Rig Warrior

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  “Done.”

  “What happens when I turn you people loose?” Barry asked Charles Matthews, standing in the open hall door.

  “We try to pick up our lives, sir.”

  “Go to the police?”

  “No. It would do no good. The people who run these places would just go further underground. It’s government sanctioned, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” Barry said wearily.

  “You mean our tax dollars are going to help support this … this place?” Montana asked.

  “I’m afraid so. It’s privately funded, as well. But this place is just about to be put out of business.”

  “What’s gonna happen to it?”

  “I don’t know, yet.” He watched as Slim, a grim look on his face, began taking pictures of the experiment station. He was visibly paler after leaving the laboratory.

  “Person that would do that to a dog or cat oughta be tarred and feathered and then branded,” Slim said. He walked on, pausing in front of each filthy cell, taking pictures with Barry’s 35mm.

  “Barry,” Montana said, “these folks should be taken to a hospital. Some of them are in pretty rough shape.”

  “I know. But where, and how? The nearest town is about fifty miles away.”

  “Put them in my rig.” Dolittle spoke from the doorway. His voice was choked with emotion. “I’ll come up with some story as to how I got here.”

  “You’re letting yourself in for a lot of grief,” Barry reminded him.

  Dolittle shrugged. “I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t do it.”

  Charles Matthews walked back inside. Barry glanced at him. “Tell me this, Charles. Why? What is the point and purpose of this horror?”

  “From what I was able to gather during my lucid moments, all types, or many types, of new, unproven drugs are tested here and in other places. How much pain the human body can endure before breaking. What the best method is to attack certain types of drug addiction. There is one facility, I don’t know the location, where only work on the AIDS problem is done. Homeless people and illegal aliens are used because apparently nobody gives a damn what happens to them.”

  “Surely, surely, no one in the upper echelons of government sanctions places like these?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t think so. The President probably knows of the CSS, but not what they really do behind closed doors. Unfortunately, I did find out. Pressure was applied on the hiring and firing committee of the institution where I used to teach. I was terminated. Blackballed. I have no family to speak of, so I was not really missed. Some men grabbed me one evening, right off the street, and eventually I was brought here. I will accompany your driver to the nearest hospital, Mr. Rivers, but I must warn you of this: these people, most of them, have been here for a long, long time. They have all undergone mind-altering procedures. Even if they did testify, no one would believe a thing they had to say. Many of them can’t track very well, conversationally speaking. A few are no more than gibbering idiots. Many are very close to that point.” He paused, his brow wrinkling in deep thought.

  “What are you trying to say, Charles?” Barry asked.

  “I’m assuming you know the location of all the experiment stations.”

  “I do.”

  “Then you have to destroy them, Mr. Rivers. Or as many as humanly possible. For humanity’s sake.”

  “I agree, Charles. But we have some obstacles in our way, and I think you know what I’m talking about.”

  “The personnel assigned to this place. Yes. You don’t have to worry about the guards. They’re nothing more than thugs and drifters. No decent person would consider working in such a place. They’ve run away, and they won’t talk or return. I’ll bet on that. They fear prosecution. It’s the others. I haven’t a clue as to what to do with them.”

  “Did the people who run these … torture chambers really think their existing guards would be able to stop me, or whatever they had in mind for me?”

  Charles shrugged. “I suppose. Being one of the inmates, I was not privy to that type of information.”

  Barry turned to Montana. “Help Dolittle get the people loaded and get them out of here. then bring the personnel to me. I’ll be in the main office building.”

  Charles stuck out his hand and Barry shook it. “See you around, Charles.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Rivers.”

  “I don’t know what in the hell I’m going to do with you people,” Barry told the small gathering of so-called doctors and administrators and technicians. “I ought to just shoot you and be done with it.”

  Miss Bradshaw lay on a couch, her broken jaw and busted mouth swelling grotesquely. She managed a squeal of fright at that prospect. And it was genuine. She could attest to Barry Rivers’s volatile temper.

  “But I’m not going to do that,” Barry said.

  An audible sigh was heard.

  “What I am going to do is this: You all will be provided with paper and pen. You will write out everything, everything, you know about what goes on in the various experiment stations around the country. You will name names, dates, and anything else you know. Who hired you, how you get paid, how many people you witnessed dying in these snake pits, how, and where they are buried—if they are buried. Get busy and don’t fuck up, people. ’Cause I’ll kill you if you do.”

  With the men and women writing frantically, Montana standing watch over them, Barry stepped outside just as the sounds of trucks reached his ears. As any trucker can attest, each rig sounds different, and Barry could hear his Kenworth rolling, Swamp Wolf’s rig right behind it.

  Kate swung down and into Barry’s arms.

  “Where’s the rest of the crew?” Barry asked.

  “ ’Bout half an hour behind us,” Kate said, looking up at Barry. “We off-loaded just outside EI Paso, then were told to come here.”

  “Here?”

  “Yeah,” Swamp Wolf said. “This another one of them experiment stations?”

  “Yes. I think we got troubles, people. I think we’ve just been set up.”

  Beer Butt looked out at the vastness of landscape that surrounded the station. Plumes of dust were kicked up high by fast-moving vehicles coming toward them.

  “Montana!” Barry called. “Lock those people down and get out here. Grab your guns.”

  29

  The station’s personnel locked down in the main building, Montana had gathered up the hastily written and signed documents and given them to Barry. Barry stowed them in his Kenworth. The drivers turned their attention toward the half-dozen vehicles that had stopped just outside the complex gate, blocking the only road.

  There were five men to a car, all heavily armed. One of the men held a cowboy hat in his hands. Barry recognized it. Dolittle had been wearing it when he pulled out for the nearest town with the sick and abused men and women … and Charles.

  “Looks like we spoiled your party, Rivers,” the man holding Dolittle’s hat said.

  “Maybe,” Barry replied, the Uzi in his hand. “Where’d you get the hat?” Barry felt he knew how the hat had been obtained. But before he started wholesale killing, he wanted to know for sure.

  “Took it off the head of a friend of yours, Rivers. He must have thought an awful lot of it. We had to kill him to get it.”

  Montana’s knuckles turned white with strain as he gripped his shotgun.

  “And the men and women he had with him?” Barry asked.

  The man tossed the hat to the sands. “Nobody has to worry about them anymore.”

  “You are a sorry son of a bitch!” Montana cussed him.

  The man laughed. “I think I’ll just gut-shoot you, mister, and leave you for the ants to eat.”

  Montana lifted the muzzle of his shotgun and pulled the trigger, opening the dance. The buckshot tore half the man’s face off and slammed him to the ground, his M-16 dropping from suddenly lifeless fingers.

  The men from the four-wheelers had been bunched together when Montana lowered
the boom with his shotgun. Beer Butt had edged to the left side of the compound, Swamp Wolf to the right side. They fired almost simultaneously, their shotguns roaring and belching flame and smoke and buckshot, the double-ought shot tearing great holes in the men. Five of the men were down before the others could fully recover and react.

  Two of the attackers spun around and attempted to duck behind one of their cars. Barry gave them a short burst from the Uzi, the 9mm slugs catching them in the back and spilling them forward. They landed on their faces on the ground.

  Kate was kneeling on the ground, by the rear of the trailer, working the twenty-gauge. She knocked a leg out from under one man, sending him to the hot sands screaming in pain, his leg bent and mangled under him as he fell, and put a load of magnum-pushed shot into another’s belly. If he survived, he would be eating baby food for a long, long time.

  The truckers were still badly outnumbered, but the surprise was still on their side, and they took advantage of it, keeping up the deadly hail of lead.

  Shiny and Slim were on their bellies on the ground, both of them with M-16s taken from the experiment station’s arms room. They were not being very hospitable toward the newcomers or their vehicles. Lead from one of the M-16s had set one car on fire, smoke boiling from under the hood. All knew it would not be long before the car’s gas tank blew, and as bunched up as the attackers were, they would bear the brunt of the explosion.

  “Fire at the gas tanks!” Barry yelled, his voice carrying over the din of battle. “Blow the bastards to hell!”

  Montana suddenly grinned at Barry and jumped to his cowboy-booted feet, zigzagging toward his truck.

  “Where you goin’, you crazy freight-hauler?” Horsefly yelled.

  “Cover him!” Barry yelled.

  Montana made it to his truck and opened the outside storage compartment. All the drivers then knew what he was planning.

  Red sticks began flying over the cab of the truck. Slim, Barry, and Beer Butt each caught one and looked at each other, grinning.

  They were holding road flares.

  The men sparked the flares into hot, sputtering flame and tossed them over the fence, toward the leaking gas tanks of the four-wheelers.

  “Hit the ground!” Barry yelled.

  The fumes ignited and the cars blew, sending pieces of hot metal and bits and chunks and globs of human flesh all over the nearby landscape.

  Just as the remaining attackers were getting to their feet, stunned and confused by the blasts, Barry yelled, “Finish them!”

  Shotguns and rifles and pistols blasted the still-shock-waved air, knocking the addled attackers to the sands, dead and dying.

  “Cease fire!” Barry called. He had to call the order several times before the last weapon ceased cracking.

  Inside the main office building, men and women were screaming in fright, begging for somebody to help them. They were smashing at windows, breaking the glass, but unable to get out because of the bars covering the windows. The front and back doors were all metal, impossible to smash through.

  The building was blazing, set on fire from the flying bits of flame after the explosion.

  The carpet and drapes and wooden paneling were blazing, sending out black clouds of choking smoke.

  “Who has the keys to the building?” Barry asked.

  Montana shrugged. “All I done was just close the front door,” he said.

  “They deserve whatever they’re gettin’,” Horsefly said. “Maybe it’s justice. Them gettin’ the first taste of Hell.”

  No one said anything out loud, but they all agreed with him … to a point.

  “We better haul our asses outta here,” Beer Butt said. “They’s liable to be cops crawlin’ all over this place pretty damn quick.”

  “Aw, shit!” Slim said. “I can’t leave them sorry bastards and bitches in there. Goddammit, I just can’t.”

  He ran to his Peterbilt and opened the outside storage compartment, dragging out a heavy chain, hooking one end to the rear of his trailer.

  He looked at the others, the expression on his face silently telling it all.

  “Well … crap!” Horsefly said. “Oh, all right!” He ran to Slim and grabbed the other end of the chain, running to a barred window, burning his hands as he looped the chain through the steel and secured it.

  Beer Butt had raced to the Kenworth and grabbed another chain, hooking one end to the rear of Slim’s Peterbilt and the other end to another barred window.

  “Go!” Kate yelled to Slim.

  Slim dropped the transmission into gear and rumbled forward, jerking the bars loose, in the process pulling out part of both front walls.

  Burning men and women staggered out of the smoking, broken building, their clothing and hair on fire. They fell to the compound grounds, shrieking in the awful, burning pain.

  “Jesus,” Barry said. “Now what?”

  “Trucks comin’,” Beer Butt said.

  Lady Lou was in the front truck, Beaver Buster behind the wheel.

  Briefly, Barry explained what happened. Lou said, “You can see this smoke for miles. Won’t be long before somebody sends help. I was a nurse before I got married. I’ll stay, take care of these folks best I can. Y’all better get movin’. The guns in my rig is clean. The cops can’t connect me with none of this. I’ll tell ’em I don’t know what happened; I just saw the smoke and pulled in here.”

  “We’ll tell them,” Beaver Buster corrected.

  “Let’s split!” Barry ordered.

  Jack Morris could scarcely contain his rage upon hearing the news. After hearing the terse telephone message over his office phone, Jack left the office, telling his secretary he would not be back that day.

  He drove aimlessly, attempting to cool his anger. That bastard Rivers was continuing to screw things up royally; was there no way he could be stopped?

  The men sent to kill the old man hadn’t even gotten within a half mile of him before Fabrello’s men gunned them down and then vanished before the cops got there. Now Rivers and a handful of ragtag, ignorant truck drivers had wiped out—totally—a CSS experiment station and some of the best men Morris had working for him.

  Jack knew, of course, that Barry was an expert when it came to fighting, but goddammit, no one man is invincible. Lucky, yes, but sooner or later luck has to run out.

  Maybe, he mused, he should just take what he had gathered thus far, and cut and run?

  That was certainly something to be considered.

  But … no.

  He had come this far, and he wasn’t going to stop now, not until he had completed his initial plan.

  Jack was a thief, sexually twisted, and totally amoral, but despite that, or because of it, he was no fool. He felt that by now, certainly, Barry knew he was involved in the operation. He had no idea how Barry might have found out, but he felt certain the man knew.

  He whipped into a service station and placed a call to Paul Rivers. The man was badly shaken by the recent events. To Jack, he seemed confused and mentally disoriented. He babbled and ranted and could not keep a coherent train of conversation.

  Jack finally hung up on the fool.

  He dialed another number. No reply. Christ, his well-thought-out and -conceived network was falling apart.

  He walked back to his car, wondering what Barry Rivers was up to now.

  “Where are we headin’, Barry?” Kate asked.

  “Arizona. We’ll link up with the rest of our gang and head out.” He chanced a glance at her. “Kate, I’m about to become the most wanted man in America. I’m going to destroy as many of these damnable experiment stations as I can. I’ve had the word put on me by the federal people: either I quit, or they’ll be coming after me. I’m not going to quit, Kate.”

  “I didn’t figure you would,” she said. “But before you start runnin’ your mouth and stickin’ your boot in it, hear this: I’m stayin’. With you. Beside you. All the way. And so are the others. They asked me to tell you that.”


  “I won’t permit that, Kate. Hear me out!” he said, with more heat than he intended. “I’ve got to have friends on the road for my plan to succeed. The others will be no good to me if they’re busy looking over their shoulders for the law. You see what I’m getting at?”

  She was silent for many miles. During that time, the widely separated convoy met half a dozen police cars, lights flashing, sirens wailing, all headed, they guessed, for the source of the smoke still drifting into the air.

  “Yes,” Kate finally spoke. “Just don’t include me in that plan to stay behind.”

  Barry knew there was no point in even talking about that. “All right,” he reluctantly agreed. “But you’ll do what I tell you to do, when I tell you to do it, without hesitation or question?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly.

  “Louder, Kate.”

  “I said, ten-four, Rivers!” she shouted.

  Barry grinned at her just as Jim Carson and the other drivers for Rivers Trucking showed up on the horizon. “Little but loud.”

  “And stubborn,” she added.

  Barry thought it best not to agree too much.

  30

  At a truck stop on Interstate 10, just outside Las Cruces, at a table set back from the other over-the-road drivers, Barry laid it all out for his people.

  “If you think I’m gonna let Kate go ramblin’ off into a firefight alone, you’re crazy!” Beer Butt informed Barry. “There ain’t no way you’re gonna keep me out of this.”

  Coyote, Swamp Wolf, Cottonmouth, and Cajun agreed with Beer Butt. They were staying, come hell or high water.

  Barry knew there was no point in arguing with the men. He glanced at the other drivers around the table. To a person they wanted to go, but their wives and kids were invisibly standing in their way.

  Barry made it easier for the married men. “You people will continue to haul the contracted cargo in the SSTs. Rivers Trucking has got to make some money to keep my schemes going. Jim, you’re the road boss. You call the shots for the others. You best put some distance between us and yourselves. You’ve got your traveling orders. Take off.”

  One by one, the drivers left. No one made a big show of shaking hands, not wanting to draw attention to anyone.