Mancini leveled his handgun and fired off two shots, dropping the front runners of the onrushing feral crowd. The gunfire boomed in a hollow echo beneath the canopy. Trey slammed the transmission into drive and began pulling away from the gas pumps.
“Come on, man,” he yelled to Mancini. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Mancini turned and jogged alongside the Thunderbird then rounded the trunk to approach the passenger door. He felt his left sleeve being violently tugged from behind and half swiveled around to see a scowling infected man, wearing the torn remains of a gray jog shirt grabbing at his arm. Mancini shrugged off his attacker’s grip and swung his right fist at the assailant’s face. The handgun barrel smashed onto the bridge of the infected guy’s nose, demolishing the soft tissue amidst a cloud of blood. The infected man rocked backward under the impact of the blow and Mancini twisted and ducked away from the grasping hands of the enclosing infected horde.
“Get in the fucking car, will you?” Trey bellowed. He was contemplating hitting the gas and leaving Mancini behind. They had a few more seconds before the Thunderbird was totally engulfed in a sea of gnashing teeth and flesh tearing hands.
Mancini fired two more shots, randomly into the crowd. He ran alongside the car, struggling to keep pace with the increasing speed.
“Jump, man,” Trey yelled.
Mancini leapt into the Thunderbird’s interior. His head burrowed into the passenger side foot well and his legs scrabbled for purchase, either side of the head rest. His trailing foot thumped against the side of Jorge’s head as he thrashed around in an attempt to regain an upright position. Trey stamped his foot on the gas pedal and the Thunderbird lurched forward at gathering speed.
Finger nails scraped against the sides of the car and along the trunk as Trey accelerated out of the garage forecourt. He glanced down to his right to check Mancini was okay. Mancini struggled to clamber from the foot well and twisted to his left.
“Are we clear yet?” Mancini gasped.
Trey didn’t reply. He weaved between the infected stragglers at the rear of the crowd and glanced in his rear view mirror. The grimy, contaminated horde gave chase in the Thunderbird’s wake, sprinting across the concrete in pursuit.
“Shit!” Trey yelled a fraction of a second before the car’s nose plowed into an infected woman, who leapt into the vehicle’s path.
The woman’s body slammed into the Thunderbird’s front grille and she rolled up the hood, before smashing into the windshield. She tried to clamber up the side of the car but Trey accelerated harder. The infected woman lost her grip and tumbled onto the concrete ground, rolling over several times like a rag doll.
“Fuck, no!” Trey roared in frustration as he tried to see through the cracked windshield. “That fucking bitch has totaled my ride, man.” Trey didn’t dare stop to inspect the damage. He pulled out of the garage onto the road without slowing down or checking the lanes were clear.
Mancini scrabbled himself around so he was able to sit upright in the passenger seat. He was concerned about the severe knocking sound the engine made as they sped away from the garage.
“You better pull over when we’ve put a few miles between us and that garage and we’ll have a look at the damage,” Mancini shouted above the engine noise. “I don’t like the sound of that.” He pointed to the dented hood.
“Fuck…shit…bastard!” Trey yelled and thumped the steering wheel several times. “Of all the things those ugly motherfuckers could do, they had to go and wreck my car, man.”
“Hey, simmer down, Tonto,” Mancini said. “I know we’re balls to the wall here but we need to keep our heads. We’ll ditch the T-Bird if we have to and find another ride in the next town.”
Trey swiveled his head and glared at Mancini with rage burning in his eyes. “I ‘aint ditching my T-Bird, man.”
Mancini sighed. “This thing won’t eat the road much longer if we don’t stop. We don’t have the time to get it fixed so we got to ditch it.” He thought for a moment on how to placate Trey. “Maybe we can leave it at a garage where they can fix it up and pick it up on the way back from La Paz, how does that sound?”
Trey huffed. “It sounds better than abandoning it all together, man.”
Mancini turned his head to check on Jorge and Leticia in the backseats. Leticia was slumped against the side of the interior, slid as low as she could in the seat and Jorge repeatedly glanced at the road behind them.
“You guys hanging in there, back there?” Mancini asked.
Leticia nodded nervously and Jorge gazed at Mancini with his mouth hanging open.
“Careful, Jorge, you’ll catch a whole bunch of flies,” Mancini mocked.
“This whole thing, this whole situation,” Jorge stammered. “It is getting worse. It is becoming too big, too uncontrollable, way out of control.”
Mancini briefly nodded and turned around in his seat. He didn’t know what to say. He knew the entire state of affairs was growing worse with every mile they drove further down the Baja Peninsula. Luiz, Jorge and Ernesto had created a monster that wasn’t easily going to be killed.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Mancini retrieved the map from the glove box and unfurled it on his lap. The Thunderbird’s engine became sluggish and slowed in speed with the knocking sounds growing increasingly worse. Mancini worried they’d break down on the lonely highway in the middle of nowhere. He decided to call Eddie Reinbeck in LA again for a situation report when they stopped. He studied the map but wasn’t sure of their exact location. No landmarks or road signs were visible amongst the dusty, sun-scorched terrain.
“You notice any road signs when we were back there at that garage?”
Trey glanced at Mancini and shook his head. “Me? No, man. I was too busy pumping gas and then trying to get the fuck out of there in one piece to notice anything like a road sign, dog.”
Mancini let his irritation pass. He simply hoped they’d arrive at some kind of uninfected form of civilization soon, while glancing at the Thunderbird’s dash panel. The temperature gauge rose to the red and the engine hissed like a giant snake lay under the hood. Mancini caught a whiff of what smelled like boiling water and cooking engine lubricants.
“Okay, pull over on the side of the road,” Mancini instructed Trey. “Let’s take a look under the hood but don’t switch off the engine or it might not fire up again.”
Trey groaned and slowed the vehicle, stopping on the sand covered shoulder on the roadside. Mancini took a glance at the road behind the Thunderbird before he got out. The highway was deserted and a strong wind whipped a cloud of sand into his face. He spat out small grains and turned back towards the front of the car, thankful he still wore his sunshades.
“Jesus, that wind is starting to hurl a zephyr,” Trey said, as he hauled himself from the driver’s seat.
“Ah, that’s the least of our worries, right now,” Mancini said, dismissing the breeze with a flap of his hand. “Open her up, Trey and let’s see what the damage is.”
Trey leaned into the interior and engaged the hood catch then followed Mancini around the front of the Thunderbird. They inspected the impact damage and Mancini whistled through his teeth whilst Trey groaned in despair. The horizontal chrome slats on the front grille were broken away from the main frame and poked inwardly towards the engine compartment. The glass on both the passenger side headlamps were smashed and a human sized indentation inwardly bowed the hood. Trey shuffled forward and struggled to lift the hood.
“Damn thing is all bent and buckled,” he seethed.
Mancini stepped forward to give Trey a hand. Between them, they wrestled with the misshapen metal cover and yanked it open. Trey sighed as he set the securing rod in place. Mancini leaned over the engine compartment for a closer inspection.
“My money is on one of those pieces of busted front grille has either slashed the water hose or the water pump is FUBAR,” he said, pointing to liquids raining from the engine.
“Shit,�
� Trey whined, holding his hands to his head. “So what do we do? Can you fix it?”
Mancini glanced up and down the empty highway. “Not out here, unless you’ve got any heavy duty tape, a few gallons of water and some cooling fluid.”
Trey shook his head. “Nah, I don’t carry that kind of stuff. I’ve got a jack and a spare tire and that’s kind of it.”
“That’s not much use to us, right now,” Mancini sighed. “I guess we’ll have to plow on and hope the engine doesn’t cook itself before we reach some kind of civilization.”
Trey momentarily hung his head before he closed the hood. He had to sit on the metal cover and bounce up and down a few times before the catch engaged.
“Just take it real slow,” Mancini instructed, as they clambered back inside their seats.
“Trouble?” Jorge asked from the back.
“Oh, yeah,” Mancini sighed. “With a large slice of ‘T’.”
Trey slowly pulled off the shoulder and back onto the highway, not daring to take the speed beyond twenty miles per hour.
“What happens if the engine overheats and cooks, like you said, man?”
Mancini took out the map once again and attempted to decipher their exact location. “You say adios to your car,” he muttered.
Trey made a whimpering noise and turned back to the cracked windshield. “This damage is already going to cost me like a gazillion bucks, man. Damn it, I’m so pissed off right now.”
Mancini followed Highway 1on the map with his finger but at a rough estimate, he could only figure out they were located someplace inland, miles away from the coast and approximately at the center of the region. The highway ran for seemingly endless miles across the peninsula. He swiveled around in his seat to look at Leticia. Her hair blew across her face as she stared blankly into space and she seemed as though she was in some sort of withdrawn trance.
“Any clue as to where the hell we are?” he asked.
Leticia waited a few seconds before she looked up at Mancini. “There are lots of small towns along the route,” she said. “I’m sure we will find a place soon enough.”
Mancini sighed and turned back to the front of the vehicle. Leticia was of little help and she seemed to be suffering from either depression or shock or both. Mancini had seen the condition several times amongst military personnel stuck in horrendous situations inside combat zones. It was too late now to dump her off and leaving her at the roadside would probably condemn her to a horrible death or become one of the infected. She’d have to tag along with them for now. Mancini just hoped she wasn’t going to be yet another burden along the way.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Plumes of steam billowed from the engine, after a further few slowly driven miles between steeply rising rocky landscapes on either side of the highway. Mancini glanced at the temperature gauge and saw the needle was pushed to the limit of the red zone.
“We’re losing power drastically,” Trey whined. “I think she’s going to cut out any moment.”
Mancini knew they should never have continued driving the vehicle once the damage was incurred but they had little choice but to continue onwards. He saw a white colored road sign sprouting from the sand at the edge of the highway, roughly one hundred yards in the distance.
“Let’s see what that sign says,” he shouted to Trey. “It might help us figure out where the hell we are.”
Trey shrugged and continued plodding the Thunderbird along the blacktop. They both fixed their sights on the sign, which seemed to take an age to come within reading range. Finally, Mancini could make out the black lettering on the sign.
“Chorro de Arena, two miles,” he read aloud. He turned to the backseats. “Is that a town of some sort?”
Jorge shrugged and shook his head. “I’m originally from Hermosillo, on the mainland. I don’t really know this region.”
“It means ‘Sandblast’ in English,” Leticia said, in an offhand tone.
Mancini waited for an answer to his question but didn’t receive one. He sighed and turned back to the map on his lap, looking for the location of Chorro de Arena.
“A-ha, got you,” Mancini cheered when he pinpointed the small town on the map. “It don’t look like there’s much there but at least we can stop for a while and try and make some repairs.”
“Yeah, right, if the engine holds out,” Trey gloomily chipped in.
Mancini hoped they hadn’t sustained too much permanent engine damage by keeping on driving the Thunderbird for the last few miles. The rocky landscape receded away to reveal a flat barren terrain with sparse green vegetation on each side of the highway. The wind blew smatterings of sand from right to left, showering the Thunderbird’s interior.
“Ouch, that hurt,” Jorge wailed, brushing sand from his face.
“I see why they named this place Sandblast,” Mancini mused. He noticed a huddle of single storey, whitewashed buildings in the distance.
The Thunderbird chugged along the highway towards the small town’s outer limits but came close to petering out as they drove by the Chorro de Arena sign post.
“Keep a look out for some kind of auto parts store or a garage,” Mancini said.
“I could really use a bathroom too,” Jorge added.
Mancini turned briefly in his direction. “Take a piss at the side of the road when we stop.”
“No, I’m more desperate than that,” Jorge insisted. “I really need to go…”
“Ah, enough, man,” Trey interrupted. “Too gross to engross, dude.”
Mancini studied the town’s layout and the empty sidewalks on either side of the main street. “This place doesn’t look too inviting,” he murmured.
The town center looked sun bleached and battered by sandstorms but nobody was around. A general store, a deserted market square and a bank stood to the right of the main street and a bar sat next to a restaurant on the left between some isolated, single storey dwellings.
“You thinking maybe the whole town has been wiped out?” Trey asked.
“Who knows?” Mancini muttered. “Hopefully, they’re all taking a siesta.”
Trey noticed some old fashioned, column shaped gas pumps outside a low standing building, twenty yards further down on the left side of the road.
“Over there,” he said, pointing through the windshield.
“Okay, let’s make a stop and see if they can fix up this car,” Mancini said.
“Ah, man. I just know it’s going to cost,” Trey sighed.
“Don’t worry, Jorge is paying,” Mancini said. “But don’t count on the garage having any spare parts for this old thing.”
Trey slowly bumped the Thunderbird up the curb and brought the car to a halt outside the small garage. He switched off the ignition but the engine continued to hiss and steam. Mancini was the first to exit the vehicle and he was concerned they wouldn’t be able to fix the damage or find a replacement vehicle. He counted three parked vehicles along the whole main street, running through the center of town. Two were sedans that looked as though they’d seen better days and the third vehicle was a beaten up, rust bucket of a pickup truck, which gave the impression of a non running wreck.
Trey, Jorge and Leticia followed Mancini onto the sidewalk in front of the garage. They glanced over the building, peering through the front windows into the dark interior. Mancini noticed a sign hanging inside the front door’s top glass panel.
“Cerrado,” he read aloud. “I guess that means the place is closed?” He turned to Jorge and Leticia for confirmation.
Jorge nodded. “You guess right.”
“Aghh, man,” Trey groaned. “What in the hell are we going to do now?”
“I’m sorry guys, but I really need to take a shit,” Jorge moaned, hopping from one foot to another. “I got to find someplace to go, real bad.”
Mancini glanced at Trey, who screwed up his face in revulsion. Another wave of sand whipped through the thoroughfare on a gust of wind. The four of them turned their backs agains
t the sand filled breeze. Mancini wanted to try and call Eddie Steinbeck in LA and speak to him in private. He decided Jorge wouldn’t run any sort of risk in absconding, due to the lack of any mobile transport in the vicinity.
“All right, Jorge. Go and find someplace to dump. You stay with Leticia, Trey and see if you can raise somebody inside that garage. I’ve got to make a call so I’ll just take a short walk,” Mancini said.
“I’ll be right back,” Jorge stammered and scurried along the street, back along the way they’d entered the town.
“Keep an eye out for him,” Mancini said to Trey, pointing down the road.
Trey nodded. “Sure thing.”
“You got your piece on you?”
Trey nodded. “U-huh. I might just use it to open up this god damn garage.” He rattled the door and knocked on the glass panel.
“Okay, I’m going to call HQ and find out if there are any new developments,” Mancini said and turned away from the garage. He walked a few paces, taking out his cell phone and his pack of smokes.
A few narrow side roads crisscrossed the town’s main street and Mancini strolled across the road, lighting a smoke before he dialed Reinbeck’s number. The phone rang a few times before the call was answered.
“Talk to me, Marco. What have you got?” Reinbeck sounded tired and stressed.
“I was hoping you’d have some more news for me,” Mancini sighed. “It appears that Luiz has got into bed with a cartel guy by the name of Logrono. Ring any bells?”
The line went dead for a few seconds and Mancini briefly thought the weak phone signal had petered out altogether.
“Eddie…you there?”
Green Ice: A Deadly High Page 15
