The Extinction Pandemic: A Post Apocalyptic Novel (The Hatchery Compound Book 1)

by Grayson Hawkins

  Bryce and his team entered the gun shop, headed down to the vault and cracked it open. As they walked inside, they saw the fifty or so rifles that they had to leave behind when they first came through. Along with the rifles, there were at thirty or more handguns, and God only knew how much ammunition. They started to make trips back and forth to the flatbed truck and loaded everything up. An hour went by, and Quinton used the word fuck frequently, to make it well known that he wanted in on the spoils.

  “Listen,” Bryce finally told them with a level head this time, “This shit was found by us, and the rifles you have in your hands were given to you by me. Now please calm down and wait until we are done, we will make sure you get your fair share.”

  This upset the resort members even more, since they had put their asses on the line today as well, and they wanted more than “their fair share.”

  Logan and the guys took about ninety percent of the weapons in the vault, and then they moved on to the rest of the store. They grabbed any items left in the store that they considered relevant, extra magazines, extra holsters, carrying cases, cleaning kits, optical sights, and tactical lights. Then, once they were done cleaning the place out, Bryce told the resort crew to have at the rest of the store.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Payson, Arizona

  After the resort group had filled up their vehicles with the remainder of the guns and ammunition and used various profanities to express their contempt, everyone got in their vehicles one more time to head over to the gas station on the edge of town. Bryce’s truck, which was the lead vehicle, allowed him to see them first.

  There were about twenty-five infected gathered around the fuel truck, gas station, and generator, clearly drawn by the noise the generator made.

  “Fuck! What happened?” Bryce exclaimed.

  They had left two of the resort members to watch over the truck.

  Bryce had Logan stop the truck about 500 feet shy of the gas station so the group of infected was not alerted to their presence. Everybody else stopped their vehicles and got out.

  The looks on the faces of the resort members matched across the board.

  Quinton was the first one to say anything, “What the fuck happened, and where are my guys?”

  Logan had already pulled a pair of binoculars from his vest and as he looked through them he said, “Aww fuck.”

  “What!” Quinton exclaimed.

  “I found your boys,” Logan said and handed Quinton the binoculars.

  As Quinton put the optics to his eyes he knew what he was about to see. In the middle of the infected stood his two men, one had a chunk the size of a baseball that had been carved from his neck, and the other had somehow misplaced his arm.

  The look of sorrow on Quinton’s face let the others in the group know what had happened.

  “Motherfuckers,” was all he said as he handed the binoculars back to Logan.

  “Now what” Robby said.

  “Well, we can’t just leave the damn truck, we need to clear out those infected and get it back,” Bryce said.

  “I’m not leaving my men to rot as infected either. We’ve got to get in there and put them down. It’s the humane thing to do,” Quinton replied.

  Logan took a look at the infected and ran the math, twenty or so infected, twenty or so functional highly armed humans. The infected had hands and teeth, Logan and the others had fully automatic weapons. Not to underestimate hands and teeth, but they should be all right.

  “Yeah let’s take them out and get the truck,” Logan said, then paused, then quizzically added “and vengeance?”

  They decided to have the heavy weapons stay in the rear to cover their retreat, and the rest of the group would move in with their M4s.

  Quinton was on board, but a few of his crew were clearly not. After a few minutes of indecision, the resort team split up, and one vehicle drove down the road with five passengers inside.

  Well, now we are outnumbered, Logan thought to himself.

  The remaining members of the resort group followed Bryce and his guys toward the station. They held a tight formation as they walked. Everyone stood shoulder to shoulder, with their rifles faced forward.

  Tony had a firm grasp on his SAW, and at about a hundred feet out, the infected realized that they were coming. Tony laid down on the ground and pulled out the bipod for the SAW and got ready to provide suppressive fire. Well, it used to be called suppressive fire. Now it was more like defensive fire, to cover their retreat, because the hail of gunfire would not suppress the infected.

  The rest of the group trudged on, and when the infected got within 50 feet, they all tried to place carefully aimed headshots, but when they got too close they opened up with their rifles. The group of infected got pelted with 5.56mm ammunition which only slowed them down. Quite a few dropped right there on the spot, but the rest advanced in a wave.

  From behind the station came another wave of infected, drawn by the staccato gunfire, which only added to the horde of infected shambling toward them. The guys worked their way toward the truck in a flanking maneuver. They attempted to lead the infected away from the truck while they continued to kill them. The group of infected pushed onward and away from the truck all the while they were torn up by small arms fire.

  Unfortunately, for every infected they took out another replaced it as they streamed out from behind the station, or from out of the woods that surrounded the station. The guys quickly realized that they might have bitten off more than they could chew. Already committed, however, they waved Nathan forward, and he cruised up in one of the pickup trucks and parked next to the fuel truck. He hopped out of the cab and grabbed a gas can of diesel fuel, and drained the container into the fuel tank of their tanker. Jose stood up in the bed of the truck to cover his ass while he filled the fuel truck.

  The rest of the team picked away at the larger group of infected. It quickly became too close for comfort and the guys backed up a little too fast. One of the resort crew tripped over a curb, and went down hard. The infected were on top of him in an instant, like an alligator snatching a wildebeest, and long before one of his friends could run over to help him up. Before the man who had intended to help his fallen comrade could turn around to flee back to the group, a large female infected leapt forward and tore into the attempted savior’s neck.

  Logan saw the female lunge and tried to react, but his shot went wide and the she ripped out the poor guy’s jugular just as fast. Just like that, two more people were dead. Nothing could be done to save them, and the group could only look on in horror and empty their magazines into the group of infected.

  After the intense shooting, all of them ran low on ammunition, and the group was forced to retreat toward their vehicles.

  Jose yelled to the rest of the group above the din of gunfire, “Almost done; get ready to get the fuck out of here!”

  As the group made their way back toward the vehicles, another pack of infected came out of the woods. This pack was much larger than the group before, probably thirty or more. With them added to the infected that already chased them, it seemed like there were now more than fifty.

  Behind them, Tony opened up the SAW and started to fire in their general direction. Bryce spun around as he tried to figure out why Tony was shooting toward them. There was another pack of infected that approached them from behind, it was a smaller group, but they were about to be overrun and surrounded.

  Bryce and Logan didn’t waste a second, and through some nonverbal agreement, they made a hasty decision to run directly through the small group as they waved everyone forward. They ran straight at the small group of infected, and sprayed them with bullets as they went. When Bryce’s rifle went dry, and he was out of spare magazines, he dropped his rifle in its sling and pulled out his Taurus 9mm and aimed for their heads before they got too close for comfort. The infected group started thinning out in front of them, and the survivors charged right into the middle of them. With the sound of his chamber clicking
and no bangs to follow, Bryce picked up his rifle and struck out wildly, as he used it like a club to knock the infected out of his way. Logan pulled out a giant combat knife and stabbed it into the neck of a particularly large male. The rest of the group saw this and followed the lead, and used whatever they had to beat the infected group down.

  Eventually, Bryce and the others reached the trucks and did a quick head count. All of Bryce’s people were accounted for, except for Jose and Nathan. He checked their status and Jose was in the front seat of the pickup, and Nathan was behind the wheel of the fuel truck. They both stepped on it and headed out of the parking lot, and smashed through bodies as they drove.

  The resort team was another story. Only three of them made it back to the vehicles, and the others stood on top of an abandoned car and shot at the infected that quickly surrounded them. Quinton Grymes and his son were among the people who fought for their lives.

  Logan thought quickly and hopped in the big Ford truck and waved Bryce and Robby over. They both got in the truck, and Logan slammed the pedal to the floor. He hauled ass into what was left of the small group of infected, which sent them flying every which way, while some of them were crushed under the weight of the vehicle. The big cattle guard on the front of the truck did its job and quite literally sliced through the group, and left appendages strewn across the asphalt.

  Logan barreled toward the much larger group of infected and the rest of the resort crew. Logan screamed like a lunatic and rammed right into the mass of them, which scattered them all over. He tried to stop, but slid the truck right into the car that Quinton and his group stood on. One guy fell off the backside, into the group of infected, never to be seen again. The others hopped onto the hood of the Ford and ran and dove into the truck bed with several thuds. Logan threw the truck into reverse as infected hands slapped at the windows and spattered blood everywhere. As he backed up, Logan crushed several infected under the truck’s monster dually tires. He power slid the truck around in a circle; crushed more infected along the way, and slammed the gear selector into drive. Logan peeled out on the face of a female infected, as he hauled ass out of the group and toward the rest of their convoy. Jose and Nathan waited while rest of the group piled into whatever vehicles they could get in, and they all stepped on it. The entire convoy barreled down the highway at breakneck speed as they tried to get the hell out of Dodge.

  Fortunately, they didn’t run into any other surprises, and the two groups made it out of town and back toward safety.

  They rode in silence the rest of the way to the cutoff for the hatchery and the resort. They stopped here, and everyone got out to switch to the correct vehicles. Bryce knew that everyone was far too stressed out to haggle over who got what supplies, so he let them have whatever goods they had collected in their own vehicles and figured that was fair.

  Before he let them go, Bryce said to the group, “I’m sorry about your friends back there. Today was a horrible tragedy, but I want you all to know that I am trying to avoid days like today by building a strong community. You guys did fantastic, today and I need more fighters like yourselves, because the stronger we are as a group, the safer we will become. If any of you choose, we would be more than happy to have you over at our camp.”

  Bryce knew it was not the appropriate time to try and enlist the resort group’s fighters, especially since they had just lost men, but Bryce admitted to himself that the ones who had been able to adapt, had been damned good.

  He didn’t let anyone else know right then and there, but the whole day had been one gigantic test, a test to see how his men functioned under pressure and combat, and how this new group of survivors functioned. He knew exactly what would happen when he left that generator running, because he had already seen it happen once. It made him feel good to know that his team had functioned flawlessly, and hopefully it would grow within the next few days by the addition of some of these resort group members. It was a shame that the resort crew had lost three fighters, and they may have even been good, but then again, if they were good, they would have made it out. Bryce didn’t want people who were pretty good on his combat teams; he wanted the best, because only the best would survive.

  The two groups said goodbye to each other, shook hands, and got back in their vehicles. Bryce and his group headed back to the hatchery to unload their supplies and have a mission debriefing. Bryce thought about this on the way back. He thought that it would be a good way for them to discuss the mission in its entirety, discuss failures and successes, and how to improve next time. It would also help them decompress and offload some of the emotions that came from the loss of multiple comrades in a single day. Bryce knew that if they just buried the emotions, eventually they would resurface.

  When Bryce and the others arrived, everyone from the compound gathered around. As they got out of their vehicles, there were more than a few sighs of relief. Everyone who stayed behind on these outings knew exactly how dangerous it was for them to go outside the confines of their home.

  Bryce thought to himself about the day’s events, and that had learned some valuable information today. When he originally calculated his plan he had figured that there would be 20 or 30 infected drawn to the truck, not 70. He had no idea that there were that many infected in Payson, since they were almost never out roaming around. The mission gave Bryce valuable information about how they operated, which he would bring up during their debriefing.

  Bryce walked over and gave his wife a hug and a kiss and did the same to Trystan. Logan did the same with his family and Mitch greeted the rest of his family. The four soldiers walked away back toward their quarters.

  Bryce took a look around and saw that the other compound members had been hard at work and had put up some of the fence and security spotlights. The fence had come along nicely, and it already gave them a much-needed boost in security.

  Bryce asked his guys to help unload the supplies and had Henry stop his security light project to help out. They put all of the guns and ammunition into the armory first, which filled about half the building with ammunition cans while the other half was lined with guns of all shapes and sizes. Their armory was now effectively maxed out. They probably had enough munitions to arm at least 200 people or more, which was exactly what Bryce needed.

  Next, they offloaded the electronics, and distributed them to the crew quarters and office buildings for Bryce and Anthony to tinker with. They also stockpiled all of the batteries in the crew quarters to keep them at room temperature and hopefully increase their lifespan. They gave everyone at the compound a radio, a flashlight, and a battery-powered lantern with enough batteries to last a week or two.

  After that, they retrieved all of the medical supplies and handed them over to Christine, who had taken care of Benjamin all day. She was extremely pleased to have the extra antibiotics and painkillers since Benjamin’s recovery process called for both. She told Bryce very quickly that his dad was much better, and she thought that he would make a full recovery sooner rather than later. Bryce took this as good news.

  Lastly, they took all of the new food items they scavenged and put everything inside the large pantry in the crew kitchens. Jessica and Victoria organized everything and put it where it needed to be. They also kept a detailed inventory on an iPad so they knew exactly what they had, which was more evidence to prove Bryce’s technology theory about how helpful it could be. While Bryce watched them inventory the kitchen it made him want to do the same with his armory, medical supplies, and everything else. He would have to speak with Logan about that, because perhaps it was something Henry could do. Bryce remembered that he was good with numbers.

  Since they were finally done, Bryce decided to round up the fighters for their mission debriefing. He got everybody together, and they all walked over to the warehouse. The workbench area had some chairs and tables that they all sat around, and Bryce started the meeting once everyone had sat down.

  “Okay, guys, we need to discuss our supply run today and go
over the finer points,” Bryce began. “I want to discuss the failures and successes and how we can improve in the future.”

  The men and women talked back and forth for about an hour, and went over the details of the mission. Obviously, everyone saw that leaving the truck as it pumped gas with the generator running was the colossal failure. Logan brought up the fact that he did believe that it might happen, but figured the infected would be less in number and more manageable by the crew that had stayed behind

  None of the group expected to see such a large group of infected. It was made very clear that nobody had taken any time to study the enemy. Logan brought this fact up first, and they explored scenarios for research of the infected so that they could try and figure out more information; specifically, about their whereabouts, patterns, and weaknesses. Bryce thought now was a good time to tell them about the remote controlled aerial drone he had acquired at the Radioshack. He told them how he could fly it with his iPad above a group of infected and watch their behavior from a distance. Logan commented on how this could also be a great reconnaissance device, and told Bryce that they should try to find others.

  The next critical failure they went over was the breakdown in discipline during their skirmish with the infected. The resort crew for the most part was not trained in unit cohesion, and it showed in their performance. They got their own guys killed during the skirmish mostly due to lack of discipline and training.

  The best solution they could come up with was tactical training led by Logan, Bryce, and Trevor. Everyone could use it even though some members of the group already had military or police training.

  Finally, the group quickly went over the successes of the mission which included more than 1,000 gallons of gasoline, another month's worth of food rations, the armory beyond maximum capacity, and the medical team loaded up with plenty of supplies.

  After their mission debriefing, they decided to discuss where to go from there. Bryce mentioned that the security needed to be beefed up still, especially now that they knew they had neighbors and infected nearby.