by SP Durnin
Jake laughed and stroked her aforementioned appendages. “I think I can help you there. There’s an excellent chance I’ve been banned from Olympus, anyway.”
“No way,” Kat shook her head and trailed light fingers along his collarbone. “Your divinity-ship is confirmed. But what will the rest of the Pantheon say about you spending all your time with an ordinary mortal?”
O’Connor sat back on his heels, took hold of Cho’s hands, and drew her up into his lap. “I don’t want you to say that, ever again. There’s not a thing about you anyone in their right mind could possibly classify as merely ‘ordinary.’ How many women do you know of that can stylishly take on large numbers of maggot-heads and win?”
“At least half of our group,” she reminded him. “There are a couple dozen others here in Pecos I’d be willing to put money on, too. Even maybe Willow, but I’m not sure about her yet.”
“Fair enough. How many have faced them in the last week?”
Kat thought for a moment. “Nine or ten?”
“Without the benefit of a firearm?” Jake asked. “Could they kill one of those things using a sword? Or just their hands?”
Cho pouted adorably and passed her arms over Jake’s shoulders. “That’s what I thought! You only want me around to keep zombies away.”
“You know better than that.” O’Connor touched the tip of her nose with one finger. “I want you around because you love music by the Ramones, Butch Walker, Concrete Blonde, and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Because you’re not the least bit apologetic when it comes to your love of all things ‘Hello Kitty,’ and you can quote dialogue from Big Trouble In Little China along with me. Because you like to color your hair ‘Smurfy blue,’ and—”
She scowled. “I still might kill Rae for blabbing about that.”
He went on. “…and because I like the way you think. You remind me of a butt-kicking Anime heroine. You know, the women with the big eyes? The ones who’d break the fourth wall—right after they killed an alien the size of an oil tanker with an enormous gun there’s no way they could lift in real life—and wink from the television at you? Or maybe a female version of Buckaroo Banzai.
Kat smiled broadly. “I love that movie! And you so just admitted I kick butt.”
“Don’t interrupt. It’s rude.” Jake threw her own words from long ago back at her playfully, ignoring it when she stuck her tongue out at him in response. “Where was I? Never mind, I remember. The way you move is criminal. I expected half the women in Gita’s to start waving little white flags on sticks when you were performing tonight. Speaking of which, how about letting me know before you pull something like that next time? I almost had another wardrobe malfunction during Fire.”
“Almost? I’m losing my touch,” Kat quipped.
Jake pressed onward. “The way your nose crinkles when you laugh is incredibly cute, and—”
“Cute?” Cho huffed. “Not really the most flattering way to describe someone you claim to feel so amorously about.”
“I said your nose was cute. You didn’t give me a chance to list the rest of your exceptional and distracting attributes,” O’Connor clarified, running his palms up her spine.
“Oh. Well, that’s different.” That seemed to mollify her and Kat settled closer. “Want to hear yours?”
That took him aback. “Um. I’m not sure how I feel about-”
“You’ve got a great ass.”
Jake waited for Cho to continue but she remained silent, looking at him calmly while her fingers toyed with his messy hair. “And?” He prompted.
“It’s a really great ass.” Kat added brightly.
She didn’t elaborate further. “That’s all?”
“What more do you want?” Kat tilted her head in a fair impression of her feline namesake.
O’Connor didn’t know how he should respond to that one. “I... Well... Uh. Okay?”
“Silly man. That was a trick question.” Her eyes glittered with amusement and Cho pressed herself to Jake’s chest. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Sweetie, in the whole, wide world, you are the only thing I want. What man wouldn’t be happy with a totally beautiful and insanely glamorous zombie-slayer like you? Now bring your sexy self over here, Devil-woman, and make with the Smokey Robinson style lovin’ before I pop a blood vessel.’ Seriously? I know you’re a bit distracted just now and all, but try to keep up.”
Jake moved his hands down the small of her back to apply gentle pressure, fingertips whirling over Cho’s Venusian dimples: the spot at the base of her spine, just above the cleft of some very firm buttocks. “I’m covered in shame over my lack of mental agility. Any thoughts on how can I make it up to you?”
Kat slid her palm across his chest, causing the cords in her neck to flutter as she passed one hand over his sternum. He could see the alluring play of them under the tautness of her skin, and Jake felt a sudden urge to have his mouth there on her throat. When he looked up again, a lazy smile bloomed under her cute nose.
“I have a few ideas.” Her hand ghosted down his diaphragm, phantom-light and decidedly ticklish.
O’Connor cupped her flank. “Want to share?”
Cho’s hand dropped lower. She moved along him, using nimble, nimble fingers to coax him to life again and exhaled as he rose against her palm.
“Mmmm-maybe... What’ll you give me if I tell you?”
Jake sucked in a quick breath. “What do you want?”
Kat’s smile dripped wickedness and she pushed downward. Jake groaned audibly as she slid around him; soft and wet and incredibly warm against his electrified skin. She circled her hips in an ever-so-slow imitation of whirling a Hula-hoop, rubbing him within her and causing his fingers to dig into the flesh of her buttocks.
“That.” Kat purred, eyes falling slowly closed as she bit at her lower lip. “That’s what I want...”
* * *
Winston Hess sat in the command chair of his MATTOC fingers steepled, mentally reviewing the next leg of their journey.
Since his forces had escaped—and subsequently destroyed—that damn horde those traitors in Langley, Oklahoma had unleashed, the already vicious-minded general had privately taken on a whole new mindset. Oh, he was still going to put the nation back together. He’d to it the right way this time too. No more womanish “politically correct” operational policies, no more “empathy and understanding for those of different worldviews.” The kid gloves were off.
As the dead had risen and everyone else had been shitting themselves, Hess was in his element. No adversary he could have invented in his wildest dreams would’ve been more convenient to advance his agenda than millions-upon-millions of walking corpses. Even better, when his chain of command became sketchy during the Westward exodus, choosing instead to evac large numbers of virtually useless civilians—thereby leaving Hess to rot with a bunch of bureaucrats, pencil-pushers, and bleeding-heart do-gooders in Missouri—he’d known it was time to act.
When the zombies consumed St. Louis, what was left of the unlucky population had fled west to Jefferson City. It had made perfect sense at the time, because the Missouri State Senate was there, butted right up against an Amtrack line and the Missouri River. The 138th Forward Support Company, the 835th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion, and the 229th Medical Battalion of the National Guard based there—so after the bridges over the Missouri on Routes 63 and 54 had been demolished—it had been pretty secure. But there had been a difference of opinion about what the arrayed forces should do once that was completed: continue to uphold the status quo, or break away to create an independent enclave. One Senator Robert Quinn of Illinois was the voice of dissent when it came to them remaining true to oaths taken by military personnel and politicians alike, all because he didn’t appreciate being shunted onto the back burner. Since his own territory had been written off, and he was basically without authority in Missouri, he used his influence with a few dissatisfied commanders and began recruiting a “Specialized Response and Defence Force” f
rom the units and survivors within Jefferson City. Then, once he had a sizable following—to which he’d promised all kinds of things—he convinced his fellow senators to authorize an enclave to the south.
Fort Leonard Wood was supposed to have been a secondary outpost, mainly used for supply and logistical resources, but then a horde stumped into Jefferson City. They could have repelled the creatures if units at Leonard Wood had actually responded to their broadcasts for aid. Instead, the Senator had ordered Hess to shell the town’s fortifications with the MATTOC. They’d blown the ever-living shit out of the norther defenses, and that let every zombie for four miles in through the defenses. Then he’d fired upon the enclave proper. Strangely enough, Hess had forgotten to see fit to extract Quinn prior to shelling the town. Nor did the general task any of his squads to attempt rescuing the man during the ensuing chaos that followed. No. Senator Quinn had ended his existence hunkering under the shift commander’s desk in City Hall, cowering like the pathetic little wanker he was, when the ghouls broke through the security doors and proceeded to eat everyone inside.
That left Hess in total control of Fort Leonard Wood.
It hadn’t been hard to convince the men their Higher-Ups had all but abandoned them. Nor had it been difficult to command their loyalty after he’d had one of his search and salvage teams recover the hulking MATTOC from a nearby government cache, and instituting his “Combat Stress Management and Recreation Program.”
Not everyone went along with the program at first. Some few couples (married and otherwise) had flat out refused to obey his orders regarding non-combatant women—and even those of the military—of the camp providing, as he phrased it, “A way to maintain morale, and the most viable process to insure the continued survival of the human race as the dominant form of life upon the planet,” so Hess took steps. He’d had a trio of the vocal couples arrested by base security, charged with “refusal to obey the orders of a superior officer during a time of war and treasonous acts during a national crisis.” Once they’d been found guilty—by Hess and a pair of his most loyal commanders—the general had sentenced them to be summarily executed. Immediately following the verdict, the unlucky six had been taken outside the fences, cuffed in pairs back-to-back by the arms around telephone poles just beyond the northern gate, and left to expire.
It had taken less than a few hours for a number of the creatures to show up. Sentries had reported their approach, and Hess ordered a full third of his forces to the gate to “witness the consequences of unlawful sedition.”
True to form, the zombies hadn’t been gentle. In a spectacle pulled from the darkest of nightmares, they staggered woodenly for the first restrained couple, who’d struggled vainly to free themselves. Military issue handcuffs were nearly impossible to escape, though, so their rate of success had been exactly zero. The high-pitched screams of the two being eaten alive had been chilling. The creatures had fed, tearing great mouthfuls of the prisoners’ flesh away, chewed them up with horrifying pleasure, and continued the process until both had expired. Then they moved to the next pair of condemned. Then the next. Two of the couples swiftly became short-lived members of the mobile dead, but the pair nearest Fort Leonard Wood’s gates had been too damaged to reanimate. Hess and the onlookers literally lost sight of them under the creatures as more and more of them had mobbed their prey. The man fell bellowing curses at Hess, damming his soul and lashing out at the things until they dragged him and his wife down. Her shrieks kept him fighting for a long time even though he knew he was finished, but once they’d ended with a wet gurgle as a zombie tore her throat out, her husband gave in and slumped bonelessly to the earth. He followed his wife into death moments later when the creatures ripped his abdominal cavity open. The pair was literally torn limb from limb by the dead, who even cracked their skulls open to get at their brain tissue as the feeding frenzy continued. Once the couples had been consumed, Hess ordered his sentries to execute the dead and newly-dead alike.
There hadn’t been any voices of opposition raised since that day.
The general had continued his “reintegration of the United States,” rescuing quite a number of civilians (or so those rescued had believed at the time), adding the men to his forces and most of the women to the “morale” program. Everything had been proceeding to plan, right up until the survivors holed up in Oklahoma handed him an ass-kicking.
Hess’s brow drew inward as he frowned. The way they’d utilized unwitting zombies combined with a damn M134 minigun as a delaying force to cover their escape—and annihilated much the Pensacola Dam with well-placed high explosives, thereby rendering the town of Langley useless to him as a haven from the dead—told Hess someone in that group had more than a little experience when it came to combat. The fact whomever that might be had chosen to join with the population within the walls of Pecos, which he’d long-know about from the town’s broadcasts and planned to absorb into his growing force down the line anyway, didn’t bode well. The longer said individual remained there, the more they might assist the colony with asset acquisition, supply procurement, and maybe even creation of some impressively staunch defensive measures.
The last didn’t worry Hess much. His MATTOC, while impressive, was nothing like the Screaming Mimi. It wasn’t bright, Pepto-Bismol pink for one thing, but done in awful digital-camo, and it only had two sections, not three like George’s baby. It also didn’t possess the Mimi’s eight-foot prow-blade. The monstrous thing’s nose was blunt, like that of the Rheinmetall 8x8 HXs once used to transport heavy weapons (and missiles) by the Bundeswehr units of the German Army, and it had been heavily modified. The front end and thick crash plate there were armored to the max, but—thanks to a little forethought on Rae’s part and a shit-load of her Tungsten, home-loaded rounds—now looked like the pitted face of Luna. A clam-shell hatch was at the rear, like the Mimi, but it also had an access hatch on the rear driver’s side of the aft section which looked like it originally belonged in a bank. There were a hell of a lot of what looked to be gun ports along its port and starboard sides too, evidencing that its primary function was attack and not command/control. It also had a 105mm tank gun taken from a Striker Heavy Transport riding its back—which was now useless, since both the firing mechanism of the weapon, and the only soldier with the knowledge and training to operate it, caught a piece of shrapnel through the face back in Langley—capable of firing six rounds per minute and turning buildings into smoking craters.
Now, the only real way to utilize his MATTOC offensively was to ram it through the town gates, which action Hess didn’t want to take. That would allow the dead to swarm inside as they’d done in both Jefferson City and Langley, thereby making the refuge useless. He didn’t have the manpower to clear the enclave after a move like that, and there were precious few defensible locations remaining east of the Rockies, so the general wanted Pecos.
Luckily, he had an option in place to fall back on.
-CHAPTER NINE-
Four days later the party, such as it was, came to an end.
“That Hess douche-bag is coming.”
Jake was assisting Rae, George, and Allan with modifications on a Caterpillar road grader (a heavy machine with a vertical under-the-belly blade, normally used by road crews to aid with leveling earth before laying down pavement) in the slim man’s workshop, when a very dusty Ryan Szimanski strode in with Elle. He stopped trying to work the two-foot long bolt he’d been working on with a three-foot long wrench free, and wiped his sweating face with his short shirt-sleeve. “Shit. Are you sure?”
Szimanski didn’t look happy. “Pretty damn sure.”
“I went out with Ryan and his team today. Got bored and wanted to get in some practice with the Long-Arm rifle, so I tagged along.” Elle nodded. “We were up west of Lubbock, near a town called Littlefield to grab a tanker full of natural gas another team had found early last week. Had to take along a new battery and change out the old one to get it going. Anyway, it’s normally pretty quiet when
there’s no maggot-head presence. You know, no sounds of civilization now. So when we started hearing engine noise, we sent a few of the team back in the tanker and the rest of us went to check it out.”
“It was a convoy of trucks. A big one,” Ryan told them.
George pulled out a stogie. “Numbers?”
“Shit, a lot.” The pretty sergeant crossed her hands on the straps of her tac-vest. “At least thirty deuce-and-a-halfs, and some more of those UNIMOG things. No Strikers or MRAPS that I saw. I think Rae’s little toy tore up all Hess had when he showed up at Langley, so that’s a plus. There were quite a few civilian transports mixed in: F250 King-cabs, some U-Haul moving trucks and box trucks and such. They also found a bunch of school busses somewhere. I can’t be sure, but it looked like most of the vehicles were packed to the gills with people.”
“Some might be non-combatants, but I’ll bet you that’s the whole RUST army. I wonder where they’ve been. No way they squatted in Langley…Where did you last see them?” Though he’d known this was sure to happen, Jake felt the cold hand of fear on his spine.
“They were turning south on 385, taking it pretty slow and careful from what I could tell. So we turned around and hauled ass to the south-east down to the 114.” Ryan said, as he watched George blow a few impressive smoke rings.
“What about that ugly piece a’ shit Hess found somewhere?” George demanded.
“Have you looked at our ride lately? It’s pink.” That was from Rae.
Foster squinted at her. “Woman. I kid you not…”
“Oh yeah. That monster was there too. Right near the head of the column, but not the lead. They have a pair of snowplows running interference to clear most of the obstacles. Maybe your little surprise did some damage too, George, because make no mistake; the front end of it looked like shit.” Elle gave the older man a sideways glance. “I’d suck a mile of dick for a crack at the thing with a FGM-148. Bet that would ruin the general’s day, real quick.”