“That could be trouble,” I said to Sonny, looking at the overcast sky. “If it snows and the Chinese Army is looking for us, it’ll be easy to follow our trail in fresh snow.”
“Yeah, it could create a problem,” Sonny replied. “And they will be after us for sure, but there’s no reason to worry about it. We’ve got enough things to worry about that we can control, or at least influence. Weather isn’t one of them – nor are the Chinese.”
“I guess that makes sense,” I said.
We headed back into the garage in silence, lost in our thoughts. I can’t speak for Sonny, but I was thinking about what he’d said, about only worrying over the things we could control, and my mind had gone straight to the problem of who would be coming with us.
Mark was in a bad way, and it wasn’t a stretch to think we might be bringing him out to lie next to Karen before the day was through. He was still unconscious when we got back inside but Samara reported his heartbeat was strong. Still, he was in no condition to travel. Nor was John.
I knew I was soon going to have to make a decision, one way or another. It was one I didn't want to make. The thought of leaving anyone behind killed me. I had all afternoon to think it over, so I decided I would put it off as long as possible. Why was it my decision anyway? Yes, I had been voted leader, but how long did I have to be the one making all the decisions?
Sonny was back on his feet now, albeit sore and limited physically, but it seemed even he was deferring to me. I decided not to think too deeply about it, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue making the big decisions.
“We got everything back in place and shifted it around a bit so maybe it’ll be harder to shake loose next time, Boss,” Luke said, coming up to me. “Indigo brushed all the broken glass out of the cab, too.”
“Good,” I replied. “I'm hoping Sonny can drive so I can ride in the back for a while.”
“You and me both, bro,” Luke said, following me to the main doors.
I pulled them open just an inch or so and peered at the gas station through the narrow gap.
Glancing at him, I could see he looked just as exhausted as I felt. It was the stress and the constant stream of adrenalin, I think, leaving us feeling drained. He also looked dirty and scrappy, his patchy, ginger-colored adolescent beard adding to the look.
“Man, you need a shave and a shower...” I joked.
“Stuff that, when we leave this place I plan on curling up in a sleeping bag on a mat in the back of the truck and sleeping. Just sleeping. And you oughtta talk, by the way!”
My hands went to my own face and felt the light fuzz of my own boy beard before lightly running my fingers over the wound on my cheek. It had crusted over and thankfully didn’t hurt apart from a faint throb. I must have looked a sight, but what can I say? Priorities tend to change when you are in the middle of an apocalypse, running for your life.
“You can get some sleep now, if you want,” I told him. “I was going to see if you wanted to come with me to check out the gas station for any supplies, but I can take Ben or Indigo with me instead.”
“I doubt that we’ll find much there,” he said, eyeing the station. “That place looks like it has been closed since long before the current mess started, but I’ll go with you. Ben is busy worrying about his sister’s ankle and Indigo is already sleeping in the back of the truck.”
“Alright, you and me then,” I said, rising to my feet. I patted the pocket with the revolver in it, feeling its welcome weight. “You might want to grab a gun ... just in case ...”
“Nah, I have sworn off firearms, I’ll get my crossbow. Be right back,” he said, and headed to the truck.
I fought the urge to argue with him, knowing if it came to a confrontation with military, the crossbow would be of limited value. He returned a moment later holding the weapon loosely in his hand. The way he carried it called up images in my mind of old time movies like Robin Hood, except in those, it always seemed to be the bad guys who had the crossbows. This time, they would be carrying semi-automatics.
“Let's go, man,” Luke said, pushing the door open and breezing past me with a self-confident air about him. I shook my head and smiled to myself. My friend would have fit right in with a group of medieval outlaws. I pulled the door closed and followed him across the gravel expanse between the garage and the station, maybe ten yards across at most. With every step, I worried a Chinese patrol would come rolling down the road.
8
We made it to the back of the cinderblock building without incident. The window was boarded over and the door was locked with a chain and padlock.
“Let’s try the front,” said Luke.
There was another door about halfway down the side wall, this one unchained, with a faded picture of male and female stick figures stenciled on the outside. It was locked too, but Luke put his shoulder against it and with a hard bump, it popped right open.
Inside was a simple bathroom with a single toilet and a cracked porcelain sink beneath a grimy stainless-steel mirror. There was no door leading further into the station.
“I always hated gas stations where the bathrooms were on the outside, they were always filthy like this,” Luke said, turning away with his face etched with disgust. “But you know what I hated more than that?”
“What?” I asked, as we continued along the wall to the front.
“When fast food restaurants did the same thing. You remember the Hefty Burger back in Fort Carter? They were set up that way.”
“Yeah,” I said, with a nod of my head. “A real pain in the ass.”
If only little things like that were all we had to worry about.
The glass doors at the front were also chained and clasped with a padlock.
“We need something to cut the padlock,” I said, grasping the chains.
“Yep,” Luke said. “Sonny brought some bolt cutters, I helped him pack them up. Be back in a flash.”
He ran off toward the garage before I could answer. I heard the faint hum of a helicopter in the distance, back in the direction of the bridge where we had encountered the Chinese, but I couldn’t see it and it didn’t seem to get any closer. Still, I was glad I thought of checking for the bolt cutters rather than trying to shoot the lock which was the first idea that popped into my head; if they were searching for us in this direction and were close enough, a gunshot might lead them right to us.
When Luke returned with the heavy bolt cutters, he cut through the padlock and I yanked the chain out from between the pull handles. Other than the padlock and chain, the front door was unlocked.
I took another glance up and down the road in both directions. It was still clear, but I wondered how much longer before we saw some sign of the Chinese. I pulled the door open and we slipped inside. It was dark. The boarded over windows only allowed narrow cracks of light to seep in around the edges. Luke pulled a small LED flashlight from his coat pocket and tossed it to me before pulling another out for himself.
“I hope we’re not draining the batteries down for nothing,” he said, shining his little light along the counter to the right of the door.
“What size do they take?” I asked him.
“What?”
“What size batteries do they use?”
“Double-A, I think,” he replied. “Why?”
“Here,” I reached down and picked up the unopened pack of double-A batteries by my foot and tossed it over to him. “Now we don't have to worry about it.”
“How long do you think those have been lying there?” he asked.
“Don't know, at least a year, maybe longer,” I said, as I shone my flashlight around the station’s interior. The place had been abandoned, but you could tell that when it closed down the owner hadn’t gotten quite everything out. Various convenience store-style sundries still sat on their racks. Most of the bags of chips and nuts had been gnawed into by rats or mice.
“Hey, look, they have a fishing section,” Luke said, walking over to where lures an
d bobbers were hanging. He grabbed a couple rolls of fine fishing line, and several packs of small hooks, shoving them all in his pocket.
“What are those for?” I asked.
“Medical supplies,” he responded. “I grabbed barbless hooks. Those and the line together will allow us to stitch people up if we need to.”
“Good idea,” I said, while grabbing a few small bottles of aspirin from the shelf near me. We were low on pain killers of any sort and I figured something was better than nothing. Mark was going to need them, if he ever woke up, and John could probably already use some. He’d been awake and in agony when Luke and I had left.
“Too bad they don’t have anything stronger than aspirin here,” I said, looking over to see what Luke was doing.
“Yeah, we’ll have to be careful giving those out though. Aspirin is a blood thinner, so we won’t be able to give them to the wounded. I got three unopened cases of soda here,” he said. “I take back what I said about this place not being worth checking. It’s a gold mine.”
I went behind the counter to see what I could find. There were dozens of packs of cigarettes, and a few full cartons as well, but none of us smoked and this didn’t seem like the ideal time to take up the habit, so I ignored them. The till on the register was open and was empty of everything but a handful of pennies, which I left there. Coins were almost as useless as cigarettes. In a cupboard under the register I found a stack of porno magazines, which would have left me giddy six months before, but now were just junk to be tossed out of the way. Under them, I found something much more valuable to us. A revolver. I whispered a triumphant, “Yes!”
“What did you find?” Luke asked.
I picked up the revolver from under the counter, stood up and placed it on the countertop to show Luke.
“There you go, man, the mother lode!” he said, beaming. He picked up the new weapon and examined it as I pulled my own out to compare the two. “Awesome, it’s a different make to yours, but it’s a .38 too, so it’ll use the same bullets. You can be the Two-Gun Kid, now.”
“Is that from some Old West video game?” I asked, sarcastically.
“Nope, he’s a comic book character from the ‘50s and ‘60s,” Luke replied. “It was my dad’s favorite comic.”
Replacing my revolver in the pocket of my parka, I checked the cylinder of the handgun I had pulled from under the counter and found it was empty of bullets. I checked it for rust and tested the action to make sure that it worked smoothly. It was fine and I fished six rounds out of my pocket and loaded it up before slipping it into my belt. I decided to continue my search behind the counter.
If this keeps up, I'm going to need to get a gun belt and some holsters, I thought to myself.
I approached what appeared to be a fire safe built into the counter a few feet down from the register. The safe was unlocked and open a crack, which led me to believe that, like the money in the till, any cash that had been in here was long gone, not that it would do us any good anyway ... American currency was now worth less than the paper it was printed on. I had no idea what the Chinese even called their money, but I figured it would soon become the currency of North America.
Knowing that there might be a chance of something more useful than money in there, I reached down to open it. I caught a flurry of movement in my light beam and a large squealing rat erupted from the safe. I stumbled backward, falling on my backside as I struggled to get away from it. It was as big as a cat and its squeaks became a hiss as it darted toward my legs. I kicked at it, missing badly, and watched as it darted past me and scurried under the counter.
“Are you okay, man?” Luke asked, glancing over from where he was standing by the empty drink coolers. He had a grin on his face.
“Yeah.”
I was blushing, but happy that I hadn’t screamed. I would never have lived that down.
“It was just kind of freaky. I’ve never really liked rats.”
There was a shelf inside the safe. It contained a few old ledger books, some yellowed papers and scattered coins. I shuffled the papers out of the way and my eyes widened. I had uncovered a box of .38 caliber ammo, hollow points, which I picked up and opened. It was about a third of the way full, so I scooped out the bullets and added them to the ammo already in my pocket.
The bottom of the safe was a rat’s nest, literally, of bric-a-brac, chewed cardboard, small pieces of wood and plastic, paper, and other unidentifiable stuff. I considered digging through it, looking for anything of value, but then decided that it was not going to be worth my time. Besides, there was no need to destroy the rat’s home, if that is what it was. I carefully closed the safe until it was only open a crack, just like I had found it.
Luke had wandered away from the coolers and was standing in front of some gauges and buttons set into a panel on the wall. I came out from behind the counter and walked over to join him. The panel was to control the three fuel pumps out in front of the station.
“I wonder if there’s still some gas down in the tanks,” Luke said, as I wandered up beside him.
“I don’t know. The gauges say empty, but that could be because there is no power reaching them.”
“That’s what had me wondering, Chief,” Luke said. “Be a shit fight to pump it out without power anyway, I guess.”
As he finished speaking, we both caught the sound of tires crunching on the frozen gravel in front of the gas station. We clicked off our flashlights at the same time and scurried over to one of the boarded-up windows. Peeking through a crack, we could see a Humvee had pulled into the lot and we watched as four Chinese soldiers got out of the vehicle.
A jolt of adrenalin shot through my system. Three wore the trench coats which marked them as conscripts, while the last was wearing urban camouflage and carried a modern assault rifle like the one that I had left back in the cab of the truck. I could see the driver was still in the Humvee.
“Balls,” Luke cursed quietly. “What if they go and check out the garage?”
“If they do, we need to make sure they can’t report in,” I whispered back. “That means we have to take out the guy in the Hummer first.”
“That’s not going to be easy,” Luke said. “Look again, there are two men still in the Hummer.”
“Damn,” I said. Luke was right. I don’t know how I missed it the first time, but there were two in the Humvee, the driver and a conscript. The conscript was standing, his upper half coming up through the vehicle’s roof as he manned a ring mounted machine gun.
“That’s going to be hard to sneak up on,” Luke said. “If he sees us, that thing will tear us a new one. Shit ...”
The camouflaged soldier waved two of the conscripts toward the building behind the gas station and led the other one toward the front door we had just broken into. We were sitting ducks.
Things only got worse as we heard the sound of a helicopter in the distance. Luke had his crossbow up, focused on the door, eyes narrowed. I moved away from the window to crouch behind the end of the counter, a revolver in each hand. This Two-Gun Kid was ready to go out in a blaze of glory, if need be. With a bit of luck, we would be able to take out the two coming through the door before we had to worry about the soldiers in the Humvee. I didn’t even want to think about other two.
The sound of the chopper got louder and through the grimy glass of the doors I saw the officer stop and turn. The building began to shake and it was clear the chopper was landing. We were cooked, well and truly. Luke lowered his crossbow. He waved me back over and I joined him. He had a better view from his vantage point, and we saw the soldiers we had been about to engage plus the two who had been headed to the garage come back to watch the helicopter land.
The camouflaged officer walked toward the aircraft as dirt and debris started swirling in the yard of the gas station. The chopper set down about 30 feet behind the Hummer and the passenger door opened. A woman in a sleek black uniform jumped out with another similarly dressed male.
What happened n
ext happened so quickly it’s still a blur, even though I witnessed it firsthand. Ducking to avoid the rotors, the woman approached the officer from the Humvee. If he saw her take the pistol from the pocket of her black overcoat as he raised his hand in salute, he didn’t have a chance to react. She aimed and shot him through the face, then walked forward with purposeful strides and shot the other soldier through the throat as he struggled to bring his weapon up.
Her companion began firing at the two who had been about to check the garage. He managed to wing one, who fell to the ground screaming and clutching his thigh – the other turned and ran, but another shot took him in the neck. He collapsed, dead before he hit the ground.
Behind the black clad killers, the driver of the Hummer sat up straight in his seat and began screaming at the soldier manning the machinegun turret. The woman’s companion walked calmly to the soldier he had winged and stood over him, before coolly shooting him through the eye.
I recognized the woman now. It was Huian. I began to yell a warning as the turret on the Humvee swung toward her, but my voice was drowned out by the rapid fire of heavy machine guns. The helicopter’s weaponry had been brought to bear on the ground vehicle.
The Humvee jumped and quivered as it was torn to pieces by the armor-piercing shells and forced forward against the gas pumps of the abandoned station. The hellfire ended after only about 30 seconds but there was no movement in the smoking pile of twisted and chewed metal.
Huian gave a thumbs up toward the helicopter and I looked over to it as two men dressed in urban camouflage uniforms opened the side door of the chopper. They unloaded a black motorcycle, then got back in and slid the door closed. Huian’s black uniformed companion approached her and they had a brief conversation before he ran back to the chopper and climbed in beside the pilot. The rotors started turning faster again and the chopper rose into the air, turning a tight arc before heading back in the direction from which it had come.
Fight Like Hell [America Falls Series | Books 1-6] Page 21