Five Roads To Texas | Book 11 | Reciprocity [Sidney's Way 3]

by Parker, Brian

  “Keep your clothes on,” he grumbled. “I’m not going to have sex with you poor girls. Where’s the bathroom?”

  He really did need to piss some more. After he took care of that, he’d figure out what to do next. He either had to try to break out now, or he would have to go along with the gang for a while until an opportunity presented itself to get away.

  As he unzipped his pants and began to piss into the toilet, he whistled the old Price is Right tune. “I’ll take door number one, Bob,” Grady mumbled aloud.

  There wasn’t a chance in fuck he was gonna stick around here longer than he needed to. Scorpion believed that his offer of safety, women, and power was enough to make Grady join the gang. Wrong. Then, they made the mistake of untying him. Why were people so dumb?

  When he came out of the room, the girls were sitting on the bed, staring blankly at him. “How many guards are outside the door?”

  “What?” the white girl asked.

  “Guards.” He pointed toward the bedroom door. “I heard Scorpion talking to somebody. How many of them are out there?”

  “Um… I don’t know, man,” she replied. “You gonna have sex with us or what? If you don’t, Scorpion might get mad at us.”

  “Don’t worry about him anymore.” Grady’s eyes searched the room for some type of weapon. He needed something. Something—There! His eyes came to rest on the closet. It was a terrible weapon choice, but it was all he could come up with on short notice. Like his old pal, Pete “Skipper” Thompson, used to say, “If it works, it ain’t stupid.”

  Pete had been his team leader at The Havoc Group for years until his body betrayed him and he had to move into the business management side of the house. Grady felt a momentary pang of loss for his friend, who was likely long dead by now.

  His eyes narrowed as he eyed the closet door. “I’m trying to put an end to this mess and these fucking gangbangers are standing in my way.”

  “What?” one of the girls mumbled.

  He glanced at them. They’d taken off their shirts and were caressing one another as they kissed, watching him, inviting him to them. The stark contrast of pale white skin against the other girl’s dark skin was definitely interesting. “I said no.”

  Grady opened the closet door all the way and there it was: his new weapon. “Let’s take you out for a test drive, buddy.”

  22

  * * *

  LIBERAL, KANSAS

  MARCH 7TH

  Light filtered in through the drapes over the window, hurting Sidney’s eyes. She slowly became aware of breathing near her ear. Mark still slept on the bed next to her where they’d fallen asleep, huddled together for warmth the night before.

  “Oh goddammit. No fucking way,” she hissed, shoving his hand off her breast and scooting her hip away from his erection. “Ew!”

  “Wha?”

  “Get off me, perv.”

  “Huh?”

  She sat up. The kid was obviously just waking up. He hadn’t been copping a feel while she slept, it was just how he’d ended up. “Get up. It’s morning,” she ordered.

  Mark lifted his arm and looked at his watch. “Dang, it’s, like, noon. We must have been worn out.”

  “Really?” Sidney looked at her own watch. “That sucks.”

  Mark stood and shuffled to the window. He watched for a moment, then returned. “Doesn’t really matter. The crazies are still all over the place. A bunch of ’em are just sort of milling about.”

  Sidney nodded, then went into the bathroom. She peed in the empty toilet and came back out. “Any sign of the Iranians?”

  “A couple, but they’re all newly infected now.”

  She unsnapped a button keeping one of her backpack flaps closed over a pocket and retrieved a pair of small binoculars. “Let’s see what we can see.”

  After observing a while, Sidney decided there really wasn’t much to see at the fort and she handed the binoculars to Mark. “Not much left over there,” she said, sliding down the wall to the floor. “Not much left anywhere.”

  Mark looked down at her before moving away from the window. He sat on the bed, then pushed himself off the bed. He sat down on the floor directly across from Sidney. “You okay?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Yeah. I’m just…” She sighed. “What’s the point of all this?”

  “We took out like twenty or thirty of those Iranian dudes,” Mark said proudly. “You and me. That’s twenty or thirty guys who aren’t gonna come after us later on.”

  Sidney grunted. She didn’t like being stuck in this house. She hated the feelings of weakness and hopelessness that accompanied being trapped. They took her mind to a dark place, one that she’d thought she’d put behind her after she found out that she was going to be a mother.

  “I’m just sick of always running and feeling like we’re never gonna be safe, y’know?”

  “Yeah,” Mark agreed.

  “And now we’re trapped in this house.”

  “Only for a day or two,” the boy reminded her. “The crazies will get bored soon enough and move on. Then we’ll get back on the road. Or else, we could…”

  He trailed off, not wanting to speak the words. Sidney knew he was offering to abandon their mission and return home. She could return to Lincoln and he could go back to Katie. It would be so easy to go back to the safehouse with their story of victory.

  Sure, they’d put a minor dent in the Iranian operation, but in the grand scheme of things, what did it matter? Not counting last night’s action, they’d killed more than fifty of the foreigners in the last month or so. Yet, there always seemed to be more of them, waiting for their opportunity to kill Sidney’s group. That was why she’d chosen to take the fight to them. She was sick of running. Sick of wondering if today was going to be her last day. Sick of…of everything. She needed to find some type of safety and if that meant killing more Iranians, then so be it.

  Sidney picked at her fingernail in frustration. “No,” she said. “We can’t head back. I can’t head back. You could though. You could tell everyone that we took this place out and gave them a lot of breathing room.”

  “I’m not going back without you. You need me. Without me, that attack wouldn’t have worked at all, and, you would have fallen off the roof to the infected down below. Like it or not, you’re not Super Woman or something. You need my help.”

  She nodded. He was right. He’d saved her ass twice already. “I’m grateful for your help. I really am, but—”

  “Don’t,” Mark grunted. “Just don’t, okay?”

  Their conversation ended in a stalemate, so Sidney went to her pack for some food. She had some old beef jerky and ramen noodles. Yum.

  A few hours later, they heard the sound of an engine in the distance. Almost immediately after they heard that, the gunfire began. “What’s happening?” Mark asked.

  They crawled to the window. The gunfire was coming from the base. Whoever was still alive over there had been quiet all morning and now they were shooting up a ton of ammo.

  “They must have heard the truck too.”

  They watched as the ambling horde of infected surged toward the base where several people were shooting. The defenders did a good job of putting down the crazies with head shots and decimating machine gun fire. Sidney found herself almost rooting for the Iranians to keep up the great work as they killed scores of infected, helping to clear the area for her and Mark.

  “Should we try to leave?” she asked aloud.

  “What?” Mark’s voice cracked slightly in his quick response.

  “They’re distracting the infected. Should we take the opportunity to leave?”

  “Uh… Hold on.”

  Mark got up and went into one of the front bedrooms. He returned within a few seconds. “Nah, probably not,” he said. “All this is just bringing more of them from the surrounding area. It actually might be making it worse.”

  The gunfire increased in intensity, causing Sidney to look back out the window. Two tr
ucks, filled with men shooting, were advancing slowly toward the base from the east. They were attempting to rescue the remaining defenders.

  A line of smoke trailed away from the lead truck and an explosion sent bodies flying. They were shooting RPGs at the clusters of infected, helping to clear a path toward the base. Men threw hand grenades into the thick clumps of bodies surrounding the vehicles, while truck-mounted machine guns—the big ones that were too heavy to carry away—tore into the crowd, each round practically cut the infected in half. The response was insanely overwhelming. And it was working.

  The trucks reached the base perimeter. Sidney and Mark watched as six or seven Iranians rushed from a building, firing from the hip at whatever target presented itself. The big guns swept the crowds, creating mounds of dead. Once the defenders made it to the trucks, the drivers had to turn around.

  That’s when the glorious rescue took a turn for the worse.

  There was only room for them to execute a three-point turn, so the trail vehicle reversed. The back wheels left the roadway as they backed up, sinking into the soft soil there. The driver spun the wheels, further complicating their plight as he tried to gain any type of traction. The soldiers in the back continued to fight valiantly, despite their obviously precarious situation. The infected fell by the dozens.

  Then the big machine gun went quiet. Sidney got her binoculars and saw two men working frantically to clear a jam or reload it. Since it was a piece of equipment that she’d never used, she was unfamiliar with what they were doing. One man wore oversized gloves and he struggled to remove the gun’s barrel at the awkward angle the crew found themselves on beside the road.

  The infected surged, their numbers seemingly endless as they swept into both sides of the truck. Up and over the back of the open bed, they tore the men from their places, ending the threat to them from that vehicle. She swung the binoculars to the left and saw the men in the first truck still firing. The barrel of that machine gun seemed to be glowing red. Not good.

  The two of them watched as the machine gun continued to rake the crowd and the men with regular rifles and hand-carried machine guns fired into the press of bodies. The larger explosions had stopped, so Sidney figured their supply of grenades was gone. The truck-mounted machine gun was key. That’s what had been the other truck’s undoing.

  “Come on. Come on,” she muttered as this truck also attempted a three-point turn.

  “Are you actually rooting for them?” Mark asked.

  She grinned self-consciously. “Yeah, I guess so. Crazy, right? We were trying to kill all of them last night, but now I’m sort of hoping they make it. They’re human, you know?”

  “They sure are killing a lot of the crazies.”

  “Hundreds of them,” Sidney agreed. “That helps us in the long run.”

  Mark pointed toward the trucks. “Makes you wonder just how many of them are out there in the cornfields, huh?”

  “Yeah, I know. Liberal was a small city, twenty-five thousand or so, but geez, there’s a lot of—oh no.”

  Mark followed her gaze. The large machine gun was silent, its barrel glowing white hot. The muzzle was rapidly sinking as the super-heated metal warped beyond repair. The additional defenders from the fort helped to stave off the quick overwhelming attack of the infected, but only for a few minutes.

  The infected swarmed over one another in their frenzy to reach the men in the back of the trucks. When they finally clawed their way over the bodies of their fellow infected, they tore at the men, who used their rifles as clubs. The battle raged fiercely for several seconds, but in the end, it was hopeless. There were simply too many of the infected. They were unbothered by injury and fearless in their crazed state.

  Then it was over. Bodies littered the ground around the failed rescue vehicles. They’d wiped out an incredible number of the infected, and it hadn’t mattered. The mass of infected moved around and over the vehicles, searching for more victims. It was an awful sight.

  Sidney swallowed dryly. It was a stark reminder of how dangerous the infected were. “We need to keep this in mind when we attack their main base,” she said, her voice hoarse.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Hiding,” she responded. The way the attack on the patrol base went down was almost perfect, minus being trapped in this house for right now. She wanted to think about how they could do the same thing at the bigger Iranian airbase in town. “We have to stay hidden in a safe place where the infected can’t get to us and don’t even know we’re there. Just like we did here.”

  He nodded without replying.

  “So now, we wait,” she sighed, lifting the binoculars to her eyes once more to watch the men in each of the truck cabs. They were trapped, but for how long? The infected could see them. It was only a matter of time until they succumbed to madness and chose to kill themselves or open the doors to let the creatures take them.

  23

  * * *

  MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK

  MARCH 7TH

  “Their turf is the next block over,” Phil said, pointing down a side street. “Just walk down this alley and somebody will meet you.”

  “You’re not coming with us?” Jake asked the former police officer.

  “I got a shift down at the market.” Phil smirked. “Look, kid, Jefferson and the Kings have a truce. We aren’t gonna risk screwing up the balance of power here in Manhattan. Your guy is a rogue. He got you into this mess, you’ll have to get yourselves out of it. You got thirty dudes with assault rifles. As far as we know, the Latin Kings have about eighty or ninety guys with knives, clubs, and a few handguns. Sounds like even odds to me.”

  Jake swallowed hard as he looked down the street. “Why is it that they don’t have very many guns? I mean, yeah, I know New York City gun laws and all that, but criminals don’t give a shit about the law.”

  The cop nodded. “We got a lot of guns off of the streets back in the day, but they always got more. I guess I should say that the gangs are mostly out of bullets, not guns. They had some major gang wars early on for control of parts of the city, really reduced the numbers of mouths to feed, if you know what I mean. After a couple of months of firing thousands, hundreds of thousands of rounds, at each other, the idiots shot up all their ammo. There’s no way to restock unless you go over to Jersey where the loonies are everywhere.”

  Jake groaned at their stupidity. How many innocents had been caught in their crossfire? No wonder there weren’t quite as many people around as he’d have thought there would be in New York. Sure, there were way more people than anywhere else these days, besides maybe Fort Bliss, but that wasn’t saying much.

  “Alright, thanks for letting us know where to go,” Jake said after a moment’s contemplation. “I guess we’ll be on our way. Look for us to come back to the apartment complex soon.”

  “Don’t you be coming directly to the boss’ HQ with your tails between your legs, empty handed,” Phil warned. “The boss wants Harper alive, but he’ll take the body so he can go do his scientist shit on it. That means you either gotta take out the Kings—which is a win for everybody in the city—or you gotta negotiate for the body. Either way, Scorpion can never know that we helped you in any way. Got it?”

  “Yeah. I understand, Phil. Thanks. We appreciate all of your help.”

  “Don’t thank me yet.” The big cop reached out a hand and Jake took it. “Good luck, Lieutenant. I hope I see you again.” With that, Phil turned and walked quickly back toward the marketplace where they’d first seen him.

  Jake watched him go for a moment before calling his squad leaders over for a quick mission brief. He had no real plan besides walking into the Latin Kings’ neighborhood with his platoon and seeing what developed. Jake had made the hard decision to leave four guys back at the apartment complex, plus Taavi and David, to watch over the platoon’s gear that wouldn’t be used for the assault. That left him with thirty-one guys to attack an enemy with at least double their numbers on the
ir home turf—terrible odds. The Army had taught him that you should have a minimum of a three-to-one advantage when you’re attacking an enemy position, but you play the hand you’re dealt and Harper had given them a fistful of dog shit.

  “Alright,” Jake said, rubbing his hands together as he thought. It would have to be as basic of a movement as possible, something that everyone had done several thousand times. There wasn’t any time to train and rehearse some bullshit Hollywood attack. He remembered one of his TACs at West Point telling his platoon about the K.I.S.S. Principle. Keep It Simple, Stupid. The more complicated he made the plan, the more likely it was to fall apart once they initiated contact.

  He’d given a little bit of thought to how they should accomplish this goatfuck that Harper had presented them with. It primarily involved a two-prong assault into enemy territory. “Sergeant Ogden, you’re with me. Your squad will take the route Phil indicated. Bounding overwatch by fire team. Staff Sergeant Gallegos, take your squad up a block, then turn west. Sergeant Turner, I want you to go with first squad. We’ll send a runner with you. When you get in position to move in, set a ten minute timer and send the runner back here to let us know the countdown. We’ll advance into the neighborhood at the same time. Corporal Jones, your squad is in reserve. I want you to stay here at our point of entry and be ready to shift where you’re needed.”

  The corporal held up a hand. “Sir?”

  “Wait until he’s done,” Sergeant Turner grumbled.

  “I don’t want to get into a firefight with these guys on their turf because they’ll have the advantage. We need to present ourselves as non-threateningly as possible, but Phil said these guys are extremely territorial and their neighborhood is no-go territory for anyone not associated with the gang, so that might be decided for us the moment we go in. We don’t know how big the neighborhood actually is. It might be a block or two, or maybe more. No idea. Our goal is to retrieve Grady Harper, wherever they have him.”