by Dana Fraser
He shrugged again.
“And your targets?”
“Reyes had the list and was keeping score,” he answered, referring to Top Dog. “We were closing in on Hank Reynolds when shit went south.”
Thomas had to suppress a smile when he said Hank’s name. The man was still alive—or had been two days ago when Thomas last caught one of his broadcasts.
The young officer ran his fingers over the tablet’s surface, a perpetual frown of disappointment on his freshly shaven face. “And the equipment?”
“Kid was carrying most of it,” Thomas answered, trying to remember Hot Dog’s name. “Pattison that is. Reyes had the rest.”
The two men had used an assortment of gadgets and hardware for transmitter hunting, things like a directional antenna, walkie-talkies, a VHF quad antenna and some kind of attenuator box. Seeing the gear, Hank had explained the use of each piece to Thomas.
Catching the acquisitive glint in the older man’s gaze, Thomas had warned him that the every last piece of equipment probably had a GPS chip. With Hank still all beat up, Thomas had carried the radio gear away intact, taking it two miles north of the shack before smashing it to pieces and dumping it in a creak.
“That’s unfortunate,” the lieutenant said as he eyed Thomas’s clothing, the ghillie suit layered atop Patch’s field jacket and pants.
Thomas had exchanged the M40 for Patch’s assault rifle, dividing up the ammunition with Hank. The Browning still hung down his back and one of the Maxim 9s was out of sight, shoved deep in a pocket. The other was in Gavin’s hunting pack underneath the ghillie suit. Thomas had known coming down the hill that he looked like a motley fool, but he had seen several men wandering the camp through his field glasses who looked the same.
“Made some acquisitions along the way,” Thomas said, his painted face settling into a mask that had intimidated many a junior officer—when he outranked them.
The lieutenant looked at the tablet, his expression bored as he scrolled through the display. Thomas knew he was about to get fucked when a hint of a smile played at the corner of the young man’s mouth.
“Be at Staging Area 9b at oh-six-hundred tomorrow. We’re inserting a team outside Snowshoe.”
Heat flared through Thomas’s chest. Snowshoe was at the edge of the national park. He hadn’t risked his life walking into the park to head east again and erase forty miles of progress.
“All due respect, LT, but I’ve been humping up and down those hills since all this started.” He nodded at the men who had moved on to the quartermaster’s counter. “You’ve got bodies rolling out to Louisville in three hours.”
“You should have humped a little faster,” the lieutenant sneered. “That assignment is filled.”
Thomas allowed resignation to slip into his features as the officer returned the ID card and jerked his thumb at the quartermaster’s counter. The six am roll call gave him plenty of time to slip back into the woods on the camp’s west side with a few more days’ worth of food in his pack than when he had come down the hill. Depending on how they handed out credits, he might be able to swap them for even more food supplies.
Handing the ID card to the supply sergeant, he studied the man. The lips were pressed tightly together, cheeks turning red with what looked like a suppressed anger. The sergeant handed the card back then expeditiously began pulling out meal packs and ammo and placing everything at the far end of the counter, out of ear shot of the young lieutenant at the first desk.
Keeping one hand on the last box of ammo, the sergeant pushed the tablet and a stylus at Thomas. The screen showed a list of the items he had received and a statement he was meant to sign to acknowledge receipt. With the stylus hovering over the tablet’s surface, he stared at the sergeant’s hand as it remained tightly wrapped around the box of ammo.
The man glanced at the first station where the lieutenant was busy with a line of newly returned soldiers. He leaned in, voice dropping. “Any of those punks that just left miss roll call, there will be another baby louie with a tablet to swipe the ID card of the next man waiting to ship.”
Thomas nodded and signed the tablet, taking all the supplies but the box of ammo that had disappeared back beneath the counter. He hurried out, looking for the men who had been in line in front of him. Of the five of them, one had been sent to debriefing and had no current assignment. The other four were all bound for Louisville. It was a large city located only a little more than one hundred twenty miles from his home. It was familiar territory, too, and filled with cars he could hot wire.
He spotted the four men, three of them peeling off to the west, their hands already cradling their dicks as they moved toward a tent filled with women.
The fourth man headed into the showers.
His mouth a grim, determined line, Thomas followed after the lone figure.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
KILLING the mercenary in the shower took subterfuge and a bit of finesse. Thomas couldn’t slit the man’s throat or shoot him, not even with the Maxim 9. He couldn’t do anything that would make it look like a struggle had occurred—that the man had clearly died for a reason.
But, if it was bad luck that had Thomas waste an extra minute or two with Yardley and arrive at the check-in desk after the Louisville assignment was filled, then it was good luck that had all of the camp’s other mercenaries satisfying other needs instead of removing the stain of their recent sins beneath the heavy spray of hot water.
Inside the shower tent, it was just Thomas and his target, the younger male already naked and lathering up.
Thomas stripped down then used a paper towel to wipe most of the camo from his face. His gear went into a locker, a chain hanging from the key in its lock. He threaded his head through the chain then took the doorless stall opposite his target.
Water snaked along the floor from the other man’s side to where Thomas stood, lathering up. He rinsed his hands, leaving the rest of his body slick, then he faked his feet going out from under him. His flesh slapped against the floor and he released a sound that was half surprised grunt and half pained howl. Then he just sat there, naked but for the patch that covered his eye and doubting that the target would do anything more than ignore him.
It was a camp full of mercenaries, after all.
Thomas moved to stand up, flailing again then announcing that he might have twisted his ankle.
In his late twenties, the target eyed him with a mix of suspicion and caution, taking in Thomas’s patch, the grizzled beard and the many gray strands threading through the hair that covered his body from head to toe.
Thomas was taller than the target, but also older with muscles that had grown stringy after weeks of careful rationing. Without a weapon, naked on the floor and without leverage in a fight, he probably appeared to be the least formidable man in camp.
With one last look around the empty shower room, the young man crossed over to help. It took no more than a quick spin by Thomas on the slick floor to smash his victim’s head against the hot water handle. One more vicious slam, this time against the floor, cracked the target’s skull open and finished the job.
With a fresh coat of hastily applied camo paint on his face, Thomas left the shower room wet and soapy beneath his ghillie suit.
A little more than three hours later, he took a seat in one of five armored personnel carriers destined for Louisville.
The trip lasted four and a half hours. He spent every second of the drive listening for intel and trying to figure out how to extract himself from the group without dying.
And without taking an innocent life.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE PERSONNEL CARRIER dropped Thomas and the rest of an eight-man team in the South Louisville neighborhood, their destination located a few blocks from Cardinal Stadium to the east and Churchill Downs to the South.
Half the buildings on the street they traveled through on foot were already
burnt out. Those still standing displayed signs of violence visible even in the early morning twilight through which his team carefully moved.
Windows were broken out. Masonry was chipped and filled with bullet holes. Some of the damage, Thomas figured, was from before the end of the world as he knew it. But most of it was fresh.
His team’s objective wasn’t a person but one of the buildings. It was their job to set up a forward operating base complete with a sniper’s nest. They weren’t briefed on the mission until they were en route.
Thomas wasn’t a man prone to crying, but tears of relief had threatened to escape him as he listened to their mission. Among other things, their present objective meant he would be able to keep all of his gear with him when they left the personnel carrier and there were no civilians they were tasked with engaging.
At least during Phase I, if the team was shot at, they were to return fire. But they wouldn’t pursue or otherwise be on the hunt until the building was secure.
As long as his own life wasn’t in danger from incoming fire, Thomas vowed his team would find themselves handicapped with a piss poor marksman.
And once the building was secure?
Thomas smiled.
He had listened to the men talking on the ride; and he still remembered Yardley’s foul, lascivious grin and disgusting innuendoes. When the men were spread out through the building they were meant to hold, Thomas had plans that didn’t include slipping quietly away.
Three blocks from their insertion point, the team leader, a twenty-nine year old former combat veteran by the name of Roy Sparks, signaled a halt as they approached a seven-story building with boarded up windows on the first four floors. It was the tallest structure on the street, looming over the others by three stories. It was also on a corner, giving Gentry, the sniper, a clear line of sight down both streets. The boards on the window of the lower floors would make it easier for an eight-man team to keep secure.
That the building seemed perfect was no coincidence. One of the shell companies of Project Erebus owned the place. In the basement, behind a nearly impervious steel door that required a sixteen digit security code to open, there were supplies of fresh water, ammo and food and an internal power source.
Located in the largest metropolitan area in Kentucky, the building was one of several in Louisville held by the shell company. Only the team leader and a second team member knew where any of the other buildings were located.
Sparks pulled out the thermal scanner he had used earlier on the walk to scout the interiors of some of the buildings they had passed. The infrared device was as good as it got, able to register heat signals through walls Thomas would have thought too thick.
So far, Sparks had only spotted rats and a few stray cats on the equipment. That didn’t mean the other buildings were empty. The people could have been in basements or on floors higher up than Sparks was spotting for.
Satisfied that he wasn’t going to open the back door to their target building and find an ambush, Sparks moved forward, signaling all but Thomas to remain behind.
Thomas moved with the man, providing him cover. He felt like an odd choice. All of the men on the team, including Sparks, had looked at the patch covering his eye and reacted with a quiet disdain—like he was some kind of liability.
Once he and Sparks reached the back door, the selection made sense. There was no lock to pick on the exterior, just the same kind of keypad they would encounter in the basement. With a patch on his eye, Thomas couldn’t be expected to stand watch over Sparks back and spy on the code being entered at the same time.
Sparks punched in the number then stood back, motioning for Thomas to open the door and enter first.
With a wry smile, Thomas turned on the flashlight attached to the bottom of his rifle and obeyed. He stepped in, swept the beam of light up and down the hall, ears alert for any sound of movement. He moved forward as Sparks signaled the men to draw closer. Reaching where the building’s two corridors intersected, he ran his light over the second hall and waited as another team member came up behind him before moving on to the lobby and the front entrance.
Section by section, Thomas cleared the first floor, one team member always following after him then taking up a watch position, one at the front door, one at the back, and one at the lone elevator shaft that was immediately adjacent to building’s only stairwell.
“Come with me,” Sparks told Thomas and gestured at the door to the stairs. Thomas led the way, making sure the stairwell was clear while Sparks hid in shadows.
“All clear,” Thomas called as he came to a stop by the steel door with its keypad at the basement level.
“Light it up,” Sparks ordered as he joined Thomas.
Thomas pointed the beam of his flashlight on the keypad, only one hand on his rifle. The other scratched at the edge of his eyepatch.
“Turn your head,” Sparks said.
Still scratching at the patch, Thomas obeyed with a disgruntled huff, his “good eye” pointed away.
It was damn hard to keep a smile from creeping up his face after learning the security code so easily. It would be nice to stock up on supplies after killing the rest of his team.
And he was going to kill them. Having to listen to these animals on the drive, he wanted them all dead.
Most of them thought of themselves as gladiators, their psyches conveniently ignoring that fact that gladiators were nothing more than slaves constantly engaged in mortal combat for their master’s entertainment. All the team members knew or cared about was that they were alive and well armed, with a license to kill, torture and rape their targets. If they wowed their masters, they might get to live underground, surrounded by luxury. But as long as they were alive, they could rule the world outside the bunkers.
The odd duck out was the man Thomas had nicknamed Reverend Jay, something the other team members had quickly adopted. Reverend Jay thought he was there to kill sinners, especially those who didn’t worship the same god—or any god at all. He particularly wanted to root out all the atheists and Muslims. On the drive, he had read from the pocket bible he carried in his field jacket enough times that even Sparks had looked like he wanted to take the butt of his rifle to Jay’s mouth.
The lock beeped as it disengaged. Sparks pulled the door open then turned on his own flashlight and swept the beam around nearly thirty thousand square feet of space and supplies.
“Stay here,” Sparks ordered.
As the man moved forward, he turned on the small tablet he’d been given during a separate mission briefing that he and Reverend Jay had attended.
With one hand holding the tablet and the other holding a flashlight, the man was an easy target. Thomas mentally painted an X on Sparks’ back, his finger caressing the circle of his trigger guard between glances up the stairwell. He wouldn’t kill Sparks yet. When he did, he would use the Maxim 9. But first the men would be spread out among the building instead of clustered on the floor above him.
He wanted all of them dead, but he wanted to get out of Louisville alive even more.
Halfway across the unlit interior, Sparks stopped and placed his tablet and pack on the ground. Rooting around in the pack, he pulled out a flat, palm-sized LED light and set it on the floor, creating a small bubble of illumination. Directly in front of Sparks, a smooth surface glittered, then the faint light of a computer display lit up and Sparks started tapping.
The lighting fixture above the team leader’s head turned on. The object Sparks stood before was black glass, about fourteen feet across and built between two of the thick columns that provided structural support for the entire building.
“That thing got a door?” Thomas asked from his position at the bottom of the stairwell.
Sparks shrugged. “Wouldn’t know how to fix whatever the fuck is inside if it did.”
After a few more taps at the screen, Sparks told Thomas to try the light switch just inside the door. He found it, flipped it, and blessed light filled the space, the
sudden brightness making him wince. In the stairwell above him, faint blue emergency lights blinked on, the illumination they provided likely too dim to escape beyond the boards covering all the windows.
“What is it?” Thomas asked, staying near the door but walking off to the side so he could get a better sense of the glass structure’s dimensions.
“Shit ton of solar batteries and all the computers that operate it.”
The need for the solar batteries confused Thomas. From his brief exchange with Gavin, the power could be selectively kept on. So why wasn’t that the case here? Maybe the answer was in the last half of the journal. At least from a tactical perspective, Thomas could see why no one would want the building marked by the flow of electricity. If an opposing force took the power plant, they’d be able to trace the location of all the strongholds—and also cut the power to them.
“Don’t go nowhere,” Sparks ordered.
Leaving his pack on the floor, the man disappeared around the back of the structure. Thomas took the few minutes Sparks was out of sight to study the part of the basement that he could see. There were racks of firearms and ammunition and—fuck-oh-fuck—more than a dozen M16s with M203 grenade launchers and sights already mounted to them.
Like a magnet, the equipment drew him forward.
That’s when he saw what looked like motorcycles draped beneath black tarps and his pulse jumped.
“Everything looks good,” Sparks said, retrieving his pack. “We’ll clear the rest of the building, open a full line of sight for the nest, and, in a few days, bring in more teams, then it will really be time to rock and roll!”
Thomas nodded, a big grin on his face that had his team leader give him a friendly slap on the shoulder. They stepped into the hall with the open stairwell and elevator doors, Sparks locking up as he told Thomas to press the call button. They rode the elevator up one floor as a test run, then Sparks ordered Thomas and four other team members to clear the remaining floors.