by Lukens, Mark
“They could bring more airplanes,” Ray said. “More weapons than we’ve got. They could drop bombs from the planes, or attach them to drones and fly them into the building. They could have actual tanks. They could have rocket launchers, like the one they used to hit the cabin we were in before.”
Jo didn’t say anything, silenced by Ray’s doom and gloom.
“We need to get Petra,” Max said, not willing to let it go. “If we wait too much longer, he’ll kill her. Or . . .or torture her more.”
“He’s kept her alive for a reason,” Jo said. “To get all of you there. That’s what Dawson told us.”
“We need to attack,” Luke said again. “Soon. We need to get your friend back.” He looked at Max, then Jo. “We need to kill the Dragon and end this.”
“I’m not leaving the store,” Jo said. “What we have here is too valuable. We need to protect it. And we’re not soldiers.”
“Neither are most of them,” Luke said.
“I’m staying with Jo at the store,” Gil said. “If most of you are leaving, most of the shooters, then someone needs to stay and help.”
Jo looked right at Ray.
“We’re still going to Avalon,” Ray said. “I think it’s too important. Something’s there, and that’s what we’ve come so far for.”
Everyone was quiet for a long moment.
“So we divide our forces,” Luke finally said. He looked at Ray. “You, Mike, Josh, and Emma go to Avalon. Me, Max, and Phil will go to Hell Town with Dawson and his crew. Jo and the rest will stay here and defend the store until we get back.”
Until we get back. Someone was thinking pretty positive, Jo thought.
“We’ll travel together part of the way,” Luke said, pointing at the route on the map that Ray had marked from Perry down into South Carolina, to Hell Town. “Then when we get somewhere in here,” he pointed at a spot near the border between the two states, “we’ll split up. Ray and his group will go their way, and we’ll go down to Hell Town.”
“What about the other four Dark Angels?” Jo asked. “I don’t want them here.”
“We’ll take them with us,” Luke said.
“How can you trust them?”
“I can’t. And if I need to, I’ll just kill them. But I might have an idea how to use them.”
“How?”
Before Luke could answer, a man’s scream filled the darkness, coming from the front of the store, coming from the restrooms.
CHAPTER 20
Josh
Josh’s first thought was that the man guarding the restrooms had just been killed. He guessed that one or more of the Dark Angels in the men’s room had gotten loose and gotten to the guard, beating him, or cutting him, or fighting him somehow. They would get his gun, and then they would come out of the darkness shooting.
Ray was beside Josh in the darkness, his flashlight beam knifing through the blackness, bobbing up and down as he ran toward the screams. Josh wanted to tell Ray to turn off his flashlight, to not make himself such a target, an illuminated bullseye for a Dark Angel with the guard’s gun to shoot at.
Luke was somewhere with them, running silently, a deadly predator in the night, something you wouldn’t see coming until it was too late.
The screams stopped, like they had been cut off suddenly.
Had they finally killed the guard? Sliced his throat open? Broken his neck? Were they fanning out now, the four Dark Angels splitting up to find weapons for maximum damage, at least one of them going for the rollup doors in the back?
As they got closer, Josh saw the light coming from the alcove that led to the door to the men’s room on the right and the women’s restrooms on the left. The light bounced off the walls, a flashlight beam moving around, but not too erratically. The squawk of a walkie-talkie, then a man’s voice, urgent.
It was the guard calling to Jo. Josh heard Jo’s walkie-talkie come to life somewhere in the darkness behind him. The guard wasn’t dead.
Josh reached the guard at the same moment Ray and Luke did. Luke had his silenced gun in his hand, ready to shoot, to kill. Ray shined his light at the guard, the man’s eyes bulging with fear and shock. Josh remembered the guard’s name now; it was Rodney.
“What happened?” Ray asked.
“I don’t know,” Rodney answered. “Someone just started screaming in there. I don’t know what the hell’s going on. I think they’re killing each other in there.” His words were coming quick. He seemed close to hyperventilating.
“Did you go in there?” Ray asked. “Did they get loose?”
“No . . . I . . . I don’t know.”
Luke didn’t wait for any more information from Rodney. He rushed to the swinging door of the men’s room. Ray shined his flashlight at the door, illuminating it for Luke.
“We’re coming in!” Ray called out to the Dark Angels inside.
Josh was right behind Ray.
The men’s room was dark; Jo hadn’t left them a light. She’d said that they didn’t deserve a light for what they’d been planning on doing at the store, and she wasn’t going to waste any batteries on them.
Luke kicked the door open and bolted inside with his gun aimed into the darkness. Ray was right behind him with the flashlight, lighting up the room. Josh was right behind Ray.
The Dark Angels were on the floor, three of them around one who was laying on the floor, on his back, his bound hands up to his chest, his wide eyes staring up at the ceiling, his mouth wide open.
“You kill him?” Luke asked.
“No,” one of the Dark Angels yelled back. “He . . . he just . . . he just died.”
“Died how?” Ray asked. He glanced at Luke, a quick expression that said: Stand down.
“I . . . I don’t know,” the Dark Angel said, the apparent spokesman for the trio that was left alive. “I think he might have had a heart attack.”
“Looks young to have a heart attack,” Josh said. The man on the floor was really just a boy. Probably a teenager, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old. Josh remembered the kid answering their questions in the loading bay only a few hours ago. His face was pale, eyes bulging, hands curled up into claws, the black plastic zip ties digging into his bony wrists.
“Was he the one screaming?” Ray asked.
“Yeah. He . . . he was sleeping, I guess. I think he had a nightmare.”
“He was dreaming about the Dragon,” another Dark Angel said. “He saw the Dragon in his dream. I heard him say it.”
“I don’t remember that,” the spokesman said, shaking his head to add emphasis to his statement. “He was thrashing around on the floor. Screaming. I thought he was going for the door, for the guard. I tried to stop him.”
“Then he just stopped screaming,” the third Dark Angel said, a short and pudgy man with a dark mustache and beard. “He made a groaning sound, then like a choking sound. He was clawing at his chest, at his throat, and then he just went still.”
“The Dragon did this,” the second Dark Angel said. “He came to him in his dream. Scared him to death. Made him see bad things.” He looked at the other two Dark Angels. “He’ll come for us, too. He’ll do the same thing to us.”
Josh could only imagine what the Dark Angel had seen in his dream; he knew the things he’d seen in his own dreams, things that could drive you crazy.
Others were at the door. Jo was among them, right in the doorway with a flashlight. The bathroom was lit up now: a row of sinks and then a row of urinals on one side, and then a bank of stalls on the other side. The cold room smelled like body odor, sweat, and fear.
“We need to get him out of here,” Jo said. “We can’t leave him in there with them.”
Two men behind her moved in to take the dead Dark Angel out, dragging him by his feet, one man grabbing a foot each, his bound arms dragging behind him, his head rolling back and forth along the tiled floor, his skin so pale in the flashlight beams, eyes so glassy.
“He’s going to come for all of us,” the se
cond Dark Angel said. “All of you too.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Jo said, not bothering to hide her disgust.
“What are you going to do with us?” the spokesman for the Dark Angels demanded. “We have a right to know.”
Jo didn’t answer. She left.
Josh followed Jo, Ray, and Luke out of the restroom, walking past the guard who looked even more frightened now.
As they walked back toward the tables in the deli area, Luke spoke to Ray: “We need to leave in the morning, at first light.”
PART THREE
CHAPTER 21
Ray
As soon as the sun was up Ray helped Luke and Josh check through the two Humvees and the pickup truck again. It was cold outside, but within minutes Ray’s body was warm from the activity.
Mike was up and wanted to help. Ray put him to work getting the van ready, helping to load it up with boxes of food and drinks. Luke gave them another smaller box with two hand grenades, six glass bottles with the rags already poking out of them and a small amount of laundry detergent in the bottom of them, all they needed was the gasoline and then to be lit and thrown; Molotov cocktails ready to go. Luke had added his own box of bottles and strips of cloth for their attack on Hell Town.
Ray found more maps of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. He gave Luke the maps he’d drawn the route on, and a copy of the diagram of Hell Town that Dawson had drawn. He had already gone over the route with Luke that they would follow, selecting a crossroads in a remote area to split from each other. Hell Town was only fifty miles from Greenville, a populated city at one time, the most populated city in the area besides Knoxville, Tennessee, which was even farther away. But with those cities even that close, they had to be ready for huge hordes of rippers to be in the areas. Ray had visions of twenty thousand starving rippers on the move, devouring everything in their path like a swarm of locusts.
Ray and Luke had questioned Dawson one more time before loading the trucks this morning. His answers had all been the same. Ray wasn’t so sure they could trust him, but Luke was willing to give it a shot.
Mike loaded their backpacks into the van after the boxes of food, water, weapons, and Molotov cocktails. They’d gotten new backpacks from the sporting goods section of the store, two camouflage backpacks and one black one. Ray had repacked them and checked them twice. He made sure they each had two changes of clothes, two extra pairs of socks and underwear, an extra pair of gloves, an extra pocket knife. He also added protein bars, packs of peanuts, a large bottle of water, coffee filters, a flashlight, waterproof matches.
Along with their packs, they loaded up three blankets, a box of tools and extra parts for the van, extra hoses, a pair of jumper cables, a small toolbox, a can of Fix-a-Flat. The only thing Jo couldn’t spare was an extra car battery to take with them—they would have to find their own extra battery on the road.
They each carried a knife on them (Mike beamed like it was still his birthday when Ray gave him a folding buck knife in a leather case to attach to his belt), along with a handgun each.
They were loaded up and as ready as they could be. Wade, who used to be a mechanic, who had the most knowledge about cars, checked out the van, checking hoses, belts, tires, exhaust, gauges. Everything seemed to be fine. He helped them tape up a thin blanket over the busted-out back window. It cut off part of the view from the back, but it kept some of the cold air and noise out of the van.
Ray still had the handgun he’d gotten off the Dark Angel in the small mountain town in West Virginia. Josh still had the shotgun he’d taken from the man in Pennsylvania who had killed his family and then blew off most of his own head. They had extra ammunition for both weapons. Luke gave them an M-16 and three magazines, and two boxes of extra bullets, giving them a quick tutorial on how to use the weapon. Luke had given Mike a handgun he’d gotten off one of the Dark Angel prisoners. It was still a shock for Ray to see his twelve-year-old son walking around with a gun holstered to one hip and a large knife holstered to the other hip. For just a second he saw the vision of what his son would be in a few years: a warrior in this terrible new world they had to survive in.
Mike was pretty careful with the weapons so far, but Ray made him promise that he wouldn’t take the gun out and play with it. He even kept the magazine for Mike’s gun in the center console of the van. Luke had shown Mike how to use the pistol, a Sig Saur P226 that held fifteen rounds, without firing it. He showed him how to load the 9mm bullets into the magazine and then unload them, how to check the chamber for a bullet.
Mike looked a little nervous, but Luke assured Ray that Mike had done well enough with the .30-06 on the roof—he was a natural shot, and he’d be okay if and when he had to use the handgun.
The rippers were pretty quiet in the morning. They had once again dispersed, on the hunt for food, Ray guessed. He was sure many of them were still hanging around the gas station at the intersection and the partially constructed building. A few of them were still around the Dark Angels’ pickup truck, the bodies of the Dark Angels long ago pulled out and eaten, yet they still waited near the truck like they might find a scrap of flesh somewhere in it.
The coast was pretty clear so far. Ray figured they would be able to get out of the fence okay, maybe even across the parking lot, but then the rippers would swarm. Jo, who knew this town well, drew Ray an alternate route around the outside of the town, taking them past the apartment complex where she used to live, then out to the road that Ray had planned on traveling to skirt the town of Perry the day they’d seen the airplane shooting at the store, the day everything had changed.
Luke got his vehicles loaded with supplies, making sure he knew where every weapon was. He had the seating arrangements: He would drive the first Humvee with Dawson riding shotgun and Phil in the back. Max would drive the second vehicle behind Luke with George and Bella with him. J.J. would drive the pickup truck with Barry as the passenger and the three Dark Angel prisoners in the back, their hands still bound.
Ray would bring up the rear of the convoy in his van, following them to the crossroads just beyond the border where they would split up, Luke and his team heading west toward Hell Town, and Ray heading south for Avalon.
They were loaded up and ready now. They planned to leave in twenty minutes, as long as the spotters on the roof still said everything was okay. Ray had struggled with the idea of taking Mike with them. It was going to be a dangerous journey and it would probably be safer to leave Mike at the store. But the store could be dangerous too. Even though Luke, Max, and their band of Dark Angel defectors were going to attack Hell Town, there was no guarantee they would succeed, and either way the Dark Angels would be back to the store. The Dragon wasn’t going to give up on the store. But if something happened to Mike on this journey to Avalon, Ray knew he would never be able to forgive himself, but he also wouldn’t be able to forgive himself if he left Mike behind at the store and something happened to him, if he got captured or killed. At least Mike would be with him; he felt like he had some minute amount of control over things with his son with him. And if Mike was going to die on this journey, then Ray would die right along with him. He knew he couldn’t live in this world without Mike—he’d already lost Kim and Vanessa; Mike was all he had left. If he lost him, he was sure he’d go insane.
It was better not to think of things like that, but he couldn’t help trying to plan for them. They were realities now and had to be considered. Pretending things like death and harm wouldn’t happen was dangerous.
It was also risky taking Emma too, but he needed her—she was the only one who would be able to find Avalon now that they no longer had the map he’d lost in the cabin fire nearly a week ago. And with Emma came Josh. Ray was going to have to learn to trust Josh more. Josh had been a drug addict and a criminal, but he’d gotten over that. He had saved them a few times already.
Yes, it was going to be dangerous, but the four of them had ridden these roads in the wastelands before, and they
would do it again. They would survive—Ray planned to make sure of it.
CHAPTER 22
Max
“It’s not goodbye, it’s so long for now,” Max told Kate after he hugged her.
Kate nodded and wiped at the tears in her eyes.
Jo was there as Max said so long to Kate and Brooke. Her new beau Gil was right beside her. The two of them pretended not to be a couple, but Max could tell. Hell, everyone could tell. And Max was happy for Jo. It was good for her. Good for Gil too.
Kate stood outside her tent. Brooke was beside her, Tiger by her feet.
Max looked down at Brooke. “Can I have a hug?”
Brooke nodded, wide-eyed. But she didn’t make a move.
Max bent down and scooped Brooke up into his arms. She squealed with surprise, but also delight as Max spun her around and then held her tight for a moment. “You take care of Kate, okay?”
Brooke nodded.
Max set her back down on the floor.
“You have to say goodbye to Tiger,” Brooke said in her soft voice.
Max scooped Tiger up into his arms before the cat could bolt and spun him around once, giving him a soft hug. Tiger looked annoyed but didn’t try to get out of his arms. “I’ll see you soon, Tiger. You be good.”
Brooke giggled.
Max set the cat down, then the cat took off among the tents.
“I know you’ll be back, Max,” Kate said. “I know you’ll take the Dragon down. I know you’ll get Petra back.”
Max nodded. It bothered him a little that he hadn’t been dreaming about Petra lately. It made him wonder if she wasn’t alive anymore, that they were going there to find her dead—or maybe never find her at all. And it bothered him even more that Brooke hadn’t drawn anything in the last few days, like all connections with the Dragon, and maybe even with each other, had been severed. It was like the Dragon had withdrawn and was waiting for the attack, waiting to defend himself. Like he knew it was coming.