Mancini sat up in the driver’s seat and pumped his foot on the gas pedal. The engine roared into life and he revved it a few times to keep it from stalling. The steering lock freed up and he could drive up the sidewalk and loop the car around in an arc so it was clear of the road. Mancini thumped the transmission into drive and bumped the Nissan up the curb, driving in a rough, clockwise semi circle away from the road.
When he was done and satisfied the Thunderbird could fit through the narrow street, Mancini pulled the wires apart and the engine spluttered and died. He applied the park brake, scooped up the shotgun and the rifle and climbed out of the car.
Jorge nodded approvingly. “Well done, Mancini. If I ever want to steal a car, you’re the first guy I’ll come and see.”
Mancini slung the semi automatic over his shoulder, turned off the flashlight and replaced it in his pocket. “It wouldn’t have been that easy if it was a new car. They have all kinds of whistles and bells on them these days, to try and stop auto theft.”
Mancini felt his phone vibrate in his pocket, followed by the chime of his ringtone. He pulled out his cell and saw the caller was Trey.
“At last,” he muttered before answering the call. “Yeah?”
“We’re in deep shit, man.” Trey’s voice was hushed but tense. “I just got your message. The signal keeps coming and going so I’m going to have to be real quick here.”
“Where the hell are you?” Mancini asked.
“We’re stuck inside some big warehouse type place, not far from the T-Bird. We got right back there to the car and had to wait for, like an hour for you, man. I figured those cops got hold of you. Where the hell did you get to, man?”
“Ah, we had some logistical problems and had to take a bunch of detours. Listen, you need to get right back here pronto.”
“No can do, man,” Trey hissed. “Like I said, we’re pinned down in this damn warehouse. We were waiting for you by the car and got chased by a whole damn bunch of those crazy people. We got out their way but they tracked us down and we had to hide in here, man. They’re all outside, they’re all over the place. I can hear them from where we are.”
“Okay, where’s the warehouse? I’ll come on over there and take a look-see if I can get you out.”
“Good luck with that,” Trey snorted. “You’ll need more than one gun against all these motherfuckers, man.”
“It just so happens that I’ve acquired some extra fire power,” Mancini said, stifling a grin.
“All right, if you look at the Thunderbird, we took off to the left side of the street, through that alley where those goons first appeared. Then we ran to our right and the warehouse is around thirty yards down the street.”
“I’ll call you when I get near, okay?”
“Go for it, man.”
Mancini cut the connection, memorizing the route. He thought for a moment and turned to Jorge.
“Sorry, Jorge but I’ve got to go and rescue Trey and I can’t have you tagging along with that crocked ankle. And I can’t let you borrow any of my guns so I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you here.”
Jorge looked shocked. “What? Leave me here, in the open?”
“Not exactly.” Mancini pointed to the Nissan parked on the sidewalk. “I want you to get in the back of that car, lock all the doors and stay out of sight until we get back.”
“There’s blood all over the seats in there,” Jorge spluttered. “And what do I do if the crazy people see me. I’m dead meat, Mancini.”
Mancini shrugged. “No choice here, Jorge.”
Jorge muttered under his breath as he hauled himself out of the Thunderbird and hobbled towards the Nissan. He opened the back door and reluctantly crawled across the seat then lowered himself down so he lay across the foot wells, out of sight from the street.
“Don’t forget to lock the doors,” Mancini hissed.
Jorge muttered something and reappeared through the side window. He clunked the locks down on the doors and lay back down in the foot wells.
“It’s damn uncomfortable down here. Don’t be too long,” Jorge barked. His voice sounded muffled amongst the cushioning of the seats.
Mancini took a backward step off the curbside and looked through the Nissan windows. “That works. I can’t see you at all from here. Sit tight and keep quiet and I’ll be right back.” He ensured the shotgun, his Heckler and Koch handgun and the semi automatic rifle were fully loaded, turned and headed for the alleyway.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Mancini trotted through the dark alley, listening out for any sounds of the infected. He knew time was of the essence and had to hurry in his mission to help Trey and Leticia escape. The cops and law agents would be swooping through the whole area and he figured the next stage in the quarantine operation would be to scour the cordoned zone from the air with helicopters. He didn’t know what resources the law agents had in the city but the situation was on the verge of escalating to a critical level. Once things elevated to that kind of stage, there was no telling what kind of federal force and extra muscle would show up.
The street beyond the alley was predictably deserted apart from a cat that scurried across the road. Mancini stayed in the shadows at the mouth of the alley, scanning the area for any signs of movement. He trod slowly from his hiding place, gripping the stock of the shotgun with his senses on high alert. Keeping close to the store fronts, Mancini took a right turn and edged his way through the shadows.
Long wails and moans drifted through the night air and Mancini honed in on the sounds, wondering if they would lead him to the warehouse. He glanced back the opposite way down the street to check he wasn’t being followed. The street was still clear of bodies but the screeching increased in volume the further Mancini moved further to his right.
A shuffling sound in the nearest doorway caused Mancini to halt his progress. He stood stock still in the shadows, holding his breath and listening intently for any sounds of movement. Firing the shotgun was going to alert all kinds of unwanted attraction, so he’d have to eliminate the target as silently as possible, by means of stealth.
Mancini heard the shuffling sound again and silently turned the shotgun around in his hands, so he gripped the barrel. He was going to use the butt of the weapon to club the hell out of whoever was hidden in the doorway recess. The scuffling noise sounded like the soles of feet sliding along the paved sidewalk slabs.
Mancini raised the shotgun butt above his head, standing with his feet apart ready to swing like a baseball player facing a pitcher. He edged closer to the doorway recess, wielding the shotgun beside his left shoulder to attain a sweeping swing.
Exhaling a long breath through his nose, Mancini took a side step left then a stride forward so he was positioned within sight of the doorway recess, standing at a diagonal angle. He gritted his teeth and readied himself to swing the shotgun as soon as the target became slightly visible in the gloom. The shuffling sound from the recess increased in volume and a hunched shape lurched forward from the shadows.
Mancini braced himself for the jarring impact of the aluminum shotgun butt smashing into bone as he tensed his biceps to swing the weapon. He heard a cough and mutterings in Spanish. The infected didn’t speak or cough as far as Mancini knew. He kept the shotgun in position but didn’t swing the butt at the figure’s head, deciding to get a better look at the target.
The moonlight illuminated a disheveled guy, with long unkempt hair and dressed in a stained white vest as he staggered out of the doorway. The guy muttered and took a swig from a glass bottle in his hand. Mancini caught the unmistakable stench of body odor and strong liquor as the guy shuffled by. He breathed out a relieved sigh and lowered the shotgun.
The drunken guy flashed Mancini a glance and gurgled some kind of comment before he returned his attention to his bottle. He stepped unsteadily on the sidewalk and headed towards the screeching noises of the infected up ahead.
“Hey, don’t go that way,” Mancini hissed. “The str
eets are full of crazy people who’ll hurt you. Take your bottle and go home.”
The guy turned back to look at Mancini, belched loudly and made some sort of disapproving groaning sound. Mancini was now faced with a further set of problems. The drunken guy, however he had so far survived, wasn’t going to live much longer if he carried on his staggering path. The infected around the warehouse would soon sniff him out and attack, a situation which would ultimately lead them to Mancini. And he seriously doubted the drunken guy actually possessed any sort of home and probably had nowhere to go in any case.
“I should have just clubbed the prick,” Mancini sighed.
The drunken guy staggered further down the street, swaying and zigzagging across the sidewalk. Mancini followed at a distance, still keeping out of sight in the shadows beside the row of buildings at the right side of the street. He noticed a wide, squat building with two closed roller shutter doors at the front, standing on the opposite side of the road. At least two dozen infected people milled around the building perimeter, wailing and bashing their hands against the roller shutters. The building stood a little further back from the roadside than either of its neighboring structures on each side. A narrow driveway lane sat to the left and snaked around to the rear of the property. Mancini wondered if it was the place Trey and Leticia were holed up.
The building looked as though it was some type of storage space or warehouse and the number of infected patrolling the area matched Trey’s description but Mancini had to be sure. He didn’t have time to waste searching through the wrong place. The drunken guy was also going to cause a big problem if the infected spotted him. Mancini felt for his cell phone in his pocket but stopped searching when the drunken guy staggered within sight of the front of the warehouse.
Mancini decided he had to act quickly. He moved rapidly out of the shadows, cutting down the space between him and the drunken guy but still keeping a vigilant eye on the building opposite. The infected still shrieked and wailed uncontrollably, thrashing against the roller shutters. At least a dozen contaminated people also huddled around a closed, single door to the right side of the front facing wall. They jostled and barged each other as they ripped at the wooden door frame with their finger nails.
The drunken guy didn’t hear and wasn’t aware of Mancini’s approach from behind him. He seemed oblivious to the chaos going on across the street and appeared to be wrapped up in his own, drunken little world. Mancini raised the shotgun in his hands and firmly struck the back of the guy’s skull with the flat bottom edge of the shotgun butt. The drunken guy silently lurched forward and landed face first on the sidewalk. He didn’t move or make any kind of audible sound. The half empty liquor bottle was still in his hand. The cap was in place and surprisingly the glass hadn’t smashed when the guy had hit the deck.
Mancini gripped the shotgun’s stock with his right hand and grabbed the drunk’s ankle with his left. He glanced across the street to check he hadn’t been noticed. The infected were still preoccupied with trying to gain access to the warehouse and hadn’t spotted his assault on the hobo. Mancini dragged the prone drunken guy into the shadows of an inactive bar doorway on the opposite side of the road to the warehouse. He turned the hobo around and propped him up in a sitting position against the bar’s closed door. Mancini checked the drunken guy’s pulse and if he was still breathing. His head lolled forward onto his chest and Mancini heard heavy snorts as though the guy was in an alcohol induced slumber.
“Sorry, man, but I couldn’t let you walk right by there and give my position away,” Mancini whispered, while retrieving his cell phone.
Studying the warehouse from the shadow beneath the bar’s doorway, Mancini hit the call button and hoped Trey had a signal and was in a position to answer his phone. Mancini listened intently to the ringtone. He heard a click then an elongated silence, followed by a chilling moan.
Chapter Sixty
Mancini heard heavy breathing and rapidly moving foot falls on the other end of the phone. He wondered what the hell was happening.
“Yo! Where are you, man?” Trey’s voice was tense and he breathed rapidly over the phone.
“What happened just then? Are you okay?” Mancini whispered.
“We just got our asses chased, man. I couldn’t talk for a moment. Those crazy goons are in the building. I think some of them are people who used to work right here. They’ve still got work clothes on and hard hats and shit. We’re running around all over this place trying to give them the slip, man. We need to get the hell out of here but all the exits are blocked.”
“I think I’m right outside the place,” Mancini said and went on to describe the front of the warehouse.
“Yeah, that’s the place, man,” Trey squawked, then realized he’d spoken too loudly. He continued in a hushed tone. “We got inside here through a walkway around back. The door was open but I closed it when we got in. If you can make it around there, we can try and get back over to the door. Can you cover us?”
Mancini roughly counted how many infected bodies were out front. He ceased counting at thirty. “Are they still trying to get in around the back door?”
“Duh, yeah,” Trey sighed. “They chased us right across the parking lot and through the doorway. We were lucky the door was left open, man.”
Mancini inwardly groaned, realizing he was faced with an almost impossible task. He briefly considered retracing his steps, grabbing Jorge, hot-wiring the Thunderbird and continuing on with the exhausting journey to La Paz. The whole situation seemed a hopeless and never ending battle against increasingly overwhelming odds.
“Hang on in there and I’ll see what I can do.” Mancini closed his phone and placed it back in his pocket.
The ammunition for both rifles and his handgun were rapidly diminishing and he knew as soon as he fired the first shot, his position would be compromised. He had no obligatory loyalties with either Trey or Leticia and the easy thing to do was to walk away and leave them inside the warehouse. Opening the Thunderbird trunk to retrieve the cash wouldn’t be too much of a problem. A pry bar would be adequate for that particular job. Jorge could lead him to the address in La Paz, then he would be eliminated with a bullet to the head. The mess in La Paz could be cleaned up simply by burning the house or whatever the location was to the ground, with everybody and everything still inside it. Situation and problem over. Mancini could then return to LA and get back to some kind of normality.
But a voice in the back of his mind told him that wasn’t the right path to follow. Easy solutions weren’t always the correct solutions.
“Okay, Trey,” Mancini sighed to himself. “Let’s go get ourselves all killed.”
Mancini wished he had a knife or a spear with him or any kind of a weapon that made no sound. All the firearms he had with him made too much damn noise and he couldn’t possibly fight off all the infected while he made his way to the warehouse’s back entrance. Mancini would almost certainly be forced to use stealth and guile if he was to achieve a successful conclusion to his mission. He crept from the shadows in a crouching position. As soon as he was in the open, he darted across the road to the covering shadow beneath a building’s canopy on the opposite side of the street.
Mancini waited a few seconds amongst the canopy shadow until his breathing slowed to normal. He was positioned at the front entrance to a café, directly to the left of the warehouse. Holding the shotgun vertically to his chest, Mancini edged to the corner of the café’s front wall and peered around the angle. The warehouse was still engulfed by the infected but none of them had spotted his advance.
A line of low standing, spiky leaved shrubs grew along the opposite side of the access road, leading to the rear of the warehouse. The plants were positioned around three feet apart and wouldn’t provide much cover but Mancini couldn’t see any other way he was going to sneak by the infected horde. He stood around ten feet from the first in the vertical line of plants.
Mancini gritted his teeth and hoped luck was on h
is side and he’d remain unseen. He stooped and slowly edged his way closer to the tangle of spiky leaves. The soil around the plant felt damp and spongy when Mancini sank face down amongst it. The earthy scent burned in his nostrils as he lay still, glancing amongst the pointed leaves directly in front of him. So far so good, the infected hadn’t noticed him.
Repositioning the semi automatic so it sat squarely on his back, Mancini crawled through the soil at the rear of the line of plants, carefully avoiding the barbed leaves. He didn’t want to cause them to rustle and give away his position.
The line of shrubs came to an end at the edge of a small parking lot, positioned to the rear of the warehouse. Mancini glanced through the leaves of the last plant, checking for the back door. He saw a recess in the center of the back wall with a metal walkway leading upwards to what looked like a fire escape door. Several infected crawled up and down the walkway and at least a half dozen scraped their fingers down the fire door.
Mancini surveyed the ground space between him and the walkway. A few more infected roamed around the parking lot, aimlessly wandering between a few abandoned vehicles. He’d manage to outrun them to the walkway but he wouldn’t have time to reach the door if he was snared up in some sort of hand to hand combat. The ghouls would be all over him within a few seconds.
Mancini scoured the outside of the building for another possible entry point but couldn’t see any easy way of access. Maybe if he had a few grenades and several hundred more rounds of ammunition he could have stormed the warehouse. But with limited firepower and a well guarded entrance, the task was going to be exceedingly tricky. Mancini needed some kind of diversion to draw the infected away from the walkway and the fire escape door. He racked his brains and came up with a dicey solution.
Green Ice: A Deadly High Page 28
