The sun was setting as they neared the city that never sleeps.
He could see gaudy neon lighting up the Las Vegas skyline.
“They have lights in the city,” said Victoria. “That’s a good sign. They must not have had fires there like we had in California.”
“The people could still be infected, though,” said Chogan.
“Most of the casinos have their own generators, even if the power’s out,” said Halverson. “The rest of the city could be in the dark at night.”
To his right, all Halverson could see was desolation. An isolated saguaro or Joshua tree was all that sprang out of the desert under the oyster light of dusk.
He glanced at Victoria to his right then into the rearview mirror at Chogan and Emma in the backseat. They all wore beleaguered expressions on their faces. The four of them were damaged goods, Halverson decided. Each one of them had lost somebody to the plague: Victoria, her daughter; Chogan, his wife; Emma, her baby; and himself, his brother.
A bong from the fuel gauge on the dashboard behind the steering wheel interrupted his reverie. A red light was flashing on the gauge.
“What’s that noise?” asked Victoria.
Halverson checked out the gauge. “We’re running out of gas. It says we can go only fifty more miles.”
“Will that be enough to get us to Vegas?” asked Emma from the backseat.
“I hope so,” answered Halverson.
“Good,” said Chogan. “I’m getting hungry.”
“Millie is too,” said Emma.
Chogan cut his eyes toward Emma and pulled a face.
As it turned out, they never made it to Las Vegas in the Explorer.
CHAPTER 24
Three SUVs with black-tinted windshields approached them at speed as Halverson barreled toward Vegas. The lead SUV was flashing its headlights at him. He figured the strangers were signaling him to stop.
To get his point across, the driver of the onrushing SUV leaned out his window and fired a pistol into the sky.
“More people,” said Victoria, her voice even.
“They don’t seem very friendly,” said Chogan, craning his neck around Halverson to peer through the windshield from the backseat.
“Do we pull over or make a run for it?”
“We wouldn’t get very far running on empty,” said Halverson.
“There’s that,” said Victoria.
“We could shoot it out with them,” said Chogan.
“We’re low on ammo as well as gas,” said Halverson, watching the three approaching vehicles. “Plus we’re outnumbered.”
Chogan grunted. “I forgot. I’m out of bullets.”
“Maybe they’re not hostile,” said Victoria. “They didn’t shoot at us. They shot into the air as a signal to us.”
“But why shoot at all?” said Emma.
“She’s got a point,” said Chogan. “Firing a gun isn’t a great way to make friends.”
“We don’t have much choice,” said Halverson.
He lifted his foot off the gas and braked the Explorer to a halt.
The three approaching SUVs stopped side by side in front of him. Nobody got out of them.
“Interesting,” said Halverson.
“Now what?” said Victoria.
“I don’t think they want us to pass,” said Emma.
“Who makes the first move?” said Chogan, watching the vehicles.
“Do you think they want to go to Washington with us?” said Victoria.
“Even I don’t want to go to Washington with you.”
Victoria gave Chogan a look. “Then why are you here with us?”
“I didn’t have any place else to go to. I may stay in Vegas. Depends whether these guys in front of us are hostiles.”
It wasn’t until now that Halverson realized the lead SUV had a loudspeaker mounted on its roof.
“Come out of your vehicle so we can see you,” said the voice over the loudspeaker.
“Let’s see what’s up,” said Halverson.
He opened his door.
“With our guns?” asked Chogan.
“Yeah,” answered Halverson.
He spilled out of his seat and stood on the ground, his MP7 slung over his shoulder, his automatic snug in the small of his back.
Victoria, Chogan, and Emma piled out of the Explorer.
“Is that all of you?” asked the voice.
“Yeah,” answered Halverson. “What about you guys?”
“Why do you need guns? Are you our enemies?”
“We need guns to protect ourselves from the flesh eaters.”
“I don’t see any around here.”
“I’m getting tried of looking at that loudspeaker,” Victoria told Halverson. “Why doesn’t somebody come out of those cars? I can’t see anything through those tinted windshields.”
“Mind coming out of there, so we can talk to you face-to-face?” said Halverson, gazing at the lead SUV in the middle of the other two SUVs.
“We can hear you just fine,” said the voice.
“We’d like to see who we’re talking to.”
“Why do you need guns if all you want to do is talk with us?”
“I told you, the guns aren’t for you. They’re for the ghouls.”
The voice paused. “Then toss them down and we’ll come out.”
Halverson and Chogan exchanged looks.
Chogan shrugged. He removed his pistol from his waistband. He tossed the gun to the ground. What good was an empty gun anyway? he decided.
Halverson slid his MP7 off his shoulder into his hand. He dropped the gun to the dirt near his feet. He wanted the gun within reach in case the newcomers turned out to be hostiles.
The doors on the three SUVs opened. Armed men and women poured out of the vehicles.
Looking constipated, a fortysomething bald Korean guy wearing rimless spectacles climbed out of the lead SUV’s driver’s seat. He wore black fingerless gloves on his hands and a leather holster with a semiautomatic stuck in it around his waist. Looked like a Glock, decided Halverson, taking stock of the weapon.
“I’ve never seen you guys around here before,” said the guy. He had a soft lilting voice.
“Likewise,” said Halverson.
“Do you live around here?”
“No. We’re from California. The whole state’s been wiped out by the plague. We’re trying to find more survivors.”
Halverson’s answer seemed to satisfy the guy.
“You’re lucky you ran into us,” said the guy. “From what we hear most everyone in the country is infected.”
“That’s what we hear too.”
There was something odd about the guy’s face. Halverson couldn’t place it at first. As the guy approached him, Halverson realized what it was. The guy didn’t have any eyebrows. He must have shaved them off, decided Halverson, like he shaved his head.
As Halverson sized up the rest of the guy, he picked up on the guy’s arms that extended beyond his short sleeves. The guy’s arms were as hairless as his face.
The guy was wearing khaki Bermuda shorts. Even his legs looked hairless, Halverson could now see. Maybe it was a genetic thing. Maybe the guy didn’t have any body hair or facial hair, Halverson decided. He knew the guy used to have hair on his head, though. Halverson could see the stubble left on the guy’s head where the guy had shaved his scalp. And he must have had eyebrows at some point in his life. Halverson had never heard of anyone being born without eyebrows. Maybe the guy plucked his eyebrows like some women.
“I’m Kwang-Sun,” said the guy.
“I’m Chad Halverson.” Halverson introduced the other members of his gang.
Chogan extended his hand to Kwang-Sun.
“Nice to meet you,” said Kwang-Sun dryly, making no attempt to shake Chogan’s hand, or anyone else’s, for that matter.
Irked and chagrined at Kwang-Sun’s slight, Chogan lowered his hand inconspicuously, trying to hide the fact that he had offered it to shak
e in the first place.
“Same here,” said Halverson.
“Do you live in Vegas?” asked Chogan.
“Yeah,” answered Kwang-Sun.
“Are there a lot of you?”
Kwang-Sun nodded. “Hundreds.”
Kwang-Sun ordered one of his men to grab Halverson’s and Chogan’s guns on the ground.
A rangy guy scooped up the guns.
Unbeknownst to Kwang-Sun, Halverson still had a Glock wedged in his rear waistband.
“Why are you taking our guns?” asked Chogan.
“Because you don’t need them,” answered Kwang-Sun. “There aren’t any walking dead around here now.”
“The operative word is now. I’d like to have a piece when they show up.”
“If the ghouls show up, we’ll give you your guns back.”
“You don’t seem to understand,” said Halverson. “What gives you the right to take them away from us?”
“Basically, we outnumber you.”
“Does that mean you’re taking us by force?”
“No. You don’t have to come with us. It would probably be to your advantage, though.”
“How so?”
“We have food and supplies in Vegas. You’ll also have the comfort of being with other survivors of the plague.”
“Cold comfort.”
“Better than a punch in the face. What do you have if you stay out here in the middle of the desert? Nothing.”
“Do you want us to go back with you?”
“It would be a good idea.”
“Why?”
“The more people we have together in a group, the safer we are when the walking dead attack us.”
“When?” said Halverson. “You said when, not if. Does that mean you’ve been attacked before in Vegas?”
Kwang-Sun blinked his brown eyes several times. “We’ve never lost anyone on the strip to the ghouls.”
Halverson figured Kwang-Sun’s blinking was a tell for his lying. As a trained CIA operative, Halverson had participated in interrogations of terrorists. Halverson knew firsthand about Agency interrogation techniques and the reliability of the information gleaned from the interrogated. The informant’s batting of his eyelids frequently indicated that he was lying or was, at the very least, being disingenuous.
The long and the short of it was Halverson didn’t trust Kwang-Sun. However, Halverson saw no point in staying out in the desert outside of Vegas. He wanted to enter Vegas and meet with the survivors that lived there. He would have preferred to enter the city armed, but it didn’t look like Kwang-Sun was going to let that happen. So be it.
“How do you keep the creatures away from the strip?” asked Halverson.
Kwang-Sun fluttered his eyelids again and seemed lost in thought. “Maybe they don’t know we’re there,” he said at last.
His visage conveyed nothing.
Halverson huddled together with Victoria, Chogan, and Emma. “What do you think?”
“Let’s go with him,” said Victoria. “What’s the point of staying out here in the desert?”
“Yeah,” said Chogan. “I want to see the strip, as long as we’re here.”
“I’m not sure,” said Emma.
“Isn’t that why we came all the way out here in the first place?” said Victoria. “To see Las Vegas?”
No, decided Halverson. That wasn’t whey he had come here. But he said nothing. He didn’t want to say anything about his ultimate destination of DC with Kwang-Sun within earshot. Halverson didn’t plan on confiding in Kwang-Sun until he knew more about Kwang-Sun’s operation.
“I wish we had our guns, though,” said Chogan under his breath.
“I don’t know if I should take Millie to Vegas,” said Emma, biting her lower lip.
“We can always leave after we get there if we want,” said Halverson.
Or so he thought.
CHAPTER 25
Halverson, Victoria, Emma, and Chogan piled into the back of Kwang-Sun’s SUV and headed for Vegas.
To his left Halverson made out Red Rock Canyon in the fading sunlight that gilt the rucked auburn canyon walls.
As they neared the strip, Halverson noticed a massive junkyard of old and new cars alike piled at least fifty feet into the sky. Virtually all of the cars had been mangled to some extent in the process of piling them up.
“What’s with the junkyard of cars?” he asked.
“We cleared the strip so we can drive on it,” answered Kwang-Sun. “All those cars were abandoned on the strip. We moved them here.”
“How?” said Chogan.
“We used bulldozers, cranes, steam shovels, tractors, tow trucks, everything we could get our hands on to get the cars off the road.”
“A big operation,” said Halverson, running his eyes along the congeries of vehicles.
“It didn’t happen overnight. Clearing the strip was the General’s first order of business.”
“General?”
“General Quantrill.”
“We thought you were in charge,” said Chogan.
Kwang-Sun chuckled. “I’m in charge of this patrol. The General calls the shots in the city.”
“We’d like to meet the General,” said Halverson.
“Good. Because that’s where I’m taking you.”
When Halverson heard the term general, he immediately thought of a militia. A militia must have taken over the city. It was anybody’s guess what kind of a setup the General had.
At least he kept the streets clear, Halverson decided, as they drove onto Las Vegas Boulevard, which was free of abandoned motor vehicles. That being said, Mussolini’s fascist government in Italy kept the trains running on time, as well. Having clean streets didn’t of itself indicate anything about what kind of a society the General presided over.
As a militia member the General probably didn’t have any love for the federal government, Halverson decided. Halverson would need to keep that in mind when speaking to him. Halverson would have to keep his ties to the CIA clandestine.
Clutches of persons, as well as lone individuals, sauntered down the sidewalks.
In the opposite lane on the other side of the street a beat-up antique VW van tooled past Halverson’s open window. A sign on the van’s roof said Resistance Is Futile in large black block letters. As if that wasn’t enough, the same slogan boomed in an electronically amplified voice over a loudspeaker mounted beside the sign.
“What’s that all about?” said Chogan, peering out Halverson’s window at the van.
“Beats me,” said Halverson.
He was trying to get his head around the meaning of the sign. Resistance against what? he wondered. The flesh eaters? The citizens of this society? The federal government? The leadership here? The plague? The apocalypse?
Maybe the guy speaking in the van was one of those doomsday prophets that used to frequent street corners before the advent of the plague and harangue their listeners about the end of the world.
The pedestrians on the sidewalk took it all in stride as if the van was part of the scenery. Certainly they displayed no fear or anxiety while the sonorous voice blared through the street and resounded against the facades of the palatial casinos that skirted the boulevard like canyon walls towering on either side of a gulch. Then again the pedestrians weren’t resisting. So why should they be afraid? decided Halverson.
“What’s with the guy in the van?” he asked Kwang-Sun.
“He’s just telling it like it is.”
“Resistance against what?”
“Against anything.”
“One of those go-with-the-flow hippies they used to have in the sixties,” chipped in Chogan.
“Sort of a bleak message when you think about it,” said Halverson.
“You can say that again,” said Victoria. “It’s like telling everyone to give up.”
“I don’t like it,” said Emma. “Millie doesn’t like it either.”
Chogan shook his head at Emma’s mention
of Millie. He was sitting next to Emma in the seat behind Halverson and Victoria.
“How do you manage to keep the zombies out of here?” asked Halverson.
Kwang-Sun said nothing.
Maybe Kwang-Sun hadn’t heard him, decided Halverson.
“Why aren’t there any walking dead around here?” repeated Halverson, casting around the boulevard for signs of the creatures.
He saw no corpses, either living or dead, on the streets or sidewalks.
“They don’t come here,” said Kwang-Sun.
“Why not?” put in Chogan. “You have a lot of people here. Living human flesh attracts the walking dead. So where are they?”
“Maybe they don’t like the desert heat.”
“We saw them roaming in the desert on our way here,” said Halverson. “They’re all around here—and yet they’re not on the strip.”
“They know better than to come around here,” said Kwang-Sun. “If they come around here, we’ll blow them away.”
He drove into a semicircle that had a man-made waterfall in the middle of it in front of the Mirage Resort high-rise and pulled up under the porte cochere in front of the lobby.
“There must be more to it than that,” said Chogan. “The walking dead aren’t afraid of anything. Fear wouldn’t keep them away from here.”
Kwang-Sun ignored him. “The General is waiting for you.”
He parked the SUV and climbed out.
Halverson, Chogan, Victoria, and Emma clambered out of the vehicle.
“Where?” said Halverson.
“Right there.” Kwang-Sun gestured toward a lone figure standing in front of the row of plate-glass doors that led to the lobby.
The General was a woman.
CHAPTER 26
The woman was Priscilla Quantrill, a brunette in her midforties, Halverson could see.
Her khaki pants and matching blouse reminded him of a Boy Scout’s uniform. She was wearing a pistol in a leather holster attached to a belt buckled around her waist. She looked in good shape. She was a handsome woman rather than a beautiful one. Maybe she worked out in the gym. She had a sensuous face with fleshy lips and wore her hair back in a ponytail secured by a pink scrunchie.
Zombie Apocalypse: The Chad Halverson Series Page 93