by Jeff Kirkham
Noah had been standing beside his Land Cruiser with his keys in his hand for several minutes, the Arizonans arguing and celebrating in the background of his thoughts. If he stood there long enough, somebody would come along and drag him into whatever drama the Tucson hotheads were cooking up. He needed to get the hell out of there, if only to avoid another moment where he’d feel compelled to lead. Once he went down that rabbit hole, he knew he’d get high-centered—and the cartel would move away into the night, committing whatever obscenities they had planned.
Noah stepped up into the driver’s seat and turned the key. The blaring radio cut through the adrenaline aftermath of the Battle of Corker’s Hill.
“You fought the demon every day,
And it’s dragged you to your knees.
But facing dawn, you’ll come to find,
‘Fore me, that demon flees.”
Noah turned the music down.
“Sounds good to me. We’ll head east, then.” He cranked the key and smiled.
Some people were given guardian angels. He’d been given ghosts in his cassette deck. That sounded about right to him. So long as he wasn’t expected to babysit a bunch of post-apocalyptic mall ninjas, he was good with the arrangement. Subject to that one condition, the ghosts could point him wherever they liked.
Chapter 23
Tavo Castillo
Phoenix Bypass Route, Gila River, Buckeye, Arizona
The town of Buckeye, Arizona glinted in the cool, dawn light. The clay-colored homes and white-painted industrial buildings nestled in the Gila River Valley, preparing to soak up any bit of cool air coming off the river. The day would be a scorcher, especially with air conditioning gone forever.
Tavo wondered if these residents would make a go of it—remaining in their clustered, suburban neighborhoods while the civilized world collapsed around them. Buckeye, Arizona could pull water from the river and even irrigate from the canal that carved a straight line through town, doling out water to a patchwork of a hundred fields. From up on the ridge and a mile away, it looked like the perfect place to sit out the apocalypse.
With the coming light, rifle fire crackled on the valley floor. Tavo’s heartbeat quickened despite knowing that the shooting had nothing to do with his invasion force. Hours before dawn, he had sent a recon element across the valley to gather intel on the Arizona National Guard base wedged in the sunbaked mountains on the opposite side. If his recon element engaged, he wouldn’t hear them five miles away. This was something else.
Still, he checked in with Beto to make sure. “Roadrunner, this is Actual.”
“Go for Roadrunner,” Beto replied.
“SitRep.”
“We’re golden. I count twenty OpFor and at least forty turreted Humvees. Only three of them are ready to fight. The rest are moth-balled. The target has a shit-ton of solar panels, so they must have AC. They’re pulling water from a bowser in the courtyard. I think we’re looking at what’s left of the professional staff. Advise green light on Assault Plan Alpha. This place is perfect.”
“Acknowledged. Standby.” Tavo returned to glassing the valley, searching for the source of the shooting. The distances caused the crack and whine of the rifle shots to bounce around, echoing from several directions. Finally, Tavo caught movement in a field on the near edge of town. A small group of civilians fought with another small group of civilians, maneuvering around a field of what appeared to be kale.
Somebody was defending crops, and somebody was challenging ownership. The majority of the fields appeared to be alfalfa and cotton, and maybe late-season wheat. Very few of the fields looked to be growing anything immediately helpful to humans. Lettuces, kale, pumpkins. People would have to eat massive amounts of those vegetables to survive, especially considering the many suburban subdivisions of Buckeye. A lot of people lived here—fifty thousand, he guessed. It’d take a shit-load of kale and pumpkin to feed fifty thousand people. And things would get much worse once the Phoenix ghettos began their inevitable exodus toward water and farmland. Maybe he was witnessing that exodus right now, as farmers battled desperate urbanites.
No matter. The National Guard Armory would be the ideal garrison and rally point for Tavo’s push north. His men would eventually dominate Buckeye and put down any armed resistance. They would have to collect all the civilian firearms, but that could be accomplished with checkpoints and by infiltrating the local, civilian leadership. Given enough time for the lowlifes of Phoenix to make their way into Buckeye, the citizens would probably welcome some law and order, even if it mostly spoke Spanish.
He caught this town and the National Guard Armory at the perfect moment; hanging between modern civilization and the apocalypse. The power was out, but the danger not yet known. Cataclysm had not come to rural towns yet, and it would naturally take longer before terror would overtake them. Hypothetically, Tavo could work his way up a string of such towns, all the way to Salt Lake City. His army would be their first and last hint that things had changed forever.
“Actual to Roadrunner. En route to your position. Assault Plan Alpha. Set go-time for ninety mics. Eight-hundred and thirty hours.”
“Acknowledged. We’re go on Assault Alpha at eight-hundred and thirty hours. Roadrunner out.”
Three dirt roads led to the National Guard Armory tucked into the Goldwater Mountain. Somebody, at some point in time, had chosen this location because it would be difficult to assault. Maybe it’d been an old waypoint for U.S. Army or local frontiersmen fearing the Navajo because it was a natural fortress.
Apparently, the Army National Guard soldiers hadn’t gotten the memo. To them, it was an inconveniently-located office where they came to work. Even with the collapse of military communications and the meltdown of order, the national guardsmen hadn’t bothered to place LP/OPs on the mountaintops that ringed the armory. As soon as he took possession, Tavo would remedy that oversight.
Before first light, he sent two teams up onto the Barry Goldwater mountain range to find and disable any cell towers. One team had found a tower, broke in and destroyed the electronics. On the opposite site of the valley, Tavo’s cell service dropped from five bars to one. His men on the mountain couldn’t get a signal at all. The armory wouldn’t be able to call for help on their cell phones.
Tavo had split his force into three equal companies of a hundred men each, with the technicals equally divided between them. Main Road, Mountain Road East and Mountain Road North. They’d collapse on the armory simultaneously, concentrating fire on the three turreted Humvees that appeared positioned for defense. Then they would rush the perimeter. North Company would take down the communications array at the back of the compound. The only obstacle would be the chain-link fence, and Tavo made sure each company had men with bolt-cutters or technicals to run the fence down.
The sun rose over the mountain, carving back the last of the shade in the huge, manicured-gravel courtyard of the armory. Men and women strolled about the grounds in ACU camo, chatting and joking. Meanwhile, three hundred enemy combatants silently prepared to kill them all.
Five, one-story offices buildings and one, massive storage building ringed the gravel yard in an esthetic nod to fortresses of the Old West. Tavo marveled at the intellectual failing of the design—really the same intellectual failing of the entire nation. Nobody had imagined America could possibly go back in time. Except for a few tinfoil hat-wearing whackos, an entire nation believed that modern civilization came with a lifetime guarantee. If modern convenience was all they had ever known, how could the future be any different?
Tavo reached for his radio and paused. Something rumbled in his gut. A sudden roar consumed the Gila River Valley and fear shot through him like ice through his veins. Two screeching A-10 Warthogs tore down the valley at four hundred miles per hour, nearly level with their position on the mountainside.
They’re hunting us, Tavo realized. They figured out how to get an air platform off the ground. Now, two pilots want us dead.
�
��Take the armory now. All companies execute, execute, execute.” Tavo exhaled. He clipped his rifle into the single-point configuration and climbed into the passenger seat of the command Humvee. The warthogs hadn’t seen them or else it’d be over already. Tavo’s window of safety had just begun, since the warplanes would be unlikely to return immediately to an area they had already searched. Apparently, the warthogs had no comms with the town of Buckeye, or the locals would’ve blown the whistle on the column.
“All commanders, minimize smoke signatures. Good hunting. Actual out.”
From his position on the road, racing toward the main gate, Tavo watched his column plunge down the dirt road to the east, pouring belt-fed fire onto the two National Guard Humvees on that side of the perimeter. The Humvees weren’t returning fire, so the gunners were either dead or cowering inside.
As Tavo approached, men and women poured out of the concrete buildings, seeking fighting cover, but the armory hadn’t been built for that. Either they stayed inside blind, where Tavo’s men could maneuver around them, or they went outside and fought in the open. Tavo had to give them credit; though outnumbered ten-to-one and fighting from a modern joke of a fort, the guardsmen didn’t hesitate.
“No parlay. Kill them all,” Tavo barked into the radio. With the warthogs somewhere over Arizona, there would be no time for games. A white mushroom cloud billowed from the back corner of the compound, probably an RPG hitting the communications array. It’d been a primary objective for the company coming down Mountain Road North, still the smoke made Tavo cringe.
He jumped out of his vehicle and searched the sky. He saw nothing but fresh sunlight and blue-on-blue firmament. The warthogs had flown from Tucson, halfway across the state. Even with the smoke, hunting Tavo’s fighting force would be like hunting a rat in a boulder field. Half of Phoenix and most of Tucson had been aflame, with fifteen dozen smoke columns rising over the cities and handfuls of fires in the suburbs. Unless the pilots could get on-the-ground intel, the warplanes would buzz around like flies in an outhouse—they’d have plenty of targets but no idea where to attack.
The fighting inside the armory built toward a crescendo, tens of thousands of bullets filling the air. Eight bodies of American guardsmen lay in the courtyard, and the rest had retreated to the buildings, fighting through doors and windows.
To the neophyte, concrete buildings seemed like a good defensive fortification. In truth, once inside, defenders couldn’t see much. Enemy forces could maneuver at will, surrounding every angle and lining up shooters on every window and doorway. This was no Alamo, where riflemen could take cover on elevated walls and shower death on anyone attempting to cross no-man’s-land. These buildings were more like coffins with windows.
The shooting died down as the defenders barricaded themselves inside, probably clinging to the hope that someone would come to their rescue. The nearest neighboring national guard armory was thirty miles away in downtown Phoenix, and those guardsmen were probably locked down against the threat of civil disorder. Tavo had killed any chance of the guardsmen calling out. Tucked in a lonely mountain canyon, not even the local farmers would bear witness to their deaths.
“Actual to Roadrunner.”
“Go for Roadrunner.”
Tavo considered his next steps. “Try a call out, Roadrunner. I don’t want to risk breaking the solar components. Let’s see if we can get them to trust us.” The world had become a very unkind place, very quickly. To a group of national guardsmen tucked away in the mountains, the collapse still probably seemed like a camping adventure. Among the civilized, violence took time to become one’s bedfellow.
“We are the Buckeye City Defense League,” Beto blared over a megaphone. “We’re here to take possession of the solar panels and the Humvees for the defense of our city. Please surrender them and we’ll let you return to your families. The equipment in this armory belongs to the people.”
Tavo admired Beto’s lie. It had the ring of truth. Any alternative probably sounded better than dying behind a barricade of government issued furniture. Someone shouted from inside the main building, but Tavo was too far away to understand the words.
Beto replied on the megaphone. “We give you our word. We don’t want anyone else to get hurt.”
Tavo grinned. It was just the kind of thing an American would say.
Bedraggled men and women in camouflage trickled out of the buildings, their hands in the air. They formed up in the courtyard, probably in the same order they did every morning. Some of them gawked at their fallen comrades. A few burst into tears.
Three commando teams from Beto’s company coalesced and they began to search the armory. Shots rang out. Several small firefights blended into one another in the desert air as assaulters cleared holdouts in the buildings. The men and women lined up in the courtyard shuddered helplessly and more weeping ensued as they listened to their brave brothers dying inside the buildings.
The last of the shooting stopped and the three teams of commandos drifted back into the courtyard. Tavo couldn’t get a count, but he saw at least one wounded and maybe a couple missing from his own men.
“Roadrunner. Good copy?” Tavo radioed.
“Go for Roadrunner.”
“Shoot them,” Tavo ordered.
The crackle and pop of gunfire resumed and the men and women standing in the courtyard dropped. A few tried to run, but they didn’t get far.
“Get those fires out, prontisimo,” Tavo commanded as soon as the shooting stopped.
Tavo, Beto and Saúl took stock. They had only lost four men in the assault, and three of those had been killed clearing the buildings. They had caught the armory completely unprepared, other than the three Humvees at the entrances, which was probably nothing more than SOP during heightened security.
Now that they could get inside the buildings, they counted forty-nine functional Humvees, thirty-two of which had armored turrets with 7.62 machine guns. Strangely, the base only had ten thousand rounds of 7.62 and another ten thousand rounds of 5.56 for the rifles. Tavo figured that the National Guard must have had a policy of storing ammunition somewhere beside where their guns were kept. Adding weight to that suspicion, they found a dozen pintle-mounted Mk 19 grenade launchers for the Humvees but not a single grenade.
How was the National Guard supposed to guard the nation without ammunition?
Tavo scratched his head. He’d spent enough time in America to know that it probably had something to do with lawyers or budgets or both. Every time he saw something nonsensical in America, it usually came down to something like that.
“Where’s all the bang-bang?” Tavo asked his lieutenants, frustrated. He felt like this expedition was turning into a game of two steps forward and one step back.
“Maybe the National Guard doesn’t keep ammunition in armories. The stuff we found looks like it’s for base security,” Beto guessed. “The explosive stuff might be stored in army depots. The closest ammo could be at the Navajo Depot outside of Flagstaff. I did some training with the Teams there twenty years ago. If memory serves, those guys had Humvees and even some light armor. There’s another depot in northern New Mexico and I think there’s one outside Salt Lake City.”
“If they have armor, then they might be a lot harder to kill than this armory.” Tavo waved his arms around them, already moving on to bigger and better things.
Beto rubbed the stubble on his chin. “Let me work on that problem. I’ll send a couple teams to target gun stores and then roll up the gun local owners who filed 4473 forms with the ATF. I should be able to pull together enough 7.62 ammo for an assault on the Navajo Depot.” Beto seemed to assume that he’d be in command once Tavo headed back to Hermosillo, which made sense since he was the senior man among the lieutenants.
It was closing in on noon and all the air conditioners at the armory were humming. Amazingly, the battle hadn’t resulted in the destruction of any of the solar components, though bullets had almost certainly damaged some panels.
Scavenging local fuel might be easier, but every desperate survivor would be thinking the same thing, and probably getting there first. Rather than run around trying to scramble each gas station, Tavo would control the source.
“Go ahead Kit Fox,” Tavo defaulted to radiospeak even though he and Alejandro were on a satellite phone. Alejandro chuckled on the other end of the line.
“You want the good news, the bad news or the really good news,” Alejandro teased.
“As you please,” Tavo replied like ice, barely willing to tolerate the soldier’s humor. He had a nation to conquer.
“Right. We have the refinery under control and there’s a shit-ton of gasoline and diesel fuel here. The bad news is that the locals think this is fucking Red Dawn and they’re the Wolverines.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means they’re going to be a problem. The locals are surrounding us like we’re an invading army of Cubans. We’re taking rifle fire from the perimeter of the facility, and they’ve already punched holes in several of the storage tanks. We’re patching them, but you can’t just bust out a welder and fix a leak on a gas storage tank. It requires a big plate that we have to epoxy onto the sidewall. Luckily, the guy who knows how to do the repairs is still on-site. For now, we have the problem contained, but this refinery will have to be secured 24/7 and even then, we will eventually run out of steel patches. I think rednecks are coming over from Roswell too, just to fuck with us.”