by Dave Lund
Groom Lake, Nevada
After the meeting and the stark news of Lance’s death, Ben Wright walked back to the radio hut, the airman accompanying him. They had a big task ahead of them; they needed to prioritize the list of known survivors for their needs, what sort of supplies they could be provided or if they needed to be evacuated. Then, they had to plot those groups in terms of the C-130’s effective fuel range. There would be no inflight refueling now, if ever again, and the thought of landing on an unknown airfield in an attempt to fuel the aircraft just did not seem like a good idea.
Wright was also tasked with finding where the SUV with the RV had gone in Texas, which could be miles and miles away from the previous spot by now and in just about any direction. The tasks themselves were not unusual in Wright’s professional experience with the Air Force. What was unusual was the complete lack of manpower he had to accomplish it.
Wright looked at the map on the wall, colored pins spread out across Middle America. “Any of you guys remember the operating range of a C-130?”
“I think it’s about two thousand miles lightly loaded, sir.”
“OK, so roughly nine hundred to a thousand miles out so it can make it back, with light winds at altitude.”
Wright took his compass, spread the legs to the scale on the map for a gap of one hundred miles and ticked off ten spots from Groom Lake and made a mark on the map. With a piece of string he drew a circle from Groom Lake and that spot across the map. Nearly half of the pins lay outside of the circle and outside of how far they could fly.
“You don’t happen to know how much fuel it carries, do you?”
“Yes, sir. Almost eight thousand gallons.”
Wright turned around. “OK, Mr. Dean, how and why do you know that?”
“Memorized all that stuff when I was a kid. Always wanted to go into the Air Force. Made models of all sorts of aircraft and practically wore my VHS of Iron Eagle out from watching it so many times.”
Wright smiled. The airman was nearly ten years his junior, but as a child of the 1980s, Wright knew what it was like to be pulled to the Air Force from watching Iron Eagle. The first one, at least.
“How long would it take to put that much fuel in the tanks?”
“You got me on that one, sir.”
Wright looked at the map again. They would have to figure out which fields they could fly to and refuel. They needed to know how long it would take to fuel the plane and how heavy the concentration of undead was in the area. The fuel pumps were probably electrically operated and non-functional, so they would have to figure out a way to power them. The task seemed insurmountable, but they had to do it. First, though, there were survivors in the circle who needed help.
Wright pushed the speaker button on the phone next to him and punched in a four-digit extension.
“Cliff, go ahead.”
“Cliff, Wright. How soon do you want to send a mission?”
“As soon as we can. Get Arcuni topside. Tell him to take the PJs with him for security and get a fuel truck to the Herc. In fact, new rule: after landing from a mission, refuel the plane in case of a priority rescue mission.”
“Will do. Do you want a supply drop or a rescue for the first op? I think we have good candidates for both now, both within the plane’s flight range.”
“Both if you can. We have a lot of fuel stored here, but it isn’t an infinite supply. Besides, with each flight, we take a risk breaking something on the plane that we won’t be able to fix. The more we can do at once, the better.”
“Right. Once we have the op logistics planned, I’ll give you a brief, and I assume you’re taking care of the tactical side?”
“Yes, well, sort of. I’m not going outside the wire on this one. The PJs will take care of the tactical side of the op. Get with Arcuni. He could probably use a hand up front and you’ll need another guy to act as a loadmaster. I’ll brief the PJs on their roles and send them to you for the details. You get with Arcuni and figure out the rest of the crew.”
Wright pushed the speaker button and ended the call, finishing up the barely legible notes scribbled across the yellow pad of paper on the desk.
“Guys,” Wright said, pointing to the map on the wall, “try to make contact with anyone in this circle. See if any of them are in desperate need of food, ammo, or gear and see if any of them need an evac. List them in order of needs and check the overheads for any airstrips that can handle the Herc near their location—which is how long, Dean?”
“Uh, four thousand feet or better to be safe.”
“OK, four thousand feet or longer runways. Civilian fields are OK, but they need to be close to the survivors. Either we have to go get them and bring them to the field or they have to get to the field. For supplies, we still have to land. We don’t have the rigging for an air drop, nor do we have anyone who knows how to rig it. We’ll have to land and offload ourselves. Once you have that list, plot them to see if we can hit more than one of them in a single trip. We are limited to daylight ops, and Cliff wants the first op wheels up as soon as we possibly can. I’ll be back in ninety minutes to check on progress. Oh, and check for undead concentrations near the fields.”
Wright looked at the clock and figured they had about ten hours until sunset. “If we can be wheels up in four hours, we can fly out to a location in range, in time.”
“Major, are we allowing for night landings here, or do we need to be back here before local sunset?”
“I don’t have that answer. We have to check the lights up top to see if they work, but I think we can.”
Wright started out the door and stopped. “One of you figure out if one of the weather birds is still in orbit and still working. We can’t send Arcuni into a damn storm.”
The door shut behind him and the room erupted in activity.
CHAPTER 30
Marathon, Texas
February 16, Year 1
“I don’t see any signs. I don’t think they got shit in this town.”
The three men with leather vests drove through the small-town streets, dodging walking corpses. “Damnit, the sign says Alpine is that way. Is that town any bigger?”
“Not really. Turn around. We have to drive to Fort Stockton.”
The motorcycle club prospect who was driving turned the old van around and headed to Highway 385. He lit another cigarette off the burning end of the one he already had in his mouth, burned nearly to the filter. His gaunt face and his eyes were wild, typical of someone addicted to crystal meth. The back of the van smelled strongly of burning marijuana and gasoline fumes. Five plastic five-gallon cans of gasoline sat at the very back of the van. The thought that it might be dangerous to smoke with so much gasoline in the back of the van never occurred to the three of them, but not much ever did.
Next to the gas cans sat a crate half-full of blocks wrapped in brown paper labeled “Peno,” with an orange diamond-shaped warning placard. There was also a box with a small label indicating it held blasting caps, a box labeled as M60 Igniters, and a spool of green cabling.
The desert highway was mostly deserted, with only a few abandoned cars and an oil field truck that the van swerved around at close to eighty miles per hour. It was still well before noon when the van crossed the railroad tracks and ran the stop sign to turn onto West Railroad Avenue, continuing the northern route.
“Turn here. Something has to be on business I-10.” The van lurched left and onto West Dickinson Boulevard. The trio traveled a few blocks before the driver slammed on the brakes and turned into a parking lot of a small pharmacy. The pharmacy was more general store than medical supply, and the front window was full of merchandise.
“Bingo.”
The driver left the engine running and the three piled out of the old van. The driver carried a shotgun, the other carried an M4 rifle, and the third held a large military-style duffel bag. The driver walked up to the front door. It was locked, so he broke the glass out. All three of the men took deep breaths. The interi
or smelled stale but it had no smell of death, so the three climbed through the broken glass. The customer windows at the back of the store were blocked with a pull-down gate, but three quick shotgun blasts gave the three entry into the secured room via the employee door.
Ten minutes later the duffel bag was heavy with large bottles of Xanax, Viagra, and Vicodin, and every package of nasal decongestant the store contained. When they climbed back through the shattered glass at the front of the store, they found the running van had attracted six undead with the noise of the motor. The driver picked up a large rock from the parking lot and threw it through the other large window at the front of the store. The loud crash of the shattering glass drew the undead’s attention, causing them to shamble away towards the van, leaving the van clear for the three bikers to climb in. Before the walking corpses could turn and follow, the old van drove out of the parking lot, a black cloud of exhaust pouring out of the tailpipe.
“How much did we get?”
The man in the back of the van lit a cigarette and sorted through the bottom of the duffel.
“Enough for one batch, maybe.”
“Shit, we need a bigger store.”
“We need a bigger town.”
“We need that fucking Walmart,” the man in the passenger seat said, pointing at a sign further up the road.
Nearing I-10, the van pulled into the Walmart parking lot, which was choked with abandoned cars. Undead shuffled through the parking lot.
“Shit man, I’m not going in there.”
“No way. Lead them off and we’ll blow the drive-through window.”
The driver drove slowly through the parking lot, honking the horn, while the front passenger cranked down the side window and yelled at the undead crowd. Every rotted face in the parking lot turned to look at the van and then the dead lurched into motion, following as quickly as they could.
Hundreds of undead followed the van out of the main parking lot exit and into the street. The driver accelerated sharply, turned right, and made the block around to the rear of Walmart, then to the side of the store where the pharmacy drive-through window was located. A car sat abandoned at the window, empty with the passenger door open. The three quickly put the car in neutral and pushed it out of the way using the front bumper of the van.
The man handling the duffel bag opened the back of the van and pulled a handful of the brown paper-wrapped blocks out of the cardboard box. Unwrapped, the blocks looked like off-white modeling clay but were really civilian C4 explosives stolen from a mining operation near Buffalo, Texas. He handed off the explosives with a roll of duct tape to the driver, who taped four of the small blocks on the corners of the thick bulletproof glass of the drive-through window. Next, the spool of green cord was unrolled, four lengths cut, ended with blasting caps and shoved into the soft explosives. The three made quick work of rigging, and forty feet away, they attached one of the M60 Igniters, hiding behind the other side of their van before firing the explosives.
The explosion knocked the three men to the ground and shattered all the windows of the van. The ringing in their ears blocked out the approaching moans of the undead. Peering around the damaged van, they could see the drive-through window was missing, and there was a ten-foot hole in the exterior wall. Brick and shattered glass covered the ground.
They stood shakily, feeling dizzy, but once they retrieved their dropped weapons and the duffel bag, the three of them staggered into the large pharmacy. Walmart’s much larger stock of the drugs they wanted quickly filled the duffel to the top. To carry out the rest of the over-the-counter pseudoephedrine, they filled six plastic shopping bags. The club was set for a good while with all the meth they could cook from this haul.
The three of them were inside the building for only five minutes, but stepping back into the sunlight, they were met by more undead than they could count, some already tripping through the rubble and towards the gaping hole in the wall.
The driver shot the closest walking corpse with the shotgun. Its rotting head vaporized into a cloud of black diseased mist. The man with the duffel bag over his shoulders and the plastic bags in his hands stayed back, letting the other two take care of the approaching death. The man with the M4 pushed the selector switch past fire and to three-round burst, jerking the trigger back and firing wildly while walking towards the van. He was immediately swarmed and brought down by a dozen undead clawing at his skin; he screamed in pain while their rotted teeth tore chunks of flesh from his arms, neck, and face.
The driver kept pumping his Remington 870, firing the 00 buckshot as rapidly as he could work the action, until an audible click echoed in his ears. Another four undead pulled him to the ground, the shotgun clattering to the pavement. As he brought his hands to his neck, blood sprayed the rotted faces of the zombies ripping into the warm flesh.
Fear overwhelmed the man with the drugs. His hands were frozen shut holding the shopping bags, the duffel bag still on his shoulders. He ran. He ran as fast as he could past his screaming buddies, who were finding death one painful bite at a time. He kept running until he dove headfirst into the open rear doors of the van and pulled the doors closed against the clawing blackened hands of the hungry dead, their rotted fingers crushed between the closed doors. He clambered swiftly into the driver’s seat.
Glass fragments on the dash blew into his face as he drove through the mass of dead bodies in the parking lot. Black smoke blew out of the exhaust; the gasoline sloshed in the cans next to the box of explosives. An undead whose hand was crushed in the rear doors was dragged along the pavement. As the van accelerated, the undead’s arm ripped at the elbow, leaving the forearm stuck in the door. The prospect lit another cigarette and drove the old van as fast as he could towards Big Bend and his club.
CHAPTER 31
Big Bend National Park
February 16, Year 1
Two motorcycles roared into The Basin, past the motels and up the road to the cabins. The riders turned the engines off, leaned the bikes on their side stands, and stood to see Russell walk out of his cabin towards them. DD lit a cigarette, afraid of what he had to tell his club president.
“Well, where’s Buzzer?”
“He’s dead, Prez. Crashed and taken down by walkers.”
“Both of them? What about Mike?”
“No, just Buzzer. We didn’t go past the walkers. We left to come tell you.”
“Damnit! Those assholes are where they found Stinky! You fucking idiots didn’t even get far enough to check. Get everyone out here. It’s time for Church and we’re going to kill that fucking family!”
DD ran towards the cabins. His partner went to get supplies out of the cabin next to Russell’s. Twenty minutes later all the club members and prospects stood in the road in front of Russell’s cabin. There were only fifteen of them left. Some of them smoked and some drank beer, even though it was barely noon, and most all of them were high.
“You take that old 4x4 and put the deuce with ammo in the back. The rest of you bring your rifles and grab some ammo. We’re going to round up some walkers and take revenge. Buzzer is dead. DD, you’re the new VP. Load it up! We ride now!”
The prospects ran to get the M2 out of the supply cabin, along with two heavy green cans full of ammunition and the tripod for the crew-served machine gun, and loaded it all into the back of the Scout that had been Malachi’s. Bexar had left it by the cabins when he bugged out, along with the FJ, but the club didn’t care about the history of the vehicles. They didn’t care about the families who had spent their hard-earned money and time building the vehicles to help with their survival; the club was only going to use them like they used everything else they stole.
The mountains echoed with a dozen old Harleys cranking to life, straight pipes popping loudly. Russell waved his hand above his head and rode down the hill. The rest of the club fell in formation, riding in twos, the Scout at the rear of the motorcycles.
Highway 170
Bexar rolled off the throttle
and gently slowed the motorcycle to a stop. He had a flat tire. He must have picked up a nail or a screw or something in the road. After leaning the motorcycle on the side stand, he checked the rear tire, which sat flat against the rim and pavement. The tire was a tubeless tire, so if he had a plug he could plug it, but Bexar still had no idea how he would air the tire up enough to ride.
Bexar opened the left saddlebag, removed the remainder of his fireworks, and dug out a couple of dirty rags and a small glass pipe he recognized as something an addict would use to smoke meth or crack with. He threw the pipe across the road and it shattered with a satisfying crash. At the bottom of the saddlebag was a can of Fix-A-Flat. He shook the can and it felt full. Before the EMP there was absolutely no way he would have used a can of Fix-A-Flat on a motorcycle tire, but he had to get back to his family. Maybe the store in Terlingua had tire plugs and he could still plug the tire when he returned. He rubbed his hand on the tire, trying to find what punctured it, but he couldn’t find anything. He realized that he’d never checked the other saddlebag. Bexar opened it and dug through the contents. He found two dirty t-shirts emblazoned with the Pistoleros’ logo and a zip-top bag full of other bags. In the bags, he could identify marijuana, something that looked like meth, and a handful of different pills. The Norco he recognized, the pill colored yellow with “Watson” embossed on one side. The little oddly-shaped blue pill he could identify as Viagra, but he didn’t know what the other pills were. Bexar chuckled at the Viagra. Maybe he should keep it and see if Jessie would let him try it out with her. But he had no use for the meth or the marijuana. Bexar was nearly falling over with the pain from the bullet wound in his leg and realized he was lucky to find the Norco, a narcotic pain killer. He dug out one of the yellow pills and a bottle of water from his go-bag and swallowed the pill, then stuffed the bag of pills into his go-bag.
Glancing up and down the highway, Bexar didn’t see any movement or any undead, but he didn’t want to stay stranded in the middle of the road for long. He unscrewed the valve cap on the rear tire, screwed on the Fix-A-Flat, tube and pressed the button. The foamy glue hissed into the tire, raising the motorcycle’s rim off the pavement. Bexar pushed the sidewall of the tire with his thumb and decided to add a little more. Happy with how full the tire seemed, Bexar kept the half-used can and returned it to the saddlebag with his fireworks, started the bike, and continued the ride back to Terlingua. The hydrocodone was starting to make Bexar feel a little spaced out, but the brunt of the pain in his right leg was starting to fade.
