The Warriors' Ends- Soldiers of the Apocalypse

by Keith T Jenkins

  He takes a few minutes to show her how to load it, how to initialize and use the low-profile, high-def, low-light, electronic scope, and how to put it away. “It kicks like a mule in ‘roid rage,” he says.

  If she likes, he will show her how to clean it later, but for now, it goes back in its drawer, slides back into the sidecar, and the spring loaded cover is closed. This is one of the most powerful secrets that has ever been entrusted to her – or so we would think.

  After the events of yesterday, and the learning experiences of today, the whole gang is inclined to take another day or two in the quiet of the woods, the gang staying in the bus, as they have been, Mark and Rita, each with a new spouse, apart from the crowd. It is, after all, their honeymoon, regardless of all the other circumstances.

  The old man’s anger will be satisfied, and his demands will be met. Don’t forget, he has several dozen hard men in his employ, men who would carry out his will because he runs the town, and from him all their power flows. The old man is indispensable to the village and everyone knows it. Every day, he gets up, has breakfast, goes to the refinery gate, punches in a code on the security system, and enables operations of the plant for another day. In thirty hours or so, the daily code will become invalid, and unless someone reloads a new one, the whole shootin’ match will shut down, silent, dead; just like that, the town would be without the fuel supply to use in trade.

  As the honeymooners rest from a long day of teaching, learning, touching, and cooing, a small army of men skirt the camp unseen. A guard is set at the front of the bus, watching the road from the ground, and from the water tower, looking farther as they can. The brigand band use stealth to move through the woods, many of them familiar with the locale, having lived nearby, and they see the motorcycle with a sidecar parked in front of a tent. “That must be the place,” they figure, and they are right.

  Mark and Rita’s tent is away from the rest of the gang, not wanting their sounds of passion to be the subject of tomorrow’s breakfast talk. This works to the advantage of the intruders, allowing them a bit more space to do as they will. Hearing Marks loud, satisfied, snoring, and some from Rita as well, they approach the tent from the far side, using a box cutter to quietly slice open the back of the tent. Mark stirs in a moment, receiving a gun butt to his head, waking Rita, who receives the same treatment. A half hour later, she will awake, alone, dizzy, groggy, stumbling, and stammering to tell the others.

  “It has to be that town!” she tells them.

  “No doubt, Rita,” says Reggie, “but what can we do? They have the only soldier we have.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” says Cheryl. “We may have all we need, if we are willing to use it. He showed us how to start.” She taps the touchscreen, lights up the workstation, taps the help button, and types in “night driving.” It turns out that if a certain key stroke is given, the windshield and side windows all become black, shielded completely from the outside, and inside, they all become vid screens for viewing the outside, using infrared cameras mounted all around the bus. Inside the coach, tiny illuminator strips that would normally light up the floor area around the coach, glow dimly, providing enough light to move around. The headlights and all other outside lights will remain dark, even the brake lights, so this coach can travel unseen for as long as needed.

  They determine to make the effort. After all, it was just yesterday that Mark saved all of them from who knows what. There are some nay-sayers in the group – just a few – and they are allowed to stay behind in the camp with the lights and water running, just because they feel safer there.

  “Bring the bike,” Rita says to Reggie, who reluctantly agrees, and he follows, darkened, until they stop. The bus is in silent – electric only – mode, blackened, and hard, gliding steadily to the destination; it comes to rest a couple miles from the gates they had used, it rolls to a stop. Running to the bike, she presses the Barrett cover, rolling the drawer to the rear, and revealing the weapon of nightmares.

  “What the fuck is that?” asks Reggie.

  “It is, exactly, one Big Ass Gun,” says Rita. “Mark showed it to me yesterday – how to load it and charge it – and today, I guess, I will actually learn to use it.”

  “Are you sure you can?” asks Clara, Rita’s oldest friend. Clara was the church girl that Rita’s parents thought would be a good influence on Rita. Clara was going on this church retreat and her parents made the gesture that Rita should go along.

  “I know how, Clara. But I don’t know if I know how . . . you know?” Turning to Reggie, she says, “I used to hunt with my Grampa. Help me get this thing to the top of that hill over there.” She points to a knoll that looks down on the little city, from just above the oil pumps, and a little to the west. The village is about a half mile from their current location. Reggie helps get it where she wants it, setting it down on the grass with a box of giant magazines.

  She pops out the legs, sets it on its bipod, switches on the scope, changes the setting to “THERM,” looking for heat sources, and begins scanning the best houses in the town. They are all on the high ground, east of the pumps, looking down on the quiet Hamlet.

  Looking into what she thinks is the very best house she can find, she spots what looks like several people in a room, one sitting in a chair, surrounded by the other people standing. “That must be him,” she thinks to herself, watching for a couple moments for confirmation of her suspicions. Unless they make it a habit of tying people up and smacking them around, this must be the place, because from time to time, someone crosses the room and strikes the man in the chair. “From here, it’s like a video game,” she thinks. A more rotund man occasionally comes to move his hands about in small circles, talking down to the seated man, both physically and in demeanor.

  In a minute or so, the officious looking gent moves aside, another of the larger, more fit looking men steps up, and his hand is raised to strike Mark one more time. This time something unusual happens.

  At first, there is breaking of sheetrock to his left, then the splintering of some base moulding on his right. An enormous bang shakes through the village like a peel of thunder. She has to correct her aim, and she is quick to learn about how. Using the mil-spec settings on the scope, she puts the target two dots down and three to the right. The man’s chest explodes, splattering the room, dropping him to the ground, and the distinctive sound of a lightning strike rattles through every inch of the town. Everyone will look around and many will duck for cover, though they don’t know why.

  “Holy, shit!” shouts one of the men in the room. “What the hell is that?”

  Bound to the chair, bleeding about his mouth and forehead, Mark chuckles a little, smiles a satisfying grin, saying, “That’s the sound of my wife, and my girlfriend, telling you I should be set free.”

  “That little moppet of a girl?” A statement with a question mark. “She’s doing that?” asks the boss man.

  “Yes, sir! That little moppet of a girl is using my Big Ass Gun.”

  On the hillside, Rita has been knocked to the ground, by the second round, having knelt behind the gun, resting it on a rock. Her sheer anger held her in place to fire the second shot. She is going to be well bruised in the morning, if they all live that long. She resituates, dropping the bipod down on the grass, laying down behind the butt, because Reggie had seen that in the movies. “And put your non-firing hand here,” he shows her, cupping the end of the butt against her shoulder pocket.

  Another round tears through a second man in the room who was looking through the window to see from whence the shot had come. Too late! Now there remains one employee and one boss man in the room with Mark.

  “The only way you get out of here alive is to cut these ropes and let me walk,” says Mark. “It won’t matter what else happens, how many men you have, or how fast they get here or there. You die.”

  The anger of the boss man is too much. He can’t let go.

  “You took my son! God dammit, you don’t get to
dictate terms to me!” With that, he crosses the floor, snatching the Desert Eagle from the holster of the other man, he spins to shoot Mark in the face, but the boss man’s head explodes instead. Rita meant to hit him in the chest, but got a little excited and jerked the trigger, just a tiny bit. The remaining man stands for half a second, raises his hands in surrender, walks behind Mark with his knife coming out, cutting the ropes, drops the knife, and backs away.

  “Come with me if you want to live,” Mark says to the man. He picks up his gun, holstering it quickly, and follows Mark out the door. Down the stairs they come, and out the front door, into a town of scrambling rats. No one knows where to run or hide, and no one knows why this hell has befallen their town; but it is about to get much worse.

  Everyone in the city is running like headless chickens, in a panic, with no sense of direction. The few who do are getting into whatever cars they can, racing to the gates, running over the guards, and many of the pedestrians as they go. They are killing each other without a thought of anything but their own survival. One man ran over his own wife and left his kids, only to crash into a post of the gate. The kids made it out the gate long before he did, if he did at all. Rita quit watching the circus and began paying attention to what Mark was telling her with his gestures and scribbles.

  He runs with the other man to the high side of the storage tanks for the crude. He makes certain that she can see him, because she triggers the laser targeting system on the Barrett. It lights him up well enough for him to know she has him in sight. He mouths to her, as clearly as he can, “One for yes. Two for no.” To confirm, he also held up one finger and nodded his head, two fingers and shook it. She triggered the laser one time. He held up ten fingers, tapped his wrist one time. She triggers the laser once. He wipes his face, collecting blood to mark the storage tank beside him. Mark signals her with fingers walking away, then a finger like a ticking second hand, then she lit him up one more time.

  Mark produces his pocket tool, opening it to the pliers and snips. The new guy does the same, each being well-trained men of action, and in a couple of minutes they snip their way through the wire enclosure, running into the woods, away from the disaster that is about to descend upon this town. For most, the word Armageddon will come to mind, but only for a while.

  Many of the townspeople have made it out the gate and many have not. The hope is that the mothers and children, as many as possible, can be spared, but even that may not be a great idea. As we all know, some women are terrible mothers, and a town like Sabine has a pretty hideous moral code that has been quickly engrained upon their culture and children. The practice of grabbing women as property, for pleasure or relationships, was not an acceptable one, but it was what had become the identity of their town, defined by the actions of the many. It was similar to Sodom and Gomorrah in that, their desires had outgrown their moral sense of natural order and natural law, leaving behind any sense of moral decency whatsoever.

  It wouldn’t matter in a minute how anyone felt about anything because ten seconds after Mark hit the tree line, the first round from the Barrett blasted into the side of the uppermost holding tank for the crude. Another hole in the second tank, slightly downhill and to the west, and a third shot ripping open the tank to the east, still farther downhill. The tracers burned out, traveling over a thousand meters to their targets, but the crude is spilling out all over the ground, each at about a barrel per second, easy. She asks Reggie to get her the box magazine with the blue tape down the front, at which time he goes to the bike and returns with the prize. The blue tape lets the shooter know that the tips of these giant bullets are silver in colour – for a reason.

  Seeing she is sore as hell, Reggie volunteers.

  She rolls over and tells him, “Just hit anything that’s hard metal down there. That magazine is loaded with incendiary rounds.”

  Reggie puts the box in the front edge, snaps the back end in place, releases the bolt to put the gun into battery, and braces the butt against his shoulder. He can feel the recoil all the way to his feet. “How could this little woman do that?” he asks himself in silence. It hurts like hell. Wham! And the round goes downrange, ripping a hole in one of the fuel storage tanks, dumping hundreds of gallons of gas out on the ground, mingling with the crude.

  He had winced before the trigger fell, causing the sights to be out of place when he shot, but he figured he could overcome the pain now, knowing how great it is going to be. He pulls the butt against his shoulder, with all the will he can muster, gently squeezing the trigger, and in a moment, before the sound of the blast can clear his ears, the explosive round strikes the iron pipe leading from one of the crude tanks to the refinery. This creates a spark that blasts the crude tanks into the sky, one after the other, with flames flowing downhill, engulfing the refinery, igniting the fuel tanks below, blasting thousands of gallons of fuel into the sky, and flushing down on that vile little village like a lava flow, leaving little more than a memory of it. Few of those memories would be held in fondness for anyone who had lived there.

  When Mark and the new guy arrive, the bus is already running, as is the bike, and all are ready to go. Mark has already let the new guy know he needs to drive the bike, so they each head to their respective vehicles, and Mark falls into Rita’s arms, and into one of the seats at the dining table of the bus. He squeezes her tightly and she flinches in pain from shooting that monster gun. He understands her pain very well. When on sniper detail, his uniform usually had a dense pad in the shoulder pocket, for just that reason. “I am so proud of you, my beautiful wife. You learn so quickly!”

  “I waited all my life to get you, my husband. I had to get you back, didn’t I?”

  With their beaten bodies, his from the thugs and hers from the gun, all canoodling to be done will be in slow motion and, as it says on the dryer at home, on the “Delicate” cycle.

  The bus is silent and dark, but the new guy turns on the headlights, not realizing they should stay black. The family, plus one, drive down the old Ranger’s Road they had used to get this close, and out onto the state highway they drove in on. They are now headed back to their friends. In a few miles, they’re confronted by several pickup trucks and a suburban, seeking retribution for the destruction of their town. They had seen the lights of the bike shining on the back of the bus in the distance, and it didn’t require rocket science to know what’s what. Their enemies were in view, easy pickin’s for the locals. After all, it is a motorbike and a bus; how dangerous could they be?

  The motorcycle tears by at about fifty, as the new guy waves his arm, pointing to the rear. Reggie looks in the rearview, seeing the numerous headlights coming quickly, and yells, “I need a shooter, NOW!”

  Cheryl practically leaps into the seat beside the driver, and the seat reacts just as quickly, contouring to her form, like a giant hand taking hold of her ample ass. “What the . . .” she says aloud, but she accepts that it is there for her benefit, realizing that it is keeping her from falling free.

  The screen comes up hot, bogies in the green cartoon visage of what is following. CTRL/Shift and a tap on the Suburban in front of he pack, and crosshairs appear, following the vehicle about, even though it is swerving left and right, attempting to pass. CTRL/Shift/Space and a missile deploys. Almost as quickly as she could think about it, there is a streak of flame and smoke, jetting across the night, leading to the grill of the carry-all, detonating with devastation, more than stopping its progression. In less than a tenth of a second, the impact explodes, tossing the sixty-five-hundred-pound heap backward onto the hood of the following pickup, with the fuel cell detonating, blowing through the windshield, both sliding to a stop, in flames, skidding to the right side of the road.

  The fight is officially on as the third truck, with rednecks standing in the rear, armed with M-16 rifles and fury, pulls up behind the bus, barrels blazing, bullets bouncing and stobbing into the bus, without joy. They decide that shooting the rear of the bus is of no use, so they attempt to
pull around the driver’s side, once again, shooting to their heart’s content, but at the windows this time, determined to kill some passengers on their way to the driver. Some of the bullets seem to be getting stuck in the glass, but the glass is not breaking.

  Suddenly, the bus pulls over into the truck’s lane, smashing the rearview mirror, crushing the passenger door handle, pushing steadily, then more suddenly to the left, until the truck comes to an abrupt stop on the trunk of a large Cypress tree beside a small river. The tree was unmoved by the violent presence of the truck. The men in the truck, however, would move no more, having impacted the tree with terminal force.

  “Is the cruise control on?” ask Mark.

  “No!” shouts Reggie.

  “Then hit the ‘resume’ button three times in a row,” is Mark’s sudden instruction.

  Reggie complies and the bus begins to whir like a jetliner spinning up, and he could feel it changing shape. They can feel it wobbling in the air stream, becoming shorter, more stable, and suddenly handling almost like a racecar. The side panels of the coach upstairs, which are larger than the downstairs, slide down the outside of the lower level, making it four feet shorter in the front, and three feet shorter in the rear. The first dual wheels have pulled themselves and the tag tires upward, closer to the body of the coach. They are pushed wider by extending the axle assemblies six inches farther from the center, then allowing the axles to swing out another two feet, making the stance of the rear of the bus fully five feet wider than it had been. The governor has disengaged and the maximum speed is now a three-digit number in MPH.

  The first vehicle that had passed the bus is now coming up on the left flank, and as per Mark’s instruction, Reggie revs it up, racing the duals, with an extended cowling that acts as a scoop, impacting under the rear of the car, launching it into the woods with a bump. It is as if there had been a giant wedge shoved under one side of the rear of the car at near-bullet speed, because that is exactly what happened.