“Fuck,” was all Ray-Ban said.
“Is that…”
“Yeah, that’s an RPG.”
I heard engines, and saw in the rearview that four motorcycles were coming in fast behind us. Brick was looking out the back windows. “Contact, rear, four bikes!”
Ray Ban didn’t take his eyes off the guy in front of us. “RPG up front!”
“They all have military gear,” Brick informed us, and flipped the safety off his M4. “We can take the ones in back, but that RPG will waste our MRAP, and it’s a long fuckin’ walk to Texas.”
Our MRAP? Whoa. Just whoa.
Ray-Ban got up and joined Brick, the other marine Kinga, and Tim in the back of the truck, “What’s up, boss?” They were all checking their weapons, even Tim.
“Business as usual, we kill them all.”
“That RPG is a game-changer.”
“Doesn’t change the plan, those are Reapers. Come out shootin’ and don’t get shot.”
I joined them in the back just as a guy on the driver’s side yelled in to us, “Yoo hoo! Do you have any Miracle Whip?”
I checked my HK416, fear making my heart pound. I have no idea how these guys did this kind of thing every day even before the plague. They were dropped into situations where everybody wanted to kill you, and they did it for shit pay.
Ray-Ban pointed at Brick then pointed left. He pointed at Kinga, and pointed right. He pointed at the two of us and whispered, “Stay behind me, don’t fucking shoot me.”
We nodded, and I stood from my crouch, the guy who had asked for salad dressing (yeah, Miracle Whip is a salad dressing, if you find a rotten jar of it someplace look at the label) called out again, “You comin’ out or are we comin’ in? Any chicks in there?”
He knocked on the door. “Don’t worry, we can open this up, we have a can opener.”
I looked out the front window at their can opener. The guy with the RPG was looking bored. He got a sudden smile on his face, and I knew we were screwed. I was about to turn and scream to Ray-Ban to open the door, when Remo stepped out from between the two trucks, pulled the big dude’s hair back, and jammed his big ass knife into the guys Adam’s apple. He didn’t slice across, he jabbed down and sawed right for half a second, more or less decapitating the guy. Fucker was dead before he knew he was under attack. As he fell, Remo grabbed the RPG, spun to his left and fired it. We all heard it streak to wherever he pointed it. There was a significant BOOM! followed by small arms fire from outside.
Screams started before Ray-Ban pushed the door open, leapt out and fired into the guys that were looking in all directions behind us. They did a little dance before falling to the ground clutching at themselves. The other two marines went right and left, but the RPG and Remo’s M9 had already taken the rest of the bad guys out. One of the guys in the RPG blast zone was screaming, but I hadn’t seen what he looked like yet.
Remo was leaning against the MRAP unwrapping a stick of gum. I leaned next to him, and he held out the pack to me. I grabbed a stick and Remo pulled his M9 and shot one of the Reapers that had been trying to stand. The guy was a hundred feet away, and Remo drilled him in the chest. The best word I can think of for the way he had shot the guy is nonchalantly. Yeah, I can rock an adverb.
“Clear,” he said as he chewed his Big Red.
“Clear!” I heard from the other three marines almost in synch.
Brick ran over to the guys who had been hit by the RPG. One was goo, and the other had stopped screaming and was just kind of rasping. It was this ragged breath/cough thing, and I will never forget that sound.
Ray-Ban trotted up to the guys he had shot, and I heard two more shots as I made my way to the RPG guys. It was bad. I had seen this kind of thing before when I had first met my pal Ship, and these redneck douches had been ravaged by a few claymores.
I heard retching, and turned to see Tim with his hands on his knees back by the MRAP. The goo guy looked like…goo. There wasn’t a lot left. The other guy was a real mess, but was at least recognizable as human. His right arm and leg were hamburger. Think about that for a second. Hamburger. It is exactly what his arm and leg looked like, strings of meat with some bone fragments sticking here and there. He was a good twenty feet from where the RPG had hit the ground, and his other leg was bent under him. He was holding his guts in with his left hand, and was doing a shitty job because a purple loop of intestine slid out and hung like one of those strings of hot dogs you used to see in the deli section of the supermarket.
The guy made this sound like ug-guh about three times and he died. Fuck him. What do you think he was going to do to us? I doubt a game of checkers was an option. We checked all the other bodies, and took care of them before they turned. One had started to stir, and he put one hand out to push himself up before I drilled him. They all had these cool black vests with a scythe and the words Devil’s Reapers on the back in red and white. Remo strode back to the bikes and sat on one. He looked it over then got off and scrunched down next to it. It looked like he was working on it.
He strode back to us and said, “My bag is back there.” He thumbed over his shoulder back towards town. “And there’s something I need to take care of. Don’t touch the motorcycles. Fifteen minutes.”
He began walking down the street toward town and moved off the road into the trees. I thought about dragging the Reapers’ bodies out off of the road, but screw that. They could rot or be eaten by whatever. They did have some good shit. Three M4s, a Squad Automatic Weapon, various pistols, and the RPG. There were no extra warheads (grenades?) for the RPG, but there was considerable ammo for the other weapons, and we took it all plus the guns.
I strolled back to the bikes with Kinga. “Remo said not to—”
“Not gonna. Just checkin’ shit out.”
We got to the bikes and looked at them. I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but Kinga got down on one knee and inspected it. He huffed and gave a low whistle.
“What?”
“Remo booby trapped it. He’s got a frag on the head with a wire to the spoke, look.”
Indeed, there was a wire, but I had to get down and look closely to see it.
Kinga looked at me with a half-smile. “Boom. He he.”
Walking back to the MRAP, we heard a series of small explosions from Lincoln, and noticed some oily black smoke pouring into the air. We waited inside the truck for almost fifteen minutes, and suddenly Remo was there, knocking on the back door.
“What was that about?” Brick asked Remo when he was inside with us.
“Three trailers full of rotters parked back there. Looks like the Reapers were waiting to find the camp and then drop an infected bomb on it.”
“Well, screw them then.”
“Yup.”
I went to get in the driver’s seat, and Brick stood up, getting in my way. “I was thinking I might take a stab at driving.”
“Think that and you might just get stabbed,” I told him and brushed past. He was looking at me wide-eyed when I looked back into the cabin. “Buckle up, jarheads, this train is rolling.”
Remo wasn’t looking at me, but he did have the slightest hint of a smile on his face.
When You’ve Got To Go, You’ve Got to Go
Brick was under the impression we should take the heads of the Reapers and put them on posts for their buddies to find with a note that told them to fuck off. Ray-Ban thought it would just incense them instead of scare them, and Remo said it would take too much time. Brick then said we should mess up their bikes, but Remo put the kibosh on that too, citing that he had left them a present, and he wanted someone to open it.
In the end, we just moved west on the 200, following the road through the mountains, and then south on Route 141 until we hit Route 12 west. 12 intersected with Interstate 90 south. This would bring us eventually to the city of Butte, and we wanted to stay far away from that, so we decided to hook south until we reached Interstate 15.
The little town of Deer Lodge
was on the route, and we thought that might be a good place to find some fishing rods for some fresh fish. There were rivers everywhere, and a fishing excursion with the toughest men on the planet watching my ass sounded pretty nice. We took a left on Beck Hill Road, which the map told us would bypass a few miles of highway, including a bridge. Freeze Out Lane (no shit) continued where Beck Hill turned under I90, so we took that, and then a few other roads until we saw smoke in the distance. The smoke was coming from behind some low hills, so we parked the MRAP and went forward on foot, Tim and Kinga staying with the vehicle.
Ray-Ban, Brick, Remo, and I snuck up the side of a small hill and looked down on the town. The smoke was coming from barrels with fires in them. The entire town looked to be an armed encampment like I had seen in Havre, and my heart actually jumped a little. If two pissant Montana towns could hold out, then maybe there were more with many more people. Maybe we could eke out an existence, waiting for the pus bags to rot away. I started to stand, feeling some genuine joy for once, and Brick grabbed my load-bearing vest and yanked me back down. I looked at him all pissy, and he pointed to some of the people, obviously human, walking in the town.
They were human. They weren’t stumbling or lurching. They were walking around like humans would. I didn’t get it until Brick gave me his binoculars and pointed again. I peered through the glasses and then I could see what he was on about.
Most of the people walking around had black vests on. This was a Reaper town, probably their home base. I heard, “Son of a bitch,” come from Remo. He was looking through his own binocs, and I followed his gaze. Two of the Reapers were dragging a guy out into the street, hitting him with black clubs. When he would hold his hand up to protect himself, they just clubbed him harder. They hit him and hit him until he stopped moving.
Looking at the small town through the binoculars, more of the same was happening, albeit not as bad as the stick beating. The streets were mostly empty, but every now and then some Deer Lodge citizen someone would need something, and they would have to brave the streets to get it. Often times, someone in a black vest would shove them, or swat them.
There wasn’t a zombie in sight.
So the Reapers had taken over the town and cleared it, or they had taken it after it had been cleared. Either way, you took your life in your hands walking out into the streets as much from the bikers as from the zombies in another shitty town.
“Thirty six that I can see,” Ray-Ban said as the lowered his binoculars. “It should be tonight, when they’re drunk.”
WTF was he talking about?
“Yeah but there could be a hundred in the buildings that we don’t see. Look there.” Brick pointed toward a large parking lot near what looked like a hotel. There were dozens of motorcycles parked there. Maybe Brick was right, maybe there were a hundred bikers. But what did we care? We were going way, way around this crappy town.
Brick took his binoculars back from me. “I’m not crazy about the ones we can’t see.”
“I’m not terribly fond of the ones we can see,” Ray-Ban huffed, “Remo?”
Remo was looking through a larger pair of binoculars. “We fuckin’ kill em all.”
So I guess we weren’t going around the town. We got back to the MRAP a few minutes later, and Kinga was asking how it looked. Now, we had been looking at the place for maybe ten minutes. I had seen that there were buildings, and bad guys between the buildings, and no zombies. That’s what I saw.
These guys proved their badassery to me once again when they hunkered down, started drawing in the dirt and citing that this was a hundred meters from there so it would be a good cover spot and that this rock is the water tower and it’s twenty meters high, with two Reaper spotters on it. This is a possible barracks because we saw this dude come out and when the door was open we saw a bunch more of the Reapers in there. There are guards here, here, here, and here, don’t know about a rotation schedule.
These Marine dudes were legit. I looked at Tim, and he at me, and we must have looked a little nervous because three of the tough guys told us not to worry about it at the same time. Remo was shockingly silent.
Ray-Ban got up off his haunches and pitched a rock into the dust. “We can’t just roll in there and nuke the place, there’s civvies. I doubt they have NVGs, but we should still be cautious during the incursion.”
Once again, I don’t want you, Dear Reader, to think that I’m a total douche. I’ve done some badass shit in the past year; you know that because you’ve gotten this far in my journals. I am not a pussy. I am also not a friggin’ Navy SEAL, or one of these MARSOC boys. Hell, I wasn’t even a boy scout. I was getting better at the whole military thing, but the bottom line is that I didn’t think I would survive a running gun battle with these Reaper assholes. There were just too many.
Don’t get me wrong, I know that my escorts are more than capable of killing ten bad guys each in the blink of an eye, but all they need is one stray bullet, and their force is cut down by twenty five percent. Not to mention, that while I consider myself somewhat capable now, I can’t compete with a hundred well-armed dickweeds that have probably been killing people for fun for a generation or two. I didn’t want to complain, and I certainly wasn’t about to tell these guys that I was taking my MRAP and going home, but come on? What could I do?
Turns out the decision was made for me. We ended up pulling the truck back, and parking it in the garage of the deserted, ramshackle local fire station. Why was there a fire station on the outskirts of a small town sans fire truck? No idea. “You two stay here,” Ray-Ban told us. “If we aren’t back in twenty four hours, you take off and head for the Gulf.”
Damn he sounded cool.
The four of them took off without so much as a backward glance. Not that I could have seen said glance in the dark. As soon as the professional killers were outside of ass-saving distance, the creepiness of a rickety old fire house in a pitch black, post-apocalyptic world amped up to a gazillion. Tim and I decided we would be better served waiting inside our bullet-resistant, zombie-proof truck. We heated some MREs right in the MRAP, Tim got chicken pesto, and I got sausage with gravy.
People in the movies are always bitching about how airplane food and MREs are awful and they taste like dust or worse, but that simply isn’t true. Try prison food. Ketchup on something that looks like spaghetti. The sausage with gravy MRE (from the Menu H case) is effing delicious.
We cleaned up, played a couple rounds of Crazy Eights with a deck of cards I had traded for in the last camp, and I realized that the delicious sausage meal I had eaten was wreaking havoc on my innards. I told Tim I had to drop a deuce, and he laughed like hell telling me he had never heard that before. I didn’t think it was funny, but grabbed some toilet paper, checked our surroundings, and went to look for the toilet in the fire house.
The bathroom was on the second floor, and I creaked up the stairs with Tim close on my heels. No way was I going anywhere alone, possibly ever again. We passed the fire pole on the way to the bathroom, and I thought that there was absolutely no chance I was not sliding down that to get back to the truck.
The bathroom door was stuck open with one of those little rubber wedges when we found it. There were two stalls and a urinal. The first stall had no toilet, just a hole where one used to be. The second one did have a toilet, but it was so disgusting that I opted to poop outside. I thought about using the hole in the floor, but that just didn’t appeal to me. We exited the bathroom, walking back to the unsteady stairs. I tested the fire-pole by shaking it, and we both slid down it. It was epic.
I checked out some windows, the area looking particularly zombie free, and we moved outside. Being in prison with a cellmate, there isn’t even the illusion of privacy, so I was used to squatting with other guys around. Tim kept a lookout while I took care of business. When I was done, we made our way back to the MRAP. I opened the door to the firehouse garage, heard this whooshing sound and inky blackness took over as the ground rushed up to meet m
e.
Reapers
Thirsty. In this friggin’ apocalypse, you would think hunger would be the biggest issue, but I always seem to be thirsty. Pain throbbed through my melon before I could attempt another thought. The just-bumped-your-head-on-something-extremely-solid-and-unforgiving kind of pain. The one that sucks for a minute and subsides so that you have a dull throb. This didn’t subside. It threatened to turn me into a quivering pile of jelly. This was bad, and remember, I’ve been shot in the head.
I opened my eyes (mistake) and light assaulted my senses through my rods and cones in the form of a sharp spear of torment. The little bastard in charge of the pain shut off switch was looking to get a raise, and he threw that damn lever as far into the ON position as my optic nerves would allow. It hurt so bad I was nauseated for a moment. Yup, you guessed it, sausage and gravy came out all over the floor. I had the nerve to turn my head to the side to puke, and that sent further requisitions of suffering to the pain guy. In triplicate.
I rolled back on the cot I was on and waited for a moment for everything to equilibrate. I dared to open my eyes, and then wished I had kept them the F closed. I was in jail. Bars on the window. Bars for a door. Bars for a wall on one side of me and several other cells, all occupied. For a split second, I felt extremely safe. Every person in the cells looked to be in the same shape I was in. I could see through the cell next to me and into the one beyond, and the two guys in there were bloody and beaten. Another three cells were across from me and the inhabitants were in the same state.
I heard a door open, and two guys strode in laughing and talking. They sauntered down the corridor between the six cells and came to look at me.
“Hey, he’s up!”
The Zombie Theories (Book 2): Conspiracy Theory Page 14
