the room.

  . . twenty . . . maybe thirty in all. Coming at us from both sides. We can hold for another five or ten minutes. Then we have to have reinforcements. . . .” Garth’s gaze darted to a map of Fort Worth pinned on a wall beside him. Interstate 20 was the major artery into the city from the west. This was it! The resistance was opening a way to bring the medical supplies into the city!

  “Major, I want two hundred shock troopers sent to the roadblock immediately!” Garth’s pulse raced. “The woman we’ve been looking for is about to play right into my hands!”

  Chapter 19

  Rick shifted his weight in the seat, but the movement did nothing to relieve the nagging ache in his lower back. The long hours of inactivity were slowly taking their toll.