Two bikes come from behind, having already passed the caravan, pulling up behind Cheryl and the girls, waving at first, then waving guns, to intimidate, but since that doesn’t work, they begin shooting, and though the women act for a moment as if they are afraid, they soon begin laughing, realizing that the glass won’t budge or break.
“Sit down and buckle in,” says Cheryl. “That bike could spill and come through the glass! Besides, you don’t know that the security will last forever.” She used to be the Safety Manager at a school district. Seeing that the girls are just taunting the bikers, she shouts, “Get your god-damned ass in a seat and buckle up!” Cheryl swearing gets their attention.
The pistolmen are not dissuaded, aiming their weapons at the passengers, they begin to fire, their bullets lodging in the glass. Their greatest fortune is that the glass doesn’t allow for a ricochet. One of the girls in the bus goes to the RIO seat and begins to target the bikes.
Suddenly a panel in the top, front corner of the bus raises and slides into the top of the body, revealing a small, electric mini-gun. In a heartbeat, it extends to the left and down, pointing at the tires as it unleashes a swift and steady stream of bullets, tearing tread from the wheels, and even the right pinky toe of the driver. The bike drops to the street, sliding about thirty yards, resting silent in the dark, with the driver coddling his foot.
The bike behind that one, circles to the right side of the bus, getting his rear wheel snagged, rubbing momentarily by the bumper of the bus behind, with but a little screech of acceleration, speeding up past the girls. His passenger rotates around, facing rearward, cocking a small double-barrel shotgun, aiming at the driver. What he doesn’t know is that Boot has taken the RIO seat in the bus they are behind, and he’s stroking like a madman. Boot releases an oil slick, which dumps the bike in a blink, slamming it into the face of Cheryl’s bus, kicking the man and the bike against the rear of the forward bus, bouncing him back – bike and all – back against Cheryl’s bumper, deflecting him to the left wall of the tunnel. There are multiple large banging noises, coupled with some sounds of bone breakage, plus a splat here and there, finally against the wall, where the body lies, fingers twitching in a pool of blood.
Bikes swarm like angry hornets before them, headed toward the coaches, but in a moment, they realize what a bad idea that could be. Each bike comes to a near stop as the coaches accelerate. Boot, in bus three, accesses the networking capability of the group, giving all the command for “Combat and Evasion Mode.” The bumpers extend, morphing like a cartoon robot, becoming a flying wedge, like the track-cleaner on an old locomotive. The tops of the buses lower and the rear wheels widen, making each unit a far more stable and agile craft. The buses spread out, almost to the edges of the road, leaving only a sidewalk on each side for bikes to use. Uncoordinated, they slow down, turn, and race away. A couple of the bikes get up on the sidewalk to the left, zooming past the coaches, turning at the end of the caravan, to begin following behind.
These two bikes, driven by a couple of men, each with a woman on the back, take a look-and-see position, following at a distance. This may be their salvation, because, as long as they stay back, and do not threaten the bus, they are left alone. After all, the core of this group is still an overdue church retreat.
The coaches accelerate far slower than do the bikes, but their top end is still awesome. Also, the bikes in front are out of the tunnel, except for one, who fell down while turning around, and is trying to pick up his bike in a hurry. Alas he is too slow, so when the coaches get there, the bike is launched against the left wall, and the passenger who was trying to right the bike, is sliced off at the ankles, then bumped and splattered in front of, and then under Mark’s bus. A literal grease spot emerges from the rear, complete with a leather vest, biker boots, and ragged blue jeans. The face stops, propped up against a curb, blinking at the passing entourage.
Pulling down the road, several of the bikes have gotten far enough ahead to pull out of view, hoping to ambush the caravan. After all, who wouldn’t love a home like this to rest in after a long day of marauding? Coming from behind, there are four bikes, racing forward to shoot at the tires of the buses. It will do them no good, but it does get the attention of the occupants, which is bad news for the bikers.
The tires are increvable for the presidential services – we can’t have a flat in a getaway – so phase one of their plans has failed. The bus pulls left, all of a sudden, causing the bikes to swerve. Pulling right, one of the bikes swerves off the edge of the road, where the bike in front of him hammers the brakes to avoid the bridge abutment. The rear bike doesn’t see the bridge, but sees taillights. He applies the brakes, veers right, lays the bike down in a slide, and with his partner hanging on tightly, bike, babe, and butch sail into a ravine, about ninety feet deep, never to be seen again. Far below the bridge, there are two people, broken and battered, bleeding and shattered, with broken limbs, struggling to get out of the wooded ravine. The bike breaks open its tank on the rocks below, splattering everything and everyone, and in a moment, the bikers and the woods are ablaze.
The other bike, which had stopped, accelerates to catch the bus, but has not been paying attention to the caravan as a whole. He has his weapon drawn, watching instead, the bus to his left, and as he passes the last bus at eighty miles per hour, the next bus pulls to the right, blocking his path completely, and the bike impacts the rear of the coach. Wham! There is a huge scratch down low, and a brain stain about four feet up the rear.
Two more shooters are pulling up the left side, past the caravan, hoping to get an angle on a forward driver, but two of the coaches, the front and the third, deploy their mini-guns, and not having much concern for the wellbeing of the riders, each gun lets out several bursts of forty rounds, penetrating all four of those bikers. Hundreds of .30 carbine rounds fire off, breaking wrists and knees, skulls and necks, puncturing fuel tanks, and lighting fires, in very few seconds, leaving the riders and their passengers, busted and burning on the roadside. The fire won’t stop and the pain won’t go away.
Somewhere, there remains a few bikers, but watching from afar, they decide that additional assaults on this caravan may not be wise. For a moment, one of them argues that these wagons would make them invincible on the road, that they should take them at nightfall, whenever they stop to camp, and in a few minutes, he has convinced his brothers of the value of taking at least one of them. Agreed, they all open lamps and unplug things to make certain that their bikes have no operating lights. It is a moonbright night coming, so they should be able to get about unseen.
The girls’ coach has been in the rear, but due to the recent events, the sort order of vehicles is subject to change. Instead, Teague and Boot take the rear, falling back a quarter mile, and Boot takes the RIO seat, playing with everything he can find. Boot is special! Boot is in a whole other level of things on the Autism Spectrum, saying of the tech that, “It talks to me.” He can seemingly make things do what they were not intended to do. It’s not that they were designed to not do the things he gets done, but that he finds things that no one thought of them doing. He is the one who networked the coaches, and though they were designed for that, the makers never thought that someone on one coach should be able to run them all from a single RIO seat.
Opening his RIO screen, Boot begins tapping away at the keyboard, like he’s playing a tune on a piano. He is even humming something silly, until he abruptly and loudly proclaims, “Bomp bomp bomp BAAAAAAAM!” It is the four best-known notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. He strikes the enter key, and on the TV behind the driver can be seen, the rear view of the coach, for about two miles, and in revolving vision capabilities. There, in the rotation are infrared, night vision green, and contrast adjusted greyscale common vision. The scope of the view is only about thirty degrees; but it is very helpful because with it, Boot can see the bike motors while they are still over a half-mile back, even a mile, in the dark. Boot does a great RIO job of reporting the d
anger behind to the coach in the lead.
Mark says to Rita, “Would you like to put them down or shall I?”
Rita replies, “I’m still a little sore from shooting that monster gun of yours last time.” Then she thinks for a moment, saying, “But I would prefer if there were as little killing as possible.” She pauses a half moment, “Okay?”
“I get you, Babe. I’ll see what I can do.” Getting on the comms, he says, “Let’s all bunch up and I’m going to the rear. There’s a place a few miles up the road – an overlook into the Grand Canyon – where we can pull aside and get ready.”
Rita takes the wheel and Mark goes to stand by the rear door. When the coach comes to a stop and the door opens, Mark dashes to his bike, opens the flap to retrieve his Barrett, reaching into his sidecar, he grabs a pair of deep rubber, sticky suction locks. Tossing the locks on top of Teague’s Coach, he climbs the rear ladder with the Barrett. He fastens the bipod down with the suction locks, gets in position, changes his scope for heat sensing, and waits. “Turn the lights up to Full Surround Bright on all the buses,” he hollers down, and they do. The place is alight like a tiny city by the Canyon.
The bikers come to a stop just over a mile away, still unheard, and unseen by everyone – everyone that is, except Mark, and those watching on Boot’s TV. Steady in hand he fires a round and the caravan shakes with the BOOM of his Big Ass Gun. On the other end, the bikers don’t hear anything until one of their gas tanks bursts open, then another. Then the cylinder heads of one of those two bikes is struck with a steel jacketed round, igniting the fuel. BOOM!
Before anyone can get on the run, Mark has tuned up another couple of bikes idling by the road, by shooting them through the transmission case. Each of those bikes suddenly lurch to a stop. Four bikes down, four bikes left, and thirteen people remaining. They may be breaking up the band, but that’s no business of Mark and the gang; not as long as they don’t continue to follow.
“It’s another half a day drive to our destination, gang. Let’s pull to the other side of the Canyon and setup camp.” All agree, confident that they can keep safe one more night.
When they reach the campsite that Rita has chosen, they find themselves at a sort of peninsula in space, a finger sticking out into the Canyon, with a single roadway in, and their backs to the sky. It is a one sided fortress, once the coaches are in place. They build a large fire from found wood and dry cactus, posting a guard who will stand on top of each of the farthest coaches, with two sitting by inside, ready to take a seat in the RIO. Changing out guards every couple of hours, they get through the night, unmolested.
The sun rises quickly in the flat high lands, and morning finds them rising early as well. Mark returns to the top of Teague and Boot’s coach, Barrett in hand, using the scope to look around. Looking ahead, down the road they are to drive today, he sees a singular motorcycle rider, female, apparently alone. Mark takes his compass from his sidecar, using it as a reflector, he sends a bravo tango to the woman. She hasn’t a clue what he is saying, but she holds her arms out, drops her colours to the ground, walks with her arms out, rotating, so Mark can see that she is not armed, and she sits down in the road. She’s at least fifteen steps from her bike.
The crew packs up as if it is just another day, and this is just another road, though they know it could be a trap. Slowly they drive toward the woman. As they approach, she just stands, slowly, turning around again, she stands, arms extended, facing her bike. She is about five foot ten, looking like the quintessential biker babe; not the angry, butchy, fat one, but the one with the skinny waist, big boobs, round hips and legs up to there. She has long, auburn hair down to her shoulder blades, and instead of a blouse or shirt, she wears a custom-fit, lambskin leather vest, laced up the front. There is the butt of a rifle sticking up on the other side of her bike, and a Ruger Super Blackhawk .44 Magnum, with a six-inch barrel, laying on the seat. She is standing perfectly still.
Mark approaches her, followed by Rita and Boot. He steps to the right as Rita and Boot step to the left of the woman. Everything she is wearing is form fitting, so Rita says, “There’s no need to pat her down,” to which Mark agrees, but Boot is a little let down.
“I could pat her down,” he says.
“They’re not dead, you know,” the biker says.
“Who?” asks Mark.
“All those people you left on the roadside. They’re not dead.” Mark looks at Rita in confusion.
“The people we shot at from afar before settling in last night?”
“No, well, them too, but none of them are dead.” She turns around, asking, “Can I put my hands down?”
Mark nods, followed by Rita, and Boot sticks his lower lip out, looks her left and right, nodding his assent as well. “She’s real pretty!” whispers Boot to Rita.
“Every one of them is still alive – if you can call it alive.” She looks Mark dead in the eye, saying, “One of the guys that got shredded by that buzz saw of a gun . . . I went back to see him and the rest. But the first one I saw was Tucker. He must have taken thirty or forty rounds from that gun, in his arms, legs, chest, and head. But when I got to him, he eyes were crying out in pain, so I tried to end his misery with that,” she points at her .44. “He took a round, right through the forehead, splattered out the back of his head, and he just cried some more. I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I don’t want to be like that. I know I can’t help him, or any of the rest, but I don’t want to become one of those.” She’s scared, they can all see it, and she’s not lying about what she saw and did. Tucker’s blood is on her clothes.
“You want to join us?” asks Rita.
“Babe! What the hell?” says Mark.
“What’s she going to do?”
“Do you mind if we keep your guns ‘til we know each other a little better?” asks Mark.
“What do I care?” she says. “I can’t do anything to you with them, and near as I can figure; you are the ones with a way out.”
Walking to her side, putting her arm around the woman, pulling one of the woman’s arms across her shoulder, Rita says, “Funny thing you should say that . . . about the way out.” Rita does know the way out, and this woman is going to learn about it very soon. “What’s your name?”
“Kacy. That’s K-a-c-y, Kacy.”
“Well, Kacy,” asks Mark, “what do you want to do with your bike?”
“It belonged to my old man, but we lost him a few weeks ago. It could stay or go . . . I like it, but I won’t miss it. What do you say?”
“You won’t need it anymore, Sweetie,” says Rita, leading her toward the coach by the hand. “Maybe someone else will be able to use it. Mark snags the rifle from the scabbard and picks up her hog-leg, shoving it into the back of his pants. When he gets back to the motorcoach, he puts them both in the pantry cabinet of the kitchen. Rita has taken Kacy to the front of the coach, sitting her on the RIO seat as Rita drives. They will talk as they go, Mark will give navigational information as needed, and in a few hundred miles’ time, Kacy will become one of those kids on a Youth Group Retreat. She is a bit more dangerous than most of them, having had to survive by the gun with a biker gang for some years. Her old man was a womanizing, woman beating, need to be dying asshole, and all of their friends were the university where he learned to be that way. The mercy she was offering Tucker also came with a bit of anger, and neither could be properly delivered at the barrel of a gun.
Aleksandr’s Story
Out into the cool of the evening strolls the Pretender. He knows that all his hopes and dreams begin and end there.[25]
E-Day Minus 3.5 Years
A couple of weeks before the murder of the Two, Aleksandr Smotritel walks into a hospital room, escorted by his General Secretary – what Americans used to call his Executive Assistant – and he met with Aleksandr Smotritel! “What the HELL?” he asks upon entry.
He looks to his secretary, who is slowly closing the door with one hand, and with the other hand, d
irecting him to proceed closer to the bedside. Bewildered and confused, he stands there for what seems to him as if to be an eternity. Only a few seconds pass before Illya tells him, “We borrowed some tech from a Texican named Anders and from the Oshiro, to create a clone of the Keeper of Russia, copy his mind into the body, and to protect the Republic.”
“You mean this man is a clone?”
“No, sir,” replies Illya. “No, sir! I must tell you, respectfully, that you are the clone!”
“How can that be? I remember my entire life.”
“The Anders equipment allowed us to dump his whole life of memories into your brain. Do you really remember everything?” He pauses to allow that to sink in. “Is there anything missing?” Another pause. “Do you remember last night?”
“I remember going into a facility for lab work! There was some sort of super encephalograph! Was that it? That was yesterday! Right?” Sasha’s replacement is managing the last recorded memories of the PM. “After that, I woke up in my apartment this morning.”
“And, what day is it?”
“The eighteenth, of course!” is his sudden and harsh reply.
“No, sir. It is the fifth day of the third month after that.”
“Technology is not my thing,” says Aleksandr from the bed. “As I understand it, we were able to make a complete copy of me, body and mind, as a backup, just in case.”
“In case of what?” he asks.
“In case I die . . . tomorrow . . . on the operating table, or sometime in the next few days in my treatments.” He looks grey and disheveled, pale in his lips, and tired in his eyes. He looks like he is dying. “If I make it through, I will assume my duties when I am fit, and you can take a retirement in luxury. We will fit you with a new face and set you free in wealth, or you can stay on as my double; we shall have to see what will work out best for both of us.”
The Warriors' Ends- Soldiers of the Apocalypse Page 26
