“Dude, you sooo have no room to talk,” Niner shot back.
Aaaaand there goes the snuggle moment. “Boys, chill.” She kissed Roscoe. “You need to learn how to shut up sometimes, or get me a roll of duct tape to shut you up.”
“What if I don’t want to shut up?” His playful grin told her he was just messing with her.
“Maybe,” she said, poking him in the chest, “I just want you to so I can fuck your brains out and enjoy wordless sounds you make during sex.”
He seemed to consider that for a moment before nodding. “Okay. That’s cool. I can live with that.”
As they dressed she caught glimpses of their tattoos, the same one all the men of the Drunk Monkeys had, the tribal monkey on their backs. They both had theirs in between their shoulder blades.
She knew she needed to get up as well. While they were camped, she wanted to make use of the time going through some of the vehicles, checking them over. There was an auto parts store a few blocks away she could break into for supplies, if needed.
They caught her watching them and smiled, both of them leaning in for a final kiss. “You all right?” Roscoe asked.
She reached up and stroked his cheek. “Yeah. I will be.” Then she poked him in the chest. “Asshole.” She offered him a smile.
He grinned back. “I’m your asshole, and you’re stuck with me.”
“Good.”
Niner shook his head. “You know, we really need to work on you two’s foreplay techniques.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Mark and Ak took charge of chow that evening. They all sat around a small battery-powered lantern in the backyard, quietly eating warmed MREs. In the distance to the south and west, the orange glow from the spreading fires lit the night sky. They heard the occasional report from a gunshot echoing off houses and the canyon walls. Not close by, but definitely a sober warning of the decaying state of the LA area.
“Okay,” Papa said to Mark. “So Highway 2 is impassable. We can’t risk secondary mountain roads being any better. Bubba says north through Santa Clarita is still our best bet to get north quickly. Not like DOT is going to be out there clearing the landslides.”
The older man let out a sigh. “Last I could find out, looks like Castaic will be our next best shot for a stopover, if we need it. I don’t like that the 5 runs through there, but with enough of the road out, maybe that’ll inhibit people. I don’t know. I got hold of one of my friends who’s still working for the fire department, and he said the National Guard is trucking people out to Barstow. News reports are telling anyone with transportation to head that way, too. I don’t understand that, because it’s a fucking desert out there.”
“Lots of open land,” Uni said. “They can set up tent cities. Airdrop supplies.”
“Yeah, but how they gonna get them all water?” Mark countered. “Potentially a couple million refugees. They might as well ship ’em all the fucking way to Vegas if they’re gonna do that. Lots of empty houses and hotels in that godforsucken place. None of our emergency plans that we ran through while I was working ever listed Barstow as an evac point.”
“I think they don’t want them moving once they get them out to Barstow,” Uni said. “They want them stuck there.”
“Why?” Dolce asked. “Isn’t that sort of like issuing them a death sentence? Jamming that many people that close together, some of them probably exposed to Kite?”
Uni shrugged. “Yeah, in a way, it is. But think about it. You’re the US government. You have a literally unmanageable number of refugees streaming out of a city where you have no clue how many of them are blue. What do you do? You can’t put a couple of million people in isolation. And no matter what they’re saying on the news about mobilizing trains to move refugees north and east via rail, you ain’t gonna move people to other areas if they’ve been exposed to Kite.”
Clara dropped her fork onto her MRE tray and set it on the ground in front of her. “You ship as many of them as you can into the middle of nowhere,” she said, sounding sick to her stomach, “where you can reliably count on them not wandering too far off, because if they do, they’ll die. And if they die out there, it’s not like there’s a reservoir for their bodies to contaminate. And you can do massive burn piles for the ones who do die without worrying about it getting out of control and burning down what little is left of LA.”
She braced her right elbow on her leg, her forehead propped in her hand. “Or, you sit there and wait for them to die off from Kite, or kill each other, before you send in a bomber crew from Edwards, which happens to be nearby, to strafe the whole goddamned place with napalm, or a thermobaric bomb, or something.”
Dolce’s appetite also fled. She stared down at her tray of food and wasn’t sure if she could eat anymore. It made too much sense.
And she was, after all, a realist.
“Fuck,” Mark muttered. “Yeah. There’s some hills, and a little agriculture out there, but mostly it’s just farking desert. Miles and miles of nothing.”
“I heard Bakersfield’s just spiffy this time of year,” Roscoe snarked.
“Like it or not,” Uni said, “our path of least resistance is going to be the 5 all the way to Seattle. Or, at least paralleling it as far as Sacramento before we pick it up again. But I suspect if we can get past Pyramid Lake we’ll be okay from that point on. Bubba reported he found updates from DOT that the road’s intact north of there. But a lot of people won’t go that way, especially since National Guard is shipping them west, and they don’t have any way of going north other than on foot.”
Everyone looked at Papa.
“We can’t risk going anywhere just yet,” he said. “Not until we’re sure Doc is stable. Regardless, our next stop will be Seattle.
“Seattle?” Dolce asked. “Why?”
“Because that’s where the missing volunteer was sent by the church facility. There’s likely going to be a pocket of Kite cropping up there by the time we arrive.”
She stared at him. “Oookay, so again, why there? Why not cut east before that? That’s a pretty big city. There are lots of other places we could go hide out in.”
“Well, there are several reasons why—”
They all froze as another aftershock rattled them, rocking the vehicles and tents and nearby houses and everything else, including their nerves. Another scattershot of acorns fell from the oak tree and rattled down the RV’s roof.
When the tremor stopped a few seconds later, Dolce said, “Never-fucking-mind. I don’t care why there, as long as it’s not here.”
“Refugees from the main basin area, any that aren’t funneled to Barstow, will mostly flee south and east,” Papa said. “Paths of least resistance, especially if the government offers them a free ride out. Plus, Canuck here might have a contact in Washington state.”
“I had a friend in Seattle,” the scientist told them. “Researcher. Bubba says it looks like she’s still there. I spent six months working with her on a project at a university lab in the city. If nothing else, I’m hoping to get in and make use of their facilities.”
“You plan on just waltzing in there and asking for lab time?” Dolce asked.
“No,” Papa said, pointing at Lima. “He’s already had Bubba looking into it. Hacked their system yesterday. We’ll all have our own swipe badges.”
Dolce tried to process that. “You guys are crazy enough, I think that might actually work.”
“Doesn’t hurt that a couple of us have friends at McChord, south of Seattle,” Papa said. “Hopefully, between that and Arliss now being minus two moles, we might be able to pick up a better set of transportation than what we’ve got.”
“Better how?”
“To get us to Atlanta via air,” Alpha said. “CDC research facility there.”
“Well, to get us to a safe house from where we can run ops to the Atlanta metro area,” Papa clarified.
Dolce took a moment to let that sink in. “You’re all nuts. You know that? Every farking
last one of you You’re telling me you want to steal—”
“Appropriate,” Uni corrected.
“Uh-huh. You want to steal a piece of military aircraft and fly our asses to somewhere in the vicinity of Atlanta?”
“Yep,” several of the men said. From the way they kept eating, apparently the plan sounded quite logical and reasonable to them.
“You don’t think anyone’s going to be, oh, waiting for us when we land? If they don’t shoot us out of the farking air, first?”
“They have to know we’re there,” Papa said with a grin. You turn a transponder off and fly low, nobody sees you. By the time anyone knows you’re gone, you’re already on the ground again.”
Speechless with disbelief, she stared at Papa for a few seconds. “Why the fark didn’t you just get a boat and sail to Florida, then? Pensacola or somewhere? You were in Mexico. You could have been there by now.”
The men all pointed at Riley Perkins.
Their meaning wasn’t lost on Dolce. “Oh.”
Papa smiled. “We follow the strongest leads. Travel logistics is usually the least of our worries. Right now, though, we can’t go anywhere.”
He didn’t need to say it. She knew exactly what he meant. They couldn’t risk traveling with Doc laid up.
“So once we can move, our next step is what? Where do we go from—”
“We get our asses out of this crappy valley ASAP is what we do.”
Everyone turned at the ragged sound of Doc’s voice. He had an arm draped around Tango’s shoulders, the other over Pandora’s.
Both of them were grinning ear to ear.
Sin followed close behind, but from the look on his face and lack of protective gear, it was obvious the worst was over.
Papa stood. “You feeling better?”
“Felt a lot fucking worse,” Doc said as they helped him over to the ring of people and let him sit on the ground. “So don’t keep us hanging here in this garden of dogshit just because of my goldbricking ass.” He smiled up at his commanding officer. “Sir.”
Papa’s smile blossomed. “Ready to get back on the road, I take it?”
“I ran his latest blood work three times to be sure,” Sin said. “He’s improving.”
“You sure it’s safe for him to be around us?” Papa asked.
“I’m already synthesizing a serum from his samples. Tango and Pandora volunteered to let me try it on them. Once we know it’s safe, I’ll inoculate everyone. I think this is a good first step. Realistically, anyone could have been exposed already, from the outsides of our suits as we entered and exited the RV despite our decon protocols.”
“But it’s not a total vaccine?” Papa asked.
Sin’s expression sobered. “Eh, no. Not against the more virulent strains, I’m afraid. Only against the one he had.”
Q walked up and joined them.
“Which we still don’t know for sure was Kite,” the patient himself added. “For all we know, it could have been something different. The records didn’t show those fuckers cooking up anything besides Kite in their LA lab, but the braintrust here hasn’t finished going through all the samples yet.”
“I think,” Q said, “it is reasonable to assume it was a mutated form of Kite based on the initial protein signature reports. If Julie Chu will respond to our messages, she could confirm it for us. I sent her the protein signatures.”
“So that’s good, right?” Dolce asked. “That it’s mutating to a less deadly strain sooner than you thought it would?”
Q nodded, even though his somber expression didn’t change. “Good, but it now means the strip tests might be worthless against some of the strains. None of us ever thought to investigate what parameters they used to develop the test strips. I thought perhaps it was a protein in the virus. But if that protein is not in all the mutations, it means other deadly mutations of Kite might not be picked up by the tests any longer.”
“You could’ve just lied to me and said yes, it’s good that it’s mutating to a less deadly form,” Dolce said.
Q smiled. “Yes, it is good that it is mutating to a less deadly form.”
“Thank you.”
“You are very welcome, Annie.”
Dolce was still getting used to her code name, but she wouldn’t deny she liked it.
“Okay,” Papa said. “That means tomorrow morning, we need a scouting team to head north and do recon, see if we need to blaze a trail.”
“I’ll go,” Mark said. “I’m familiar with the area. See if we can contact my friend in Castaic.”
“Then it sounds like we have ourselves the start of a plan.”
LA was dying, circling the drain. Arliss had told Bubba that Kite was definitely exploding, uncontrolled, in areas of the city, even though that wasn’t being reported to the media yet. Suspected victims were being executed with po-clo when it was available, and by bullets when it wasn’t. One entire National Guard unit from southern Arizona had been euthanized when three of their members turned up blue. Just the week before, they had been patrolling the border with Mexico and had engaged in fights with people fleeing from Mexico City. It was assumed they’d contracted it that way.
Lima showed them the latest news feeds he’d pulled up, and it wasn’t pretty. The National Guard had orders to evacuate areas of the valley, forcibly if necessary, regardless of whether people were in shelters or their homes were habitable. Power and gas crews were being dispatched only to outlying regions where damage was less severe.
And where Kite had yet to be reported.
Police and fire protection were being diverted as well. Hospitals were being evacuated, patients sent elsewhere.
Or moved to Barstow.
New LAX was permanently closed due to terminal and runway damage and fuel shortages that prevented them from refilling their generators which powered lights, radar, and radio equipment.
Most telling of all, Bubba had reported that El Segundo was being completely evacuated and shut down, emptied of equipment and personnel. All aircraft and personnel were being moved, much of it to Edwards, the rest of it to points elsewhere.
“Hang up the closed sign,” Roscoe said. “Los Angeles is going out of business.”
“Fire sale,” Ak said. “Everything must go.”
“Hey, that’s a good one,” Roscoe said.
“Too bad it’s so damn close to the truth,” Dolce added.
* * * *
The three of them took turns holding the hose for each other in the makeshift shower that night when it was their turn to grab one. Because of the warm summer night and the sheer number of people in their group, it was just as easy to bathe outside rather than wait for time in the bathrooms. As warm as the night air felt, Dolce didn’t even mind the cool water from the hose.
As a mental image of her dead friends flashed through her brain, she felt lucky she was even alive to be taking a cold shower under a hose in in someone’s backyard, with nothing more than a hastily erected tarp for cover.
They returned to their tent and as her men settled in next to her, she realized she didn’t want to go to sleep yet.
Yeah, during her own basic training, and even during some maneuvers and assignments during her time in, she’d had to tolerate primitive conditions. This was easy to deal with. Hell, as good as a fancy hotel. She wasn’t sleeping out in the open in her clothes. This, however, might be their last night of privacy for a while.
She knew her friends wouldn’t want her wasting a minute of happiness.
She didn’t want to waste a minute of it, because it could be snatched away from her in a heartbeat. She’d almost applied for a mechanic position at CTSC, until she’d gotten the job at the auto plant, which had paid better.
It just as easily could have been her huddled down in that room with her friends.
And anything she could do to take her mind off what she’d seen there would be a blessing.
She rolled on top of Niner and kissed him. “I need a distraction.”
>
“Oh, you do, huh?”
“Did I hear someone needs a distraction?” Roscoe asked.
“Yep,” she said, leaning over to kiss him. She sat up and pulled her T-shirt off, then her sports bra. “You two think you can distract me?”
“I think we can handle that,” Niner said, reaching up and cupping her breasts in his hands. “I think we know exactly how to handle that.”
Roscoe sat up and quickly got naked. Niner handed her off to him so he could get naked, too. In the process, Roscoe managed to get her shorts and panties off of her. She ended up on top of him in a sixty-nine, that talented mouth of his doing delicious things to her pussy as he licked and sucked on her clit. She grabbed Roscoe’s stiff cock. With her fingers encircling the base, she lowered her mouth onto it, enjoying the way his moan of pleasure rumbled through her clit.
“Oh, that’s just perfect,” Niner said as he stroked her ass. His fingers settled between her legs, easily sliding into her pussy. First one, then a second. She was glad she had Roscoe’s cock to moan around, because it meant she didn’t have to worry about earning themselves a round of applause when they emerged from the tent the next morning.
She felt Niner fist his cock and start swiping the head of it up and down between her pussy lips, gathering her juices on him before slowly sliding it deep inside her.
Aaaaand that, combined with Roscoe’s delicious tongue, triggered her first explosion.
“Oh, yeah,” Niner whispered, slowing down and taking his time. “I’m going to stay right here and let him get you off a couple more times before I let loose.”
Helpless to change anything about that situation—not that she wanted to change anything about that situation—she let out a whimper around Roscoe’s cock.
She’d swear he giggled, the sensation vibrating up through her clit as Niner’s cock kept perfectly rubbing against her G-spot.
She didn’t know how long it lasted, or how many times she came. She’d given up trying to keep count, especially when sometimes it felt like they just rolled one into another. Finally, Niner took pity on her.
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