Payload
Page 5
“East!” he shouted at the others, praying that they would follow him. “We go east!”
Looking back, he saw that the press of vehicles and their own haste were hindering the zeds-they were jammed together in an unwieldy mob, a delay that was temporary but welcome. He saw a husky teenager run forward yanking on the starting cord of a chainsaw. When the ‘saw burped into life he shoved the throttle to maximum and slashed at the nearest zombie’s head.
The whirling teeth swept a gory ruin across the zed’s scalp and down the side of its head, pulping its ear and cheek before burying itself in the trapezius. The whirling chain-mounted teeth could not get a purchase on the smooth bone dome exposed by the terrible wound, and before the teen could recover his heavy weapon the infected was on him, biting away.
Ripping his pack out of the Land Rover, Bear cast a longing look at his hog, but there was no way it was getting through the mud and muck to the east. Captain Jack was helping an overburdened Doc down the ditch, and Addition was kneeling by the front left wheel working on something. JD was smashing the rear windshield of a late-model Ford sedan and then helping a couple climb out, the vehicle having been pinned between two other wrecks.
“Get them into the woods,” Marv yelled at Bear. “When you’re clear of the road, work your way to the river-I’ll meet up with you there.” The big Ranger dropped into the ditch and trotted north, keeping low.
“C’mon,” Bear yelled at JD. In the middle lane a tough-looking blond man with a pack on his back was shepherding a group of tourists, a lit road flare in each hand. As the zombies closed he advanced upon them, handling the flares like rapiers, and Bear was amazed to see the zeds recoil from the fire. Dancing and weaving, the young man maintained a barrier between the infected and his crowd of charges.
But one man could only do so much- as they emerged from their self-created congestion the infected spilled out across a broader front, and flowed past the flare-wielder.
Bear didn’t wait around to see what happened next.
Passing the open rear of the semi box trailer Marv gave the cavernous cargo area a cursory examination and kept moving, cursing himself for stupidity. His mission was to deliver the payload, a job that was already turning to shit, and here he was taking on additional risk for no real gain. This was his entire life in a single stupid act, he told himself.
What had him on the move was that he had seen one of the men who had opened the truck duck under the trailer heading north, moving very oddly. They obviously knew what they were doing by opening that truck, so it seemed likely they had an exfiltration plan. Marv wanted to know what that plan was, and who they were. And to do something to stop them from pulling this sort of stunt again.
The infected were single-mindedly pouring down the Interstate to attack the people struggling to free themselves from the wreckage; staying low in the ditch except for his look into the truck, Marv was unmolested, both by the infected and the gunfire erupting north of the truck.
Coming up onto the roadway twenty yards north of the semi, pistol in hand, Marv found himself thirty feet from a blue quad-cab dually pickup starting to roll north. A limping man, moving awkwardly, was trying to drag himself into the rear passenger area as the truck rolled not much above idle. A man kneeling in the bed was shooting at a heavyset older man in jeans and a red USMC tee shirt who was firing back with an M-1 Garand. Nearby a woman of similar age to USMC was crumpled in the roadway, a stainless steel revolver still clutched in one hand.
The man in the bed of the truck was punched off his feet by a .30-06 round, but the old Marine’s victory was short-lived as a passenger in the back seat opened up with an automatic weapon and cut him down.
Marv dumped his pack and was moving even as the shots were being exchanged-from the blood on the roadway the old Marine and his wife had had the same realization as the Ranger had had, and their actions had slowed the men long enough for Marv to catch up.
He reached the truck even as the limping man got on board and was trying to swing the door shut. Jamming himself into the opening, Marv shot the limper with the muzzle an inch from the man’s temple, the concussion of the shot deafening him. Firing at the driver and seeing blood fly, Marv rammed the dead limper deeper into the truck as the front passenger fired a pistol at him, the muzzle blast making his head ring as the rear windshield exploded in a shower of safety glass. Fortunately for the Ranger the front passenger was firing blind, half-turned in his seat with the head rest blocking his view of the backseat.
With his right boot on the floorboards and his left hand braced against the truck’s roof, Marv fired twice through the headrest, knocking the front passenger back against the dash. Seeing the weapon coming around out of the corner of his eye, the Ranger heaved himself a few inches deeper into the truck and shot the fourth man, the shooter who had gotten the old Marine, twice in the chest. Heaving himself another half of a foot into the vehicle and managing to get his left leg into the cab, he shot the fourth man in the head for good measure.
It registered that the truck was not only still moving, but picking up speed an instant before a sledgehammer hit the world and an earthquake followed.
In the confusing world of motion, flopping limbs, and hard objects hitting his body a part of Marv’s brain advised him that the truck had hit something, rode up on it, and was now rolling lengthwise into the ditch.
Except it was turning out to be one extremely deep ditch.
It always came down to this: his mother trying to capture his teeth-this was only different in terms of method and scope. Standing, Addison pulled the four second-delay on the pipe bomb he had duct-taped to the gas can and heaved the assembly into the ranks of the zombies.
Catching up his duffle bags, he turned and slid into the ditch.
Bear swept the legs out from the zombie and slammed the bat into its skull until it went limp, cursing the weapon. The bat’s business end was too broad to reliably cave in a skull-he wished he had an ice axe like Addison, but where was he going to find one in Florida?
There was a double explosion up on the Interstate, and a ball of fire blossomed upwards. The few zeds who had followed them off the Interstate immediately turned and stared; Bear took advantage of the distraction to make a mighty two-handed swing that caved in the skull of an infected woman wearing a Denny’s waitress uniform, snarling when his bat cracked just above his grip. Discarding the useless weapon he raced to the east.
Captain Jack had hung a camouflaged poncho liner between two trees, and he and Doc were beckoning the others behind it. “Here,” he called to Bear. “It appears that if they lose sight of a target, they lack motivation.”
Kneeing behind the cloth barrier, Bear peeked around the northern support-tree and saw the slender man was correct: the infected who had followed them were wandering back towards the Interstate. “They watched the fireball,” he whispered to Captain Jack. “Break their attention, and they have to re-acquire.”
“Minimal higher brain function,” Doc nodded. “Basic fight or flight mode: limited short-term memory is consistent with that state of mind.”
“Good to know.”
“Where is Marv?” Captain Jack asked.
“He headed north, said to work our way to the river and wait for him. Moved like he had a plan.”
“Good chap.”
Other than the Ranger they were all present, Bear saw, plus the young couple JD had helped, a husky thirty-ish black woman wearing jeans and a purple tee shirt, and the blond guy who had used the road flares he had seen earlier. Everyone was breathing hard and visibly shaken, except for Addison, who was only breathing hard.
Bear checked his watch. “OK, we wait twenty minutes, catch our breath, then head to the river. Nobody shoot unless I say-the noise is too dangerous. Right now the zeds are sticking to the roadway.”
“What happens at the river?” the road-flare guy asked in a calm voice, keeping it quiet.
“We meet up with one of our guys.”
M
arv never really went out, but he spent quite a while on the edge of it. At some point the truck stopped moving with his body on top of a pile-Airborne training had taught him to roll and relax, and it had helped a lot. When his head finally cleared he realized that the truck was lying on the passenger side with the front end sloping downward and about six inches of muddy water was lapping at the low end of the fractured windshield.
The river, he realized: they must have reached the south end of the bridge and rolled down the slope to the river’s bank. The bridge, he remembered, was about eighty feet above the water.
Testing his limbs, he found a new crop of bruises and a few new abrasions, but nothing serious. Touch-checking his gear, he squirmed to get his feet under him, realizing he had come to rest atop the corpses of the two back seat passengers. The driver was hanging from his seat belt, the air bag sagging limply from the steering wheel; he was alive, but not for long: Marv’s shot had hit him in the neck, and he was steadily bleeding out. The front passenger had ended up between the truck and the river bank, and was no threat to anyone.
Checking outside for infected, Marv took several deep breaths, focusing his thoughts. A helicopter crash and a vehicle rollover in less than twenty-four hours was more than anyone could expect, even from a Ranger. But the mission clock was still running, so he had to dig deep and get moving. FIDO: fuck it, drive on: the mantra of the Infantry, along with FIDMAT: fuck it, don’t mean a thing. Both seemed appropriate at this juncture of his life.
The fourth man was next on the back seat pile; Marv relieved him of an empty Mac-10 machine pistol and went through his pockets. The limper was wearing a wetsuit under blue Wal Mart coveralls, which explained why he was moving funny; the limp was from a gunshot wound. Under the limper Marv found his Colt and a black nylon sports bag that was only a third full, but heavy.
The driver wore a shoulder holster rig with an empty holster and two M1911 magazines in the mag pouches; Marv slotted one into his Colt and felt much better-he only had had the round in the chamber left. The glove box held a box of .45 hollow points, two more loaded M1911 magazines, and a strip map from an online map site.
The front passenger was also wearing a wet suit under Wal Mart coveralls. Checking his pockets was out unless the truck was moved, but Marv did find and confiscate a heavy sports pack whose straps had gotten tangled around his one unpinned arm.
Squirming out onto the river-bank mud, Marv touch-checked his gear again and carefully ran his hands over the payload’s metal case, but the shiny metal was unmarked-titanium was a good choice for this sort of thing, he decided. Other than the loss of his soft cover, his gear was all present. They had hit the crash barrier at the end of the bridge’s rail, he saw, scattering the bright yellow water barrels like ten-pins.
Orienting himself, he rose to a crouch, stifling a groan, and eased away from the wreck, heading east.
The main body of the Yard Gnome Action Team had moved forward to the river bank, a difficult business in the soft, muddy ground, and chosen a position on a sandy patch out of sight of the Interstate.
“Captain Jack, take watch,” Bear rubbed his head. No one else was inclined to give orders, nor seemed inclined to object to his. “Doc, make sure everyone is OK. Hey, are we all here?”
“Yep. Moogie made it,” the medic held up the gnome. He had produced an outdoors folding chair from a forest green nylon tube and was sitting comfortably. The chair was green nylon suspended between black plastic rods, and looked surreal in their current surroundings.
“No, wasn’t there a woman in a purple tee shirt? A black woman?”
“I think she was Cuban,” the road-flare guy offered. “But I didn’t see her after we started moving.”
“Great.” Bear looked back the way they came. “Let me catch my breath and scrape off some of the mud-maybe she just stopped to rest. I’m Bear, by the way.”
“Dyson Winters,” he offered his hand, which was hard and calloused. “You guys are pretty squared away.”
“I saw you with the road flares-that was hardcore. That’s Doc in the chair, that’s Addison, the good-looking guy is JD, and that’s Captain Jack Sawyer. Marv, a soldier, should be joining us soon. He’s what passes for our leader, I guess, although we’re mostly a self-propelled clusterfuck.”
“This is Moogie,” Doc held up the statue again. “We’re the Yard Gnome Action Team, helping Marv get to Texas, part of his mission.”
The young couple were Jack and Toni Adams from Dayton Ohio, on their way home from a honeymoon at Disney World and assorted other tourist points. They had rented a car when flights out of Florida were grounded. She was a pert little blond who did hair, he was a sandy-haired assistant manager of a Jiffy Lube. Dyson turned out to be the operator of a martial arts and mixed fighting styles dojo in Atlanta returning from a UFC event in Miami.
“JD, get an inventory of what we’ve got,” Bear sat down and flipped open his Buck lock blade one-handed. “What’re you guys’ plans?”
“We’re heading back to Dayton,” Jack said. “I’m still working on a plan.”
Noting the unspoken disconnect, Bear started scraping mud off his boots. “Dyson?”
“I’ll stick with you guys until you get close to Atlanta,” the martial artist shrugged. “I think a group is going to be needful.”
“Won’t the government start…sorting things out?” Toni asked, fear in her voice. Jack put his arm around her shoulders.
“Sure,” Dyson nodded, handing his pack to JD. “Just a matter of days. But right now, how do we get across the river?” He stabbed a dirty finger towards I-75. “I could slip across, I’m a sneaky bastard, but there’s no way a group will make it. Those things tend to stay in place.”
“I don’t know,” Bear admitted. “But Marv is an Airborne Ranger, and I expect he’ll have ideas. Doc, where are you going?”
“Just a little bit east-I’m going to burn these samples I took. I’m using Sterno, so there won’t be any smoke.”
“Is that safe?”
“Very much so.”
“Wait, you mean you had those samples you took back at Sid’s in the Land Rover this whole time?”
Doc held up a multi-compartmented container. “Full isolation protocols, never fear. I needed time for the protein tests to run their course.”
“Doc, if I find out you’re carrying any piece, part, or extrusion of an infected subject, or anything similar, I will beat you like a rented mule. You could live to a hundred and the beating will still be fresh and clear in your memory, you get it?”
“How can I conduct research?” the medic protested.
“Don’t. Because if I catch you trying, you’ll never conduct anything with those hands again. I’m not kidding-I just beat a Denny’s waitress to death with a baseball bat, and I’m not in the mood to compromise. We are permanently a virus-free zone.”
“What if Marv says it’s OK?”
“Marv would probably shoot you. Besides, what he thinks doesn’t affect me-I ain’t in the Army.”
Doc headed off, muttering.
“Well met, old chap,” Captain Jack drawled cheerfully. The others turned to see a muddy Marv limping into camp.
“…and the truck rolled,” Marv took another drink from the bottle of water. “I’m the sole survivor, as it were. The guys involved looked to be a mix of Hispanic narcos and Asian guys, but not Chinese, probably further south. Indonesian, I’m guessing based on the coins one guy had. The operators from the Wal Mart truck were wearing wet suits, zombie armor, I figure. They had worked up a barrier of heavy plastic sheeting over the trailer entrance just inside the doors which I think was intended to delay the infected long enough for the operators to get clear.”
“In short, a terror attack,” JD observed.
“Exactly.”
“Here, take these,” Doc shook two pills from a bottle into Marv’s hand. “Anti-inflammatory. I’ll give you some muscle relaxers when we make camp.”
“Now, post-missio
n debriefing: what, if any, intelligence did we get from this operation, besides what I just told you guys?”
“The zeds don’t like fire,” Bear pointed out. “Dyson held them at bay with railroad flares.”
“They are easily distracted, and if they lose sight of the target, they generally won’t re-acquire,” Captain Jack said.
“Baseball bats suck,” Bear shook his head. “Too hard to breach the skull.”
“Good stuff,” Marv nodded. “The more we learn, the better off we are.”
“My point exactly…” Doc began, but Bear cut him off.
“Doctor Frankenstein has been carting around infected samples,” the biker jerked a thumb at the medic.
“That ends,” Marv shook his head. “We have enough problems. Destroy all you have and don’t gather any more.”
“But I confirmed my theory-the saliva-producing glands are the vector epicenter,” Doc protested. “Blood is a possible transmission medium, of course, but its much less so than, say, HIV. It is also remarkably weak-even the saliva won’t remain vital for more than seconds outside a body.”
“Great, you’ve confirmed your theory.” Marv gave Doc a thumbs-up. “I catch you with another sample and your next theory will be establishing whether a human being can survive being gelded with unsterile instruments. You read me?”
“…yeah,” the medic muttered.
“What’s our supply situation?”
JD shrugged. “We kept all our firearms and ammunition, but we lost most of the melee weapons-we’re down to one bat and Addison’s ice axe. Oh, yes, Doc has a katana. We got all the medical gear and probably enough camping gear to function, and about a day’s worth of bottled water, but no food.”