“Believe me, Prit, a Siberian tiger is a pussycat compared to Lucia.”
I turned to Birley, who had witnessed the whole scene in silence. “Please excuse Lucia, Captain Birley. She’s young and impulsive, plus I don’t think she’s feeling very well.”
“Oh, don’t worry, young man,” Birley said, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “She’s just a woman, so her opinion doesn’t matter. Besides everyone knows that the female is a very fickle creature, especially if it’s one of ‘those days,’ right? Trust me, you should keep her on a short leash, my friend.”
Birley laughed and patted me on the back. I smiled, relieved that a confrontation had been averted; we’d live to see another day. Still, I felt miserable, like a damn traitor.
By then the Ithaca had docked. Lines as thick as a man’s waist held it fast. Dockworkers secured two gangways to the ship, one forward and one aft. The school bus and the Humvees stopped in front of the aft gangway. Some of the men in the Humvees got out and stationed themselves around the vehicles; another group boarded the Ithaca. With shouts, curses, and kicks, they forced the soldiers on the bow into a compact cluster. Those men who’d fought so bravely at Luba acted like frightened sheep . . . or like sheep resigned to their fate.
I studied the muscle-bound black soldier who’d led the troops. Even from where I stood, I could see the anger in his eyes. If looks could kill, half a dozen guys in green armbands would’ve died on the spot. But even he hung his head and got in line as the guards herded him and the other soldiers to the gangway.
Once on the ground, the guards ran a metal detector over their bodies, looking for weapons stashed in their clothes. Another guard passed out bottles of water, and a third checked them off a list as they boarded the bus.
“What do you make of that, Prit?”
“I have no idea. I’m sure those guys could make mincemeat of the guards in a heartbeat. And yet, there they go, like lambs to the slaughter.”
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Strangärd’s voice behind us made me jump, but Prit didn’t seem surprised. I was sure the Ukrainian had eyes in the back of his head.
“Who are those people?” Prit asked, curtly, pointing to the guards.
Strangärd looked from side to side to be sure no one was listening. “Those guards are ex-cons. The scum of the earth. The dregs of society. Evil incarnate. Don’t cross their path and don’t piss them off. They shoot first and ask questions later. But they’re the law here, the reverend’s private army. They carry out his orders to the letter. On top of that, most people in Gulfport adore them. They’re convinced that those thugs make it possible for them to live in peace and safety.”
I nodded, but what he said didn’t make any sense. I studied the men carefully. They had bulging muscles from hours and hours of lifting weights. Most wore khaki pants, white shirts, and a green armband around their right bicep. Their heads were shaved; a few sported unruly beards.
“Some tattoo artist made a killing with that group,” Pritchenko joked, cutting his eyes toward the guys nearest us. They were covered in tattoos of swastikas, cobwebs, skulls, and slogans spelled out in Gothic letters. One had “White Pride” tattooed on the back of his head.
White Pride. I realized with a chill that those rifle-toting guys were wearing the Aryan Nations armband. Those white supremacists made the Ku Klux Klan look tolerant. Before the Apocalypse, the organization had been implicated in extortion, drug running, murder, and arms trafficking. Every US federal prison had housed Aryan Nations members. Now they were the law in Gulfport.
Three of them walked up the aft gangway and headed in our direction. In the lead was a blond giant of about forty with ghostly blue eyes. A silver eagle was pinned to his armband and his white shirt strained over his beer belly. A black swastika peeked out at his collar. Tattoos on each knuckle spelled HATE JEWS. He planted himself in front of us and looked us up and down, letting his eyes linger on Lucia. She crossed her arms and looked down.
“So, these’re the fish Birley reeled in on the high seas,” he said to no one in particular. “When they told me you spoke Spanish, I thought you’d be one of those little Mexican shits. But you don’t look like Mexicans. You, with the mustache, you look Aryan, even though you’re a runt. Why do you speak that spic language, amigos?”
“We’re Europeans.” I stepped forward before any of my pals could speak. “He’s Ukrainian and we’re from northern Spain. We speak Spanish there too.”
I doubted that tattooed giant could find Ukraine on a map, maybe not even Spain, but that explanation seemed to suffice.
He shrugged. “I don’t give a rat’s ass where you’re from so long as you’re white, Christian, and you don’t fuck with Reverend Greene. I’m Malachi Grapes, head of the Green Guard. We make sure the white people of Gulfport live in peace. Do what the reverend says and you’ll enjoy all the comforts of home. Buck the rules and we got a problem.”
I didn’t ask what kind of problem, but I could guess. Grapes then fixed his gaze on Pritchenko, who stared back calmly, not flinching. The Ukrainian didn’t blink when the big man brought his face close to his, almost nose to nose.
“Fellas, we got a little rooster here,” Malachi Grapes growled. “You got a problem, dwarf?” A chorus of laughter rose from the other two skinheads.
Prit took a deep breath, dragging phlegm from the back of his throat. For one tense second, I thought he was going to spit in the guy’s face, but he just belched.
“You know, those black guys and Latinos you despise so much fought admirably,” the Ukrainian replied casually, as if he were talking about the weather. “If a couple of them on that bus ever caught you without your backup, your white ass would look like the flag of Japan. You’d better not insult them like that when they’re in earshot. And no, I don’t have a problem with you, amigo. For now.”
Time seemed to stand still. Grapes’s face turned several colors. Finally he laughed and walked away. “Gotta hand it to you, shrimp, you got balls. But don’t fuck with me or my men. Today’s your first day, so I’ll let that comment slide, but I won’t always be so nice. Now let’s go. The reverend’s waiting.”
We followed the guards down the gangplank. We had no luggage, except for Lucullus, who fidgeted, happy to be back on land. Strangärd climbed into a Humvee. He’d act as what he called our “liaison.” The reverend wanted to hear about our rescue from a crewmember. With Captain Birley’s hands full unloading the cargo, the task fell to Strangärd as first mate. As we roared off in the Humvees, I was relieved he was coming along. He was the closest thing to a friend we had, and something told me we were going to need all the help we could get.
14
Gulfport, Mississippi (The Magnolia State), was never a large city, and before the Apocalypse, it rarely appeared in national news. But its residents were proud of their town for three things: the Gulfport Marlins football team, the St. James Fall Festival with its pumpkin patches and hayrides, and for the Naval Construction Battalion Center—home of the Atlantic Fleet Seabees.
The Seabees had been part of the Civil Engineer Corps since the forties. They’d earned the nickname on account of the massive work they did during World War II. They contributed to Japan’s defeat by constructing bases and airstrips on atolls in the Pacific Ocean. After the war, the Seabees expanded. Although its men would never win a shooting contest (most never held a rifle), they could erect infrastructure anywhere in the world.
When the plague broke out, half the base’s personnel were in Afghanistan setting up a supply route to Kabul. A rescue was planned, but with the whole world plunged into chaos, combat units had priority on all flights. The planes that should have rescued them never got off the ground. If any of the corps survived, they were probably lost in the Afghan mountains, dodging the Taliban, the Undead, or both. The other half of the corps was rushed to major US cities to build the Safe Zones. It’s not hard to imagine their
sad fate.
When Stan Morgan teamed up with that sleazy preacher on the outskirts of town, only about two dozen soldiers were left on the base in Gulfport, but they had mountains of supplies that had been stockpiled for decades.
Mayor Morgan was stubborn, ambitious, and unfaithful to his wife of twenty years, but he was also sharp as a tack and resourceful. When he returned from the Vietnam War, poor as a church mouse, he saw an opportunity in the emerging real estate market. He founded Morgan Real Estate and within two years became one of Gulfport’s richest citizens.
Like the rest of the country, Stan watched the Undead attack the Safe Zones on CNN. Unlike everyone else, he decided that the best way to protect his town was not to defend it with weapons, but to build a wall around it so high and so strong that no Undead could scale it.
He knew the Seabees had warehouses with thousands of tons of steel and cement just waiting for someone to use them. After Hurricane Katrina, the Seabees’ engineers came up with an ingenious system for building dams with metal rods and modified Portland cement that would keep the rivers from overflowing their banks and flooding fields and towns again. It was called the Mobile Containment Dike Fabrication Unit, but the soldiers baptized it “the Wallshitter.”
The Wallshitter was a monster vehicle that looked like the love child of a dump truck and a locomotive. It could extrude a concrete module ten feet high by eight feet long in fifteen minutes. The best part was that the module came out half-set. In less than twenty-four hours, it dried rock hard, as sturdy as if it’d been there for years. The Gulfport Seabees base had twenty Wallshitters.
Stan’s construction crew had years of experience, so with the help of manuals and the one tech left on the base, they learned how to run those monsters in under six hours. In another six hours, those twenty Wallshitters were at work setting up a steel and concrete perimeter around the entire town. In just seventy-two hours, Gulfport was completely surrounded by an impenetrable concrete wall, ten feet high. It was crude, ugly, and looked like the Berlin Wall’s bastard sister, but it fulfilled Stan Morgan’s objective: to keep the living in and the Undead out.
Besides the Wall, other factors saved Gulfport. For one thing, southern Mississippi was not heavily populated. And although the area was flat, there were swamps so dense even the most determined Undead couldn’t get across them.
Strangärd explained all this to us as the Humvees raced through town. The green flag waving on the hood of the lead vehicle allowed them to ignore traffic lights and speed through crowded intersections. We could hardly believe how quiet and prosperous the town looked. People walked along clean, well-swept streets, stopping to talk, laugh, and joke as if hell had never been unleashed on earth. Shops were open, gardens were well tended, and cafes and restaurants operated normally. Everything was beautiful and perfect. Except for one flaw: there were only white people.
“This is . . . It looks like . . .” I stammered, trying to digest the scene.
“Like the set of a TV show? Amazing, isn’t it?” Strangärd said with a half smile. “This was a middle-class town even before the Apocalypse. Most people are retirees, professionals, divorced, or here with their families—and rich. They moved here to escape their stressful lives back in larger cities and were lucky enough to watch the fall of civilization from this side of the Wall.” His grin twisted into a sneer. “In the future, civilization will spring from them. Funny, isn’t it?”
I didn’t see anything funny about it. Kids, adults, and old people alike looked prosperous, healthy, and well fed, light-years from the skinny, impoverished survivors on Tenerife. There were only about thirty thousand people in Gulfport, whereas Tenerife was packed with several million refugees, straining the island’s resources to the limit. Everyone looked relaxed and contented, a far cry from the fatalistic fear we couldn’t shake after months of confronting hunger, destruction, and the Undead. These fine, upstanding people had barricaded themselves inside their Arcadia—the remote refuge Homer describes in the Iliad—while the rest of the planet slid down Satan’s sewer.
“There’s one thing I don’t get. How can such classy people put up with those thugs? They look like ex-cons,” I said, looking over at Malachi Grapes and one of his henchmen sitting in the front seat, enveloped in a cloud of cigar smoke.
“They are ex-cons.” Strangärd lowered his voice. “Former inmates at Parchman Farm, maximum security prison for men—Mississippi’s oldest and most notorious prison.”
“How the hell’d they end up here?” Lucia demanded. She was still angry with me, and hadn’t spoken since we got off the ship.
“They were on their way to Biloxi to build housing for the refugees. Due to a clerical error, four buses packed with prisoners ended up in Gulfport. No one knew what to do with them. The bus drivers didn’t give a fuck what happened to them. They just wanted to unload their cargo and get back to the Safe Zone in Biloxi. They locked up the vans, gave the police chief the keys, and ran. The prisoners were closed up in there for twenty-four hours, parked at the port’s loading dock in the hot sun. The Aryan Nations gang outnumbered the other prisoners and were well organized. When the doors opened, they were the only ones left standing.”
“They killed them?” Lucia asked.
Strangärd didn’t answer; he just stared out the window, disgusted.
“That explains how they got here, but not how they became Greene’s soldiers.”
Riding in the lead Humvee, Malachi Grapes puffed on his cigar and a big smile spread across his face. He remembered every little detail of that day.
15
GULFPORT, TWO YEARS EARLIER
“Guards! Guards! Where the hell are you! It’s a fucking oven in here!”
The prisoners beat on the barrier between the driver’s seat and the rear of the bus. All forty guys shouted, banged on the windows, and cursed a blue streak. They’d been parked in the lot for an entire day. The heat was addling their brains.
For the first few hours, the guards had brought them water and some food, but as the day wore on the situation was growing more and more explosive. One fat, red-faced prisoner had died of a heart attack a few hours before. They’d tossed his body in the rear of the van. The black gangbanger chained to him wasn’t acting so tough anymore. He whined and tugged on the chain that tethered him to the body that was starting to bloat.
“Help! Get me loose. I’m fuckin’ beggin’ ya. Help me, please. This guy’s about to explode. I don’t wanna die! Please help me!”
From his seat several rows up, Malachi Grapes shrugged. He could’ve easily freed the guy if he wanted to. He could’ve cut off the fat guy’s hand with the knife he had in his orange prison jumpsuit, but he didn’t move an inch. For one thing, he despised the gangbanger because he was black. Plus, he was keeping the knife hidden. The Day of the Pig was about to begin.
The previous day, the guards had hauled the prisoners out of Parchman, driven for several hours, and then abandoned them in the parking lot. Grapes knew it wasn’t a transfer. A guy with connections could find out anything, especially if you were the head of the local Aryan Nations. Plus, he’d never heard of transferring every inmate in the prison.
Fifteen Aryan Nations members were on that van. The rest of the inmates were Crips or Bloods or members of Mexican or Asian gangs, including the Filipino guy rotting at the back of the bus. Grapes felt sure the situation was the same in the other three vans.
In prison, the guards had blocked communication between gang members, so they’d come up with many ways to send messages. With no one standing guard over them, sending messages from one bus to another was a breeze—they just shouted a little louder. Over the last few hours, they’d concocted a plan. Grapes’s instructions raced through the other buses.
“When do we start, Malachi?” Seth Fretzen leaned across the aisle with eager eyes.
“Any minute now, Seth,” Grapes muttered under his b
reath.
A white liquid seeped out the corner of the dead guy’s mouth. When it dripped on the prisoner chained to him, he became hysterical.
“This motherfucker’s gonna explode! Get me loose! Get me the hell loose!”
A prisoner stood up to lend a hand, but he was chained to an Aryan Nations gang member, who yanked the chain that bound them. The prisoner fell to the ground, and a fight broke out in the back of the bus.
“Now,” Malachi Grapes said. “Let’s go.”
Seth Fretzen lit a piece of paper with a match he’d hidden and waved the flame in front of the barred window. Someone in the next bus spotted the signal and passed it along to the other buses.
Grapes didn’t wait for the flame to go out. Lightning fast, he drew the knife out of his sleeve and plunged it into the neck of the Puerto Rican guy next to him. The guy’s eyes flew open wide, blood bubbled up on his lips, and he drowned.
Seth Fretzen used his chain to strangle the guy next to him, a black guy from the West Coast. The man struggled for a few seconds, but he didn’t stand a chance. When Seth let go, the guy’s arms fell down at his sides as if they were filled with sawdust.
Malachi headed to the back of the bus to help out, but his boys had the situation under control. Since they were in the majority, were well armed, and had the element of surprise, they’d taken out the other prisoners in short order. Only one of his guys was injured. He’d cut his own arm as he hacked through another prisoner’s neck.
Adrenaline rushed through their bodies. They roared, high-fived, beat their chests, and spat on the bodies. Then they sat down to wait.
Two hours later, it occurred to Malachi Grapes that maybe offing those losers wasn’t such a good idea. In prison, you barely had time to get rid of your weapon before the guards arrived. But here, no one came. And the bodies were starting to stink.
With one swat, Grapes crushed a greedy fly that had landed on his neck. His mind was racing, devising an alternate plan. Then suddenly someone opened the door of the bus. Fifteen skinheads shouted insults at the guards, but then a heavy silence fell over the crowd.
The Wrath of the Just (Apocalypse Z) Page 8