by Dave Lund
Back in the truck, the instant coffee packet from one of the MREs was poured into a water bottle and shaken to mix. It tasted slightly more horrible than usual because it was made with cold water, but he wanted the caffeine. Another round of Pop-Tarts and beef jerky finished out his breakfast.
Cliff started the truck and drove towards the FBO. After a quick security walk of the area, he crawled under an old Dodge truck with his gas cans and his garden hose. Thirty minutes later the Chevy’s gas tank was full, and the four small gas cans were full as well. He guessed that he now had enough gas to make Groom Lake, but with the base being in the middle of absofuckinglutely nowhere, he thought it would be smart to stop one more time, to be safe.
Zephyr, Texas
Jessie sat the last watch for the night, which worked out well because Keeley woke up early and was hungry. She was down to only a few cans of condensed milk; after that they would be on to the powdered milk. Thankfully, Keeley wasn’t an infant or the need for baby formula would have been overwhelming.
Off in the distance she heard motorcycles rumbling, but she couldn’t get a fix on the direction or how far away they were. But if she could hear them, she was sure they were too close for their safety. The group’s vehicles were obvious beacons of survivors, what with all the gear strapped onto the roof racks. She needed to get the others up and on the road before their vehicles were spotted.
With Keeley holding her hand, Jessie let her AR rest on the sling across her chest and stepped inside to wake up Bexar. “Babe, we’ve got a problem.”
“Huh?”
“Wake up,” she said, “I heard some motorcycles in the distance; I think we need to get the hell out of here.”
Jessie sat Keeley down as Bexar began to wake up the others. Going to the darkened doorway, she stood back in the shadow of the building to hold security while the bedrolls were gathered. In less than ten minutes the group was awake, bathroom breaks were taken, and they were packing the bedrolls in the vehicles. Just then the motorcycle roared by.
At first the rider didn’t seem to notice the group, but then his head snapped to the side to look over his shoulder, and he slammed on his brakes. While the biker was making a U-turn in the road, Jack stepped forward, shouldered his rifle, and fired ten rounds towards the biker. The bike swerved to the side but the rider stayed upright and rode off as fast as he could, although it appeared the motorcycle now had a flat tire and might have been leaking gas.
“Well shit on us Jack, we’ve gotta get; I bet he was a scout with the group from yesterday.”
“Right Bexar, let’s get the fuck out of here.”
The group was on high alert as they quickly left the gravel parking lot. Bexar figured the bikers would give chase. Of course he hoped they wouldn’t, but in his experience with biker gangs, he knew they would come and it would turn violent. Bikers fueled on meth could ride all day and all night without stopping to rest. Bexar spent more time gazing into his rearview mirror than at the road ahead.
CHAPTER 36
Near Brownwood, Texas
Bexar flashed the headlights on his vehicle, and Jessie waved back and flashed her headlights at Jack, who waved and slowed to stop the convoy in the road. They didn’t bother to pull off the highway—there was no traffic, and the only other moving vehicles they had seen in the last two days were the bikers. Jack, Sandra, Jessie, and Bexar all met in the middle of the road for a quick pow-wow.
Bexar started. “Jack, I really think we should get off this highway and head south towards Junction. I’m worried that the bikers will follow the highway and catch up. If we can go a different direction on a different road, we could maybe shake them.”
“Sure,” said Jack, “but what if they take that road as well?”
“Well yeah, they could,” replied Bexar, “but how would they guess which road to take? The sooner we can move off course the better, I think.”
Their wives agreed, so the convoy drove into Brownwood and turned south. In the town of Brownwood, the only movement they saw were undead trapped in some of the gas stations, clawing at the windows to get at the vehicles driving by. They saw a few houses with smoke coming from the chimneys, which seemed like a good sign, but would be disastrous for those people if the bikers followed them into the town. There wasn't anything Bexar could do to help them; he could only hope that the people in those houses would keep safe.
It seemed like days of driving, but it was really only a few hours. The continually high stress of driving around abandoned vehicles and reanimated dead bodies in the road made the trip to Junction, Texas seem exceptionally long. By now they needed to gas up their convoy, so they had to stop. The closer they got to town, the more gas stations and fuel stops appeared, but unfortunately they had no way to get the fuel out of the underground tanks at the gas stations, so they were still scavenging and siphoning gas when needed.
If we’d chosen diesel-driven vehicles we would’ve had a near endless supply of fuel, with all the abandoned semi-trucks on the highway and their large saddlebag fuel tanks, Jack thought. He brought the convoy to a stop on the side of a Valero station, hoping to find fuel in some of the vehicles abandoned near the gas station.
Everyone got out of their vehicles except for Sandra, who elected to stay with the kids in the Jeep. Keeley was napping, and even though Will was awake, it wouldn’t be safe to bring him out in an unknown area unless they had to. Over the past few days a new group SOP—standard operating procedure—had been developed, that they were always armed whenever they got out of their vehicles.
Jack called over to Bexar, “Hey Bexar, how much ammo do you think we have between us for the ARs?”
“Quite a bit Jack, why?”
“I’m guessing it’ll be some time ‘til someone makes any more ammo, and we might run into an issue in the future. I want to try something new. I’m going to try using a hatchet.”
“Heh, well okay, but keep your AR on you,” Bexar said.
Jack’s AR hung across his back by the sling. After retrieving his hatchet from a container on the roof of his truck, he gestured for Jessie to join him in sweeping the area to find suitable vehicles to siphon gas from. Bexar climbed on the roof of the Jeep and stood watch over the kids and Sandra.
Jessie took point with her pistol up, Jack pulling rear guard with his hatchet, and they moved around the corner of the store. The glass front doors of the store were wide open, which was good in that there shouldn’t be anything trapped in the store, but it was bad in that anything that had been in there was now out here with them. The area around the pumps and the parking lot was nearly empty of cars, and the few vehicles near the pumps were diesel pickup trucks.
“Maybe there’s some more over by the McDonalds?” Jessie whispered to Jack over her shoulder.
She led the pair across the front of the store and around the far corner to the McDonalds. Protruding from the front of the restaurant was a large tour bus that appeared to have traveled out of Mexico. It had wrecked and driven right into the front of the McDonalds, into the PlayPlace.
“Oh shit, this is bad, Jack, we need to fall back,” Jessie said.
Gunfire erupted from the other side of the gas station.
“Fuck, come on Jessie!”
Jessie and Jack broke tactics and sprinted back across the front of the store, coming around the corner of the station to see their vehicles surrounded by a wall of zombies. Sandra was trapped in the Jeep with the kids, and undead were clawing and banging at the windows trying to get at them. Bexar was still on the roof of the Jeep, pulling the trigger on his AR as quickly as he could aim. By a quick count, Jack estimated there were still sixty undead standing.
“Jessie, hold your fire,” yelled Jack. “If you miss you’ll hit Sandra and the kids! Run forward and try to get a safe angle on some of the zombies on the edges, I’ll go around the other side!”
Before Jessie could respond, Jack sprinted away to the right, trying to get around the horde for another angle to engage.
On the far side of the convoy he ran into three undead who were slow getting to the party. One had a badly broken ankle that he was attempting to walk on, another had a very badly broken leg, and the third was missing part of his right leg below the knee.
Jack still had his hatchet in his hand, so he ran up to the one with the broken ankle and planted the hatchet firmly in its skull. The zombie dropped with a wet thud, but the hatchet stuck and pulled out of Jack’s sweaty hand. Jack reached over his shoulder and pulled his AR around from his back, ducked his head out of the sling and brought the rifle to bear just as the next crippled zombie got close. A trigger pull and it was out of its misery, the third killed moments later.
Looking back at the Jeep, he saw that Bexar was still firing as fast as he could, but one of the undead had broken the back glass of the Jeep and was trying to claw his way inside the cabin. Jack put the reticle of his optic on the back of the zombie’s head, took a deep breath, and fired.
The interior of the Jeep exploded with blackened undead brain matter, but the threat had been stopped, and the body blocked the broken window. Jessie continued to pick off the edges of the swarm, and Bexar worked as hard as he could, leaving about twenty still to kill. With carefully placed shots Jessie created a gap in the mass of undead, leaving a path to the Jeep. Sprinting towards it, she called out to Bexar as she jumped up and extended her left hand. Bexar quickly caught her hand and pulled her onto the roof.
“If those bastards are going to get my daughter, I’m taking as many as I can with me!” she said determinedly.
Another five minutes of sharp shooting and the horde was all finally down, the barrels of the ARs were smoking, and both kids were screaming.
“Holy Christ balls, Jack,” said Bexar.
“Yeah, help me get this bastard out of the back of the Jeep,” Jack said, pulling on the rotting corpse.
Nobody was sure if the splattered brain tissue on the inside of the Jeep could cause any issues, but to be safe, the tarp covering the gear was pulled out and discarded as well.
“Hey Bexar,” called Jack. “Over by the McDonalds I think I saw an old CJ with some jerry cans in the back.”
“Cool,” said Bexar. “Give me a minute and I’ll head over there, but we need to be quick. All that noise would’ve attracted some attention.”
“Roger that,” Jack called over his shoulder as he trotted off towards the Jeep.
Not only did the old CJ have four five-gallon jerry cans in the back, they were full of gas. On the floor in the back of the old Jeep they found a length of garden hose and a heavy hand-cranked pump, like what they used on farms to fuel up tractors out of fifty-five-gallon drums of fuel, as well as a set of large bolt cutters. This was like finding the Holy Grail.
With these tools they could break into the underground tanks of gas stations and hand-pump the gas out. The tires on the CJ looked like they would fit his rig, which was down a tire from their quest for Dr. Pepper.
Running back to the group, Jack excitedly told them of his find, then led the group in their vehicles back to the CJ. Twenty minutes later all three vehicles had full gas tanks, all their gas cans were full, and Jack had taken the four wheels and the spare off the CJ. The tires, still on their rims, wouldn’t fit on the FJ’s roof rack, so they were spread out over the three vehicles and also lashed to the top of the Scout’s trailer.
Without further delay, the group turned southbound to try and make it to Fort Stockton before dark. It would be impossible to make it all the way to Big Bend that day, and Jack believed that Fort Stockton might be a little far with the daylight they had left. Darkness was once again a curse; if the zombie horde from the gas station had attacked them at night, he wasn’t so sure they would’ve won that fight.
Outside of Groom Lake, Nevada
Shortly after noon, Cliff turned off the “Extraterrestrial Highway” and onto Groom Road, which would take him over the mountains and into the Groom Lake dry lakebed area. This was the infamous “Area 51.”
Cliff laughed out loud; he’d been here a few times over the course of his career, and believed that the public would be amazed at what really went on. Area 51 was known to be a secret government facility with exceptionally long runways carved into the dry lakebed. Throughout its history, it had hosted testing for numerous top-secret aircraft, including the A-12 and the F-117A. However, its biggest secret was the underground facility that housed bunkers, storerooms, and other facilities with the express purpose of providing for the continuity of government, much like the facility at Denver International, or the publicly outed, obsolete Greenbrier facility in West Virginia.
Some incredible projects had launched and landed at Groom Lake, but contrary to popular belief, none of them involved aliens. One of those projects included the Air Force space program vehicles. If NASA had been able to openly use the technology developed at Groom Lake, the Space Shuttle would have been retired years before it finally was, and if civilians could use it, space tourism would cost about as much as a Southwest flight from Dallas to Denver.
“Holy shit!” Cliff suddenly remembered there were about three dozen Air Force personnel currently in orbit. “Guess those guys are on their own.”
The drive down Groom Road was slower than usual due to the snowfall that was starting to accumulate, but eventually he reached the first gate to the property. He was worried about the status of the facility because the gate was unmanned; in fact, he hadn’t seen any of the standard roving security teams either. These were not good signs. Luckily, the mountains were still between the gate and the facility, so he would have ample cover to recon the site before blazing into the unknown.
CHAPTER 37
South of Fort Stockton, Texas
Jack looked at the GPS on his dash. It displayed a local time of just after 3:00 p.m. Glancing at the western sky, he figured there might be about three hours until the sun dipped below the horizon. The GPS also showed it should take just over three hours to arrive at Panther Junction in the park, so assuming nothing else went wrong on their drive, they would need to find another spot on the road to secure sleep tonight.
Part of the problem on this lonely two-lane Texas highway was that in this part of Texas people had to drive two hours just to go grocery shopping; there really wasn’t much of anything but large swaths of ranch land. On the upside, there weren’t a lot of people living in the area, so the population of undead should be lower as well.
The unending high desert ranch land made it easy for Jack’s mind to wander. Miles of old telegraph wire ran along the top of some of the fences in the area, long since disused but left in place for no other reason than that it would take work to remove them. Jack couldn’t fathom why someone would choose this part of Texas to run a ranch; there was better land to ranch, and better areas to live. The only action he could think of in the area was the illegals and drug runners cutting across the ranches.
Nearly two hours south of Fort Stockton, the group drove up to a tall green and white building and covered inspection area surrounded by concrete barriers. It was the Border Patrol checkpoint; Jack had been stopped there before when he had been coming back from a backpacking trip at Big Bend. Today the station appeared deserted. Gone were the familiar green and white trucks that should have been parked next to the building. Jack slowed and pulled across the highway to park under the covered area, the group following close behind.
They paused to stretch as they climbed out of their vehicles, but unlike a normal road trip, each of them had a weapon in hand, and faced in different directions to give safety coverage. Bexar walked up to the building and found the door unlocked.
“Hey Jessie, let’s clear this real quick and see if they have a chemical toilet.”
“Got it,” said Jessie, following him into the building. It only took about five minutes before they returned outside and declared the building free from the undead. This would be their home for the night. Unfortunately, there were no low-water or chemical toilets in the building, bu
t there were some Porta-Johns outside, which was better than nothing. Someone would need to stand guard outside of the Porta-John while another member of the group took the opportunity to relieve themselves.
They could hear the javelinas roaming in the brush as night fell and the group broke out their dinner. They discussed their situation in hushed voices, including their worries about the biker gang. Jack was optimistic they had eluded them, and Jessie and Sandra agreed, but Bexar couldn’t shake his worries that they had not.
Groom Lake, Nevada
Cliff set out on foot, leaving his truck hidden off the road just past the abandoned guard shack. The guard shack was unlocked but the power was still on, which gave Cliff some hope, although it was also to be expected since the facilities at Groom Lake ran on nuclear power. This had started in the 1950s with a first-generation reactor under development for the Navy. The last Cliff had heard, there were currently twelve reactors powering the facility, which sounded ludicrous if you didn’t understand how large the facility actually was, and how much power some of the systems inside, especially the computers and labs, required.
None of this was visible to the public because the majority of the facility was built underground, except for a small cluster of buildings and the obvious runways. The facility was built deeper and was more secure than the fabled Cheyenne Mountain nuclear bunker, although their missions were drastically different.
Cheyenne Mountain accommodated a communications, radar monitoring, and command structure for the U.S. military, whereas Groom Lake contained the “black” scientific research projects, and also a large bunker designed to house most of the necessary members of the government and their families. The research and continuity-of-government bunkers were for the most part separate, but there were some underground access points between the two facilities. Most of the government officials who would be whisked to safety underground here knew that Area 51 existed, and had been instrumental in black projects such as the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird and A-12 reconnaissance aircraft, the latter developed in the CIA’s Oxcart program; but only a few knew about the current big project.
