by Jason Ross
Tears welled up in Mat’s eyes, finally overcoming his adrenaline.
The town might be saved. All it’d cost them was their immortal souls.
Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk.
Gladys Carter pushed into a balls-out sprint, turning into the final mile to the football field. Her tactical vest clanked and bobbed on her thin frame. The AR-15 pumped in her hands. She caught glimpses of the Carroll hayfield, and she turned away from the sight of it. People were dying en masse. There was no time to lament. Her run would end face-to-face with a mass murdering motherfucker. What happened next would be up to Jensen. Either way, he was going down.
The football field lay in a depression; better for the halons to shine those Friday night lights. But Jensen wasn’t on the football field. It was empty and overgrown.
Gladys veered away from the entrance to the fenced stadium and angled toward the raised roadbed of University Drive—toward the thumping rhythm. On the side of the road facing the hayfield, she spotted a white van. As she flew toward it a man climbed on top of the van and gazed east.
Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk.
From a few hundred yards, she recognized Jim Jensen, wearing his saggy-ass denim pants and yellow golf shirt. He always tucked in his polo shirts, making his belly protrude like a volleyball. She pictured his naked, skinny ass on top of the thirteen-year-old girl, his pathetic, white belly smashed against hers.
I’m gonna fuck a brother up, she decided. Her legs pumped harder, pushing her into a ferocious sprint.
As she dashed onto University Drive, she saw the whole of the Sprinter van. A ladder leaned against the side and the rear doors hung open. Jensen climbed down.
Her right hand slid to the tang of the pistol grip on the AR-15. Her left hand ran the charging handle like it had ten thousand times in training. She glanced down to see brass in the breach and she let the charging handle fly. The bolt sprang forward with a satisfying snick. She looked up just in time to see Jensen’s startled expression. He held a jar in each hand, three-quarters full of yellow powder.
She must’ve looked like she felt—like the Goddess of Vengeance—because Jensen began babbling before she could even hear him. The barrel of her rifle made her emotional state abundantly clear.
“I’m saving the town,” he screeched. “Just look. Look at the field. Stop! Wait!”
Nothing would brook her fury, but she couldn’t help but look where he was pointing. Then she looked again. All the fire went out of her legs and her sprint became a jog, then it became a walk.
The Carroll’s hay field flooded over with thousands of refugees, stumbling, running, laying in the muck. It was as if she witnessed Dante’s Inferno alongside University Drive. Her brain vibrated in her skull with the horror of it.
“I did that. I stopped them,” Jensen whined. “I formulated the mixture of mustard gas and anthrax. I invented the launchers. I pulled the trigger. It was me who saved this town.”
A corner of her mind rolled below an avalanche of emotion: thousands of refugees threatened her town. Some terrible evil was eating them from the inside out. This animal...what he had done to the girl.
His cold, sweating belly pressed against her pubis.
The rifle snapped to her shoulder. The sights centered on his chest.
“Whoa,” he held out his left hand, like a magician drawing a bird from the air. His other hand appeared with a revolver. The jars had disappeared while she was stunned by the mayhem of the battlefield. The jars of putrescence must’ve gone down the white, yawning mouths of the up-angled tubes in the back of the Sprinter van.
Gladys’ radio blared to life. On top of the road, she had line-of-sight with her QRF team. “All stations, this is Mat. Hold what you’ve got. Repeat, hold what you’ve got.”
“What’s happening, sir?” another voice cried in her earbuds.
“Just hold what you’ve got. Mat out.”
Jensen’s revolver was out, but not pointing directly at her. His other hand wandered to a milk crate on the tailgate. Her rifle hadn’t drifted a centimeter from his chest.
“Break, break, break.” Gladys keyed her radio with her left hand while the right kept the rifle aimed at Jensen.
“Go for Mat.”
“I’ve got Jim Jensen in front of me getting ready to launch some kind of poison gas into the refugees. This is Gladys.”
She wasn’t asking for orders. She just didn’t know quite what to do. Should she drill this fucker or contain the launcher-weapon. She felt totally overwhelmed. The little, shiny revolver in his hands barely merited consideration. Not from where she stood. Not with people dying in the hundreds.
Jensen’s free hand drifted toward a bright red lever poking out of a cluster of white tubes. He was going to fire the launcher again. He’d send more people to a twisting, tortured death.
“Acknowledged,” was all Mat Best replied.
What the hell was that supposed to mean?
Because of the poison gas, he was going to win this battle, and it’d probably be the final battle. After this, the WMD genie would be out of the bottle. The clutching horror of mass murder would be knocked off the town like dust off an old golf ball. The town would take Jensen’s murder wagon on tour, around to the camps, and by-hook-or-crook, the refugee threat would go somewhere else; either to the Great Beyond or to the next, hapless Tennessee town. For Mat, it would be mission accomplished.
Welcome to the long, lonely road, Mat pictured himself saying to the people of McKenzie, Tennessee. It was kill or be killed and you chose to kill. That was the cost. So, pay up, bitches.
He’d been clutching his binoculars like a grenade with a lost pin. The radio shushed in his ear. He could almost feel Gladys Carter on the other end, waiting.
He pictured William, growing up in a town with mass murder scrawled in the Book of Life.
He pictured himself leaving them all behind; William, Gladys, the Morgans—McKenzie town vanishing in the rearview mirror of his Ford Raptor as he rolled west. Forever west.
“No,” Mat said to gentle breeze. “Win, lose or draw, that’s not me. That’s not them.”
Mat keyed his radio. “Gladys, this is Mat. He doesn’t fire that thing again. Not at any cost. Do you copy?”
“Good copy. Cease fire the cannons,” she replied.
The child molester lurched toward the van when Gladys said, “Cease fire the cannons.” His hand hit the red lever at the same moment she pressed the trigger—twice in quick succession.
Pop-pop. Jensen fell back against the white doors.
Instead of thunk-thunk-thunk, the six gaping mouths of the launcher coughed. Six glass jars puffed out of the tubes, flew four feet and crashed to the gravel. Four of the jars shattered.
Jensen tipped sideways into the Sprinter van and fired his revolver.
Blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, click, click, click.
A bullet punched Gladys below the collarbone. Jim Jensen slid down the door, leaving a bloody smear.
She stared at her former colleague. He wheezed, then hacked; his eyes welled with copious tears.
The gas!
She dropped her rifle and ran. Her clavicle howled in pain. Her lungs were suddenly seized by fire.
Gladys made it a hundred yards before she collapsed onto the asphalt.
“All stations. This is Mat. Consolidate ammunition. Prepare for the second wave.”
This half-mile of HESCO barrier was their last stand, and it’d be Mat, his forty-man QRF and a few hundred lightly-armed townspeople against thousands of desperate, starving barbarians. He had one mag left.
Mat had probably killed them all with his decision to end Jensen’s death cannons, but serenity flowed around him; over his shoulders, through his hair, and it caressed his arms. It smelled a lot like barbecue.
The apocalypse would kill them all eventually, but it’d be on terms Mat, Gladys, the Bible-thumping sheriff and his rosy-cheeked wife could abide. They would hold to the
ir humanity, even in death.
This time, on this field, Mat had the authority to stop the Reaper drone from raining death on the young bride, and he had done it. This would be his own final entry in the Book of Life. He wished he could have Perez here beside him—that his old buddy could die with redemption on his head instead of oxy strangling his soul.
The invisible gas must’ve thinned and blown northeast because another thousand rats surged onto the field from the edge of Carroll’s wood, and these rats knew nothing of poison gas. All they knew was that someone, somewhere was cooking hundreds of pounds of pork. The dead and dying that littered the hayfield meant nothing to them.
Why haven’t they gotten that fire under control? Mat fretted as he went through his magazines and shuffled every bullet into one and a half, twenty-round SCAR mags.
The few hundred rats that’d crossed the HESCO barrier and run into town would’ve reached the source of the smell by now and realized their mistake; the pork was all burned up. Now, they probably rampaged across town, raiding homes for food.
Sporadic gunfire popped and crackled from town proper, but Mat couldn’t allow that fight to distract him from the stunning threat he now faced: two thousand refugees, churning toward him and his hapless cohort.
“All stations, this is Mat. Shoot only those with weapons. Stop everyone you can at the wall, hand-to-hand. This is to-the-death, folks. May God help us. Mat out.”
The first ranks of the rats reached mid-field, where a gravel service road cut across, east to west. They loped up and over the road and poured into the last three hundred yards before the HESCO.
A low rumble built on the wind as the thronging mass of desperate zombies bore down on them. Out of the north, a line of speeding pickup trucks burst onto Carroll’s field, racing down the access road along University Drive, then angling out across the gravel service road, cutting the field in half.
At least twenty trucks of all makes, models and colors cut across the mid-field service road and plunged into the mass of refugees. The trucks smashed through them like ships plowing the sea. Rats dove out of the way as the convoy stretched across the breadth of Carroll’s field. Men and women poured out of the trucks, and leapt from the truck beds, and went instantly to battle with sticks, baseball bats, shovels and rakes.
The fight for Carroll’s field flipped from a siege to a melee in an instant, but it was still thousands of rats against hundreds of defenders, and Mat had no idea who had just thrown themselves into their fight.
“All stations. Reinforcements in mid-field. Move up to the center road. Get off of the wall and help them! Give them cover fire. Go, go, go, go!”
Mat slung his rifle around to his back and climbed over the side of the HESCO. He scaled down the unsteady chainlink, dangling like a sail. He let go and dropped the last ten feet to the muddy field. All the defenders followed. Up and down the HESCO, townspeople slopped across the mud and into the melee.
They charged forward, ignoring the rats that’d made it past the service road. Mat burst onto the gravel road first, punched a rat in the nose, and scanned. He saw Sheriff Morgan below in the field, shoving a woman back the way she’d come. The sheriff stood a head taller and was a fair-sight cleaner than the refugees. He wore a chunk of neon orange survey tape around his head. So did many others—all the others fighting with their back to the town.
“Friendlies are wearing orange tape. All stations acknowledge,” Mat radioed. A refugee raised a knife. Mat shot him through the chest. Another man swung an ax. Mat blew the top of his head off into the hay stubble.
“All stations, look for weapons. Clear shots only. Friendlies are wearing orange marker tape,” he repeated.
Rats charged the raised road bed. Mat butt-checked a guy in the face with the stock of his SCAR. The dude went down with his nose smashed flat. Mat searched the crowd and shot a woman swinging a shotgun like a club, then he shot another man with a hatchet.
All along the service road, town defenders picked their targets and added gunfire to the fist fight. It was impossible to read the tide of battle, but the flow of rats had halted at the melee, and few crossed the gravel road. Fewer still made it across the stretch of churned-up mud to the foot of the HESCO.
Thousands of starving rats had been fighting for fifteen exhausting minutes and, all-at-once their will broke. Whatever spare calories they had in their bodies gave out, like a switch had been flipped. Hundreds folded to the ground like wet paper dolls. Others staggered back the way they’d come. Some fell unconscious from exertion.
“Morgan!” Mat shouted over the din. The sheriff looked up from a fist fight he was winning against a bald man with a goatee. The sheriff delivered a gut punch, the man collapsed forward, then toppled into the mud.
“Can you get your people to pull back to the HESCO?” Mat shouted.
The sheriff bent over his knees, heaving for breath and flashed a thumb’s up.
“All teams, this is Mat. Pull back to the HESCO barrier. Disengage.”
22
Cameron Stewart
“Trust me, the blessed gods have no love for crime.
They honor justice, honor the decent acts of men.”
Eumaeus, The Odyssey
* * *
Main Street,
Saint George, Utah
* * *
The milkshake joint on the main drag of Saint George wasn’t shut down after all. Quite the contrary.
Cameron, Ruth and the kids sat under the awning on the half-rusted picnic tables eating sandwiches and fries for breakfast. The parking lot milled with men and women in camo, and a small tank covered them from the high point on the boulevard where it went over the I-15 freeway.
“I still can’t believe we found you.” Tommy Stewart shook his head. “We were out on patrol to get a look-see at the enemy in the desert. Lo-and-behold, we find your sorry ass with a bunch of polygamists. Um, no offense, ma’am,” Tommy said to Ruth.
“It’s okay. It’s true,” she said. “We’re from Colorado City. We’re polygamists. It’s not offensive to us.”
Tommy nodded. “Where’s Julie?”
Cameron shook his head. “She didn’t make it. They shot her during a trade.”
“Who shot her?” Tommy tensed.
“Rockville. Their town militia. They ambushed us when we traded guns for food.”
“I’m so sorry, Cam.” Tommy reached across the table and put his hand on his brother’s arm. “We were thinking about scouting along the Virgin River today. Maybe we get a little payback on Rockville.”
Cameron shook his head. “I just came from there. I can tell you what’s up. There’s no reason to go there. Rockville will pay for their sins in time. Colorado City, over on Highway 59, is full of tanks. Maybe fifty of them. The Mexican Army, I think.”
“It’s not the Mexican Army that’s in Colorado City,” Tommy corrected. “It’s the cartel. They captured abandoned American tanks and have rolled up all of Arizona, half of New Mexico and everything that’s left of Nevada. We’re holding them at the outskirts of Saint George for now, but they could roll right through us, any time they like. They stopped after annihilating our roadblock in the Virgin River gorge. They’re probably waiting for those other fifty tanks to come up through Hurricane so they can hit Saint George from two directions at once. We don’t have anything that can stop them, and I think they know that. Today, we evacuate. That’s why we’re eating up all the perishable food this morning.”
“So where’s your family?” Cameron asked his brother.
“They’re at Jenna’s place in Salt Lake City. That’s the base of operations for the Mormon Church. General Kirkham’s cobbling together an army to stop the narcos. We’re down here on reconnaissance. The whole state’s rallying to the church banner, Mormon or not. Maybe the whole Intermountain West.”
“A Mormon Church army?” It sounded absurd to Cameron.
“They’re the biggest show in town since the government fell.”
&n
bsp; Cameron chuckled. “Like a big Neighborhood Watch, huh? Are they making everyone join the Mormons? Should I call you Elder Tommy now?”
“Yuck it up. At least I didn’t become a polygamist like some people.” Ruth looked up from her fries. “I’m sorry, again, ma’am.”
She smiled and waved it away. She still wore the long skirts and kept the towering hair of a fundamentalist woman. Cameron felt strangely unconcerned about what his brother might think about him having two wives. After a fashion, he had. In the apocalypse, polygamy might be a survival strategy. A clan was a clan was a clan. Who slept with whom was less important than watching each others’ backs. Even coming from “civilization” in the north, Tommy would probably understand that. Things had gotten weird.
A new reality had been imposed by Mother Nature. Religious differences would get sorted out, but probably not until they figured out how to feed the survivors. Until then, the bigger the team, the better the chance of seeing spring.
Tommy crumpled the wax paper of his sandwich. “The Mormons don’t care if we’re Mormon or not. We’re all in this together. It’s Utahns versus drug dealers, and it’s the Super Bowl of the survival finalists.”
“You guys are going to need lotsa Jesus to beat those tanks.” Cameron shoved the last bite of roast beef sandwich in his mouth.
“That’s the damn truth. I hope General Kirkham has another rabbit up his sleeve.”
“What was the first rabbit?” Cam asked.
“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it on the way back to Salt Lake City. We’ll escort you and your family to Jenna’s place. We’re done here for now. I assume everyone’s going with us?” Tommy waved a fry at Ruth and the kids.
Cameron saw the scene for a moment from his brother’s point of view; Cameron was with a strange woman and her strange kids. Julie was gone. Tommy wouldn’t know if Cam and Ruth were together or “together.”
