The Hungry 5: All Hell Breaks Loose (The Sheriff Penny Miller Series)

by Booth, Steven

  “Scratch, you and Rat clear the SUV of weapons and be damned sure to look for any kind of tracking device.”

  “What if there’s a bomb inside?” asked Scratch. Miller looked at him. He looked back. She couldn’t tell if he was serious or not.

  Miller smiled. “Then I promise we will somehow manage to get on without you.”

  “That’s a comforting thought.”

  “Good. Now, come on, let’s get going.”

  Scratch looked like he’d been about to say something else, but in the end, he and Rat just trotted off to inspect the SUV. Rat gently opened the door and looked inside. She took a minute to study the ignition. Meanwhile, Scratch slid beneath the SUV on his back to search for modifications, explosives or any obvious tracking devices. Unbidden, Sheppard opened the hood and studied the engine—which surprised Miller, considering he had gone out of his way over the time she had known him to remind everyone that he was not a mechanic. Nevertheless, he seemed pleased with what he’d found. “She looks clean.”

  “So, we’re going north to Idaho, right?”

  Miller looked up. Vanessa had crossed the sand and was now standing very close to her. The two women searched the sky. Miller hesitated but decided to continue to trust Vanessa, at least for now. “Yes, we’ll go north. As long as Nevada is still zombie-occupied territory, we don’t want to hang around. Idaho it is.”

  “Okay. I know I can get us as far as Elko without a problem.”

  “Good.” Miller sighed. “We’ve had enough problems for one day.”

  Sheppard slammed the hood and stuck both his thumbs up. Rat exited the driver’s side door nodding in satisfaction. Then Scratch crawled out from under the SUV and got to his feet. He dusted off his clothing. He waved. “All clear, Penny. I didn’t blow up.”

  “Yes, and we’re all thrilled. All right,” Miller said. “Let’s do this.”

  She marched toward the dusty SUV and Vanessa followed obediently. “Everyone pile in. Brandon, please get Rolf and his canine companion settled in the back seat. You get in there with him.”

  “Got it.”

  “Scratch,” Miller called as she approached. “Vanessa’s driving. She knows how to pull this off, but I’m gonna want you on shotgun. Don’t drop the ball.”

  His head snapped up at the unnecessary dig. He had the good grace to only reply with, “Okay.”

  Miller turned to Sheppard. “Sorry I have to separate you from your new friend, Karl, but you and Rat are sitting with me.”

  “Look, Penny, you’re the one who wanted me to make friends. So I made a friend. So far, it’s paid off. But until we’re safe—and the data is safe—he’s just one of the team. Is that clear?”

  Miller looked at him. In all the time she’d known Karl Sheppard, he had never challenged her, openly or privately. She had obviously hit a nerve. She backed down immediately. “Clear, Karl. Get in.”

  Miller opened the side door of the SUV and got in. Rat and Sheppard entered through the other passenger side. Rolf, Brandon, and the dog were already in the back. Rolf was chewing on something and Dudley was drooling on the leg of Rolf’s jeans. Scratch and Vanessa waited in their seats, with Vanessa at the wheel. Miller stuck her head out the window. She checked the skies one last time and saw no drones. Their absence made her uncomfortable, but not half as uncomfortable as facing one would have. Miller said a silent prayer and then slammed the door shut.

  Vanessa started the engine. It roared to life immediately. Sheppard was right. Someone had been looking after it all these months. Miller couldn’t believe their luck had held. Maybe there was a God after all.

  Miller gave the signal and they moved out.

  INTERLUDE 1

  Charlotte Williams turned the executive chair. She moved slowly. When she adjusted her suit coat, she reminded Crespi of a four-star admiral preparing for an inspection of the USS John F. Kennedy. She twirled a wooden pencil as she spoke. “Well, have we heard back from the recovery team yet?”

  “No,” Crespi said, his voice hoarse with tension. “I mean not exactly.”

  “Clarify.” Dr. Williams narrowed her eyes. It felt too much like a laser sight being directed at him. “What does ‘not exactly’ mean?”

  Crespi looked down at the thick report he held with both hands, and opened it to the relevant section. He stopped on a page, and looked up. “We have a recent communiqu� from the Children of Abraham—that’s what the locals call themselves. They say that the recovery team we inserted has been…” Crespi’s face lost its color.

  “Has been what? Spit it out.”

  “Wiped out.”

  “How?”

  “Eaten by the undead.” Crespi’s features tightened at the thought of such a gruesome death. His eyes went wide, pupils fully dilated. “There were no survivors.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Perhaps we shouldn’t have reassigned the drones that quickly.”

  Dr. Williams rubbed her temples. “So they’re gone?”

  “What, the drones?”

  “No, you imbecile. I know the drones have been reassigned. I gave the order myself. I meant Sheriff Penelope Miller and that ragged band of misfits she travels with. Are they now completely off our radar?”

  Crespi cleared his throat to cover his rising discomfort. “Effectively, yes.”

  Dr. Williams cut him off with an imperious wave of her hand. “Get out of here, and don’t come back until you can tell me the exact whereabouts of Sheriff Miller.”

  Crespi found a sliver of backbone, if only for the moment. “Charlotte, I’ve already allocated all available assets to finding Sheriff Miller. Snapping at me won’t help. If D’Amore were here, you wouldn’t…”

  “Raymond is not here. We are, and I am in command. I say that there is nothing more important than recovering Sheriff Miller and Captain Karl Sheppard. I want them both alive, Crespi. We need them, along with the data they stole from TK-501. Go. Find. Them.”

  Crespi gave up. He nodded and went to the office door. He spoke in a lowered voice, without turning to face her. “I promise you, Charlotte, if they’re alive, we’ll have eyes on them soon.”

  “I’m not interested in soon, Miguel,” she said. Dr. Williams stared at the broken halves of the pencil she held in her hands. “I want now. Get it done.”

  Crespi closed the door behind him, and stared at it for a long moment. He turned down the corridor, whistling tunelessly as he walked.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “So where are these damned patrols, anyway?” Scratch said, strapped into the shotgun side of the front seat. He made a show of stretching his arms and wiggling his fingers over the dashboard.

  Miller had been staring out at the world through the side window and sipping from a canteen of water she found in the car. She’d been watching the desert go by, one way or another, for what felt like decades now. The Nevada desert was such a brutal, barren place. There was nothing out there that wasn’t in a bad mood all the time; pale cactus with nasty-assed needles, angry scorpions, filthy tarantulas, killer baby rattlers and things that went bump in the night. Sure, the Ruby Mountains were beautiful, but the desert got everything and everyone on it riled up sooner or later, one way or another. It was so damned hungry and thirsty, so eternal and unwelcoming.

  Miller looked out and all she saw were those long, empty stretches of sand and hardpan and rocks and sage and sun-bleached open highway. Then maybe a few beat up, long-abandoned buildings here and there. The dead folks who’d tried to run. Some abandoned cars packed with opened suitcases and rotting families. The same story over and over again. They’d drive into a small dump of a town gone dead, speed up, and leave it behind, and then go through the same damn thing a half hour later. Miller missed the world she’d grown up in, ridden horses in, loved and lived in. This new one was way too depressing.

  “Penny?”

  “I heard you, Scratch.” She faced forward. “So you want our asses to get stopped by armed soldiers? Or did I miss something?”
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  Scratch turned. He hooked his arm over the headrest of the front seat. “It ain’t that I want to get stopped. It’s just that it’s, you know… too quiet out there. We’ve been driving for a long time, the radio’s got nothing but static, and there hasn’t been anything going on around us. Take those missing drones for example. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  Sheppard mumbled something. It sounded a lot like, “Oh, here we go again.” Miller shot him a look, and he went back to studying his dusty pants.

  If Scratch had heard the remark, he ignored it. “Think about it. The drones were on us from first thing this morning until we reached the caves. They damned near vaporized me when I stuck my head out to take a look around. They were all over us then, okay? So where the hell did they go?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Scratch was just getting warmed up. He was doing his Terrill Lee imitation again. “Did they get beamed up to the Enterprise? Or maybe they got shot down by pissed-off vultures with fifty-caliber machine guns hanging from their tiny little vulture dicks. See, I don’t know shit about all that military hardware—that’s your area of expertise, Rat, and yours, too, Karl—but somehow I can’t imagine that those things have so little fuel that they can only hang around for an hour or so at a time. And even then, they’d be hustling back to blow our shit up.”

  “Where are you going with this, cowboy?” But Miller already knew because it had bothered her, too.

  “Someone must have ordered them home, or at least sent them somewhere else. I mean, what the fuck?”

  “Maybe they thought the team they sent to capture us was good enough,” Rat said. “Maybe they thought it didn’t have a role beyond pinning us down.”

  Miller stayed quiet. She had been thinking the same thing, of course, but she’d let their conversation continue. Maybe someone would come up with something she hadn’t yet considered. She still had an ugly feeling they were being shoved around like chess pieces on a Nevada-sized board.

  Scratch stared at Rat like a schoolteacher who’d caught his student farting loudly during a final exam. “I thought about that, Rat, but it doesn’t hold up. What about that Army team that came after us underground? Maybe they thought we’d be easy to catch, but where the hell was their backup if they were serious? Damn, you’re telling me no one was left behind to watch the trucks? No reserves were held back in case of trouble?”

  “You got me there,” Rat said. “It sure was bad tactics.”

  Scratch was all wound up now. He shook his head. “There are only two explanations that I can think of and they both suck.” He held up a finger—Miller half expected his choice would be the middle one—and counted them off. “One, someone is driving us like cattle.”

  And that’s why I love you, Miller thought. You’re nobody’s fool.

  Sheppard raised his head. “Penny and I thought that, too, when they pushed us towards the caves. She mentioned it. But that only makes sense if they were driving us there to take us captive or something, and they didn’t succeed in doing that.”

  “Looks like they just underestimated us,” said Rat with a shrug. “People have a tendency to do that.”

  “That’s point two,” said Scratch, counting off the next finger. “The idea that whoever sent those drones and that team thinks we’re a bunch of dumb-asses who don’t know which way is up. They just thought we’d be easy. And maybe that’s it. Maybe they just counted on us getting captured so quickly that they could afford to allocate their resources somewhere else.”

  “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Brandon hadn’t spoken in a long time, and when Miller looked over, he had the enormous dog in his lap. Dudley let Brandon pet him as he stuck his nose out the window. Rolf seemed to be asleep or perhaps in a mental trance. Brandon continued, “If they underestimated you then that’s why we’re all still alive.”

  “Maybe they are that dumb.” Scratch rubbed his stubble and nodded slowly. His dry sense of humor began to leak out. “That would work to our advantage, of course, but I sure as hell don’t like being underestimated. It offends my ego something awful.”

  “I’m not impressed, Scratch,” Rat said. “You don’t see Penny making decisions based on your delicate ego.”

  Miller snorted. “You got that right.”

  Scratch frowned and ignored them. “I call bullshit,” he continued. “Way I see it, we survived all this—zombies, crazy military groups, suicidal survivalists, and even cannibals—and we should be getting our props by now. Instead, someone out there still thinks we’re just a bunch of fucking needle-dick country noobs that they can just capture or kill on a whim.”

  Miller deadpanned. “I agree that’s hard to take.”

  “Damn straight,” Scratch said. “Sorry, but that just deep fries my biker balls.”

  Miller grinned now. “I don’t know, Scratch. Except for the dings on your ego, I’m not sure that’s so much of a problem for us. Being underestimated has worked to our advantage so far. If the people who are looking for us start overestimating us, they’re going to bring on some serious firepower, and we aren’t exactly prepared to repel boarders just yet.”

  “See? Penny agrees with me. They just don’t show us enough respect.”

  “You can say that twice.” Everyone turned to look at Vanessa. They’d been kidding around. She wasn’t.

  “You want to elaborate, Vanessa?” asked Miller. This is as good a time as any to find out how much you know, really.

  Vanessa hesitated. “Well, it’s just that I do know a little about the people you are dealing with, Sheriff. They have a lot to work with. So far, they’ve been going pretty light on us, really.” She turned her head briefly to look back at Brandon. “Remember when those nasty bikers came by the caves and killed a few of us? That was a horrible day. What were they called again?”

  “The Demons of Death,” said Brandon in a low tone. Miller saw his eyes go somewhere else. Something bad must have happened for him to look so grim.

  “Yeah, them,” Vanessa said. She eased the SUV around a dead cow in the road and a wrecked car and then sped up again. She was a good driver. “Okay. So, these bikers come by…”

  Scratch snapped out of his odd mood. “Wait a second. Back up. You said the Demons of Death?”

  “Yes,” Vanessa said, with her eyes back on the highway.

  “I don’t believe it.” Scratch sat straight up in his seat. “Are you telling me that those ass-hats are still on the road and back to hanging around these parts?”

  “Well, not so much anymore,” Vanessa said, this time with a satisfied smile. “But I can sure tell you one thing. The military sure as hell didn’t ‘underestimate’ that bunch. They rounded up every damn one of them.”

  “That’s just great,” growled Scratch. He returned to his milking the wounded pride angle. “The Demons get taken seriously, but not me and my badass crew. I say again, what the fuck?”

  “We sure didn’t ask,” said Brandon. “We never asked much, it’s not safe to draw their attention. They gave us supplies and food and we keep them informed about stragglers and the activity at the base down the road. That was the deal.”

  Sheppard turned to Brandon with a confused look on his face. “You were keeping tabs on Crystal Palace? How long were you doing that?”

  “What’s Crystal Palace?” Brandon asked.

  “That’s classified.”

  Brandon just looked at Sheppard and said, “Then why did you bring it up?”

  Sheppard continued to painfully contort himself to look at Brandon. “What have you been telling them about the base?”

  Miller watched as Brandon and Vanessa exchanged a glance in the rearview mirror. Vanessa broke the contact.

  “Nothing much. Troop and truck movements, mostly, though we watched the helicopters come and go as well.”

  Miller realized that Brandon was leaving something else out.

  “So what was all that about the drones attacking you whenever you popped your heads out?” Mille
r asked. “Was that bullshit, too?”

  “Leave him alone, Sheriff,” said Vanessa. “The drones were a real threat because our contacts had nothing to do with them. They left us alone when we were being resupplied or whatever, but the drones did come for our people mercilessly other times. We never understood it, but it looks like there is more than one group of the military who has an interest in this area.”

  Vanessa saw a truck graveyard ahead, where a couple of eighteen-wheelers and an Army truck had turned into dusty sculptures. The massive wrecks were surrounded by smashed vehicles and half-clothed skeletons that the collision had flung out onto the rock-freckled sand. Vanessa went off road. She took them down the embankment, sped up for fifty yards without losing control, then brought them back up onto the highway. Miller watched Vanessa drive. She was impressed.

  They drove on for nearly another two miles. Miller leaned forward to put her hand on Vanessa’s shoulder. “Tell me something, Vanessa. You knew where we’d be when we emerged from that door. Why didn’t you lead the military to us there? That would have solved your problems. Instead, you came with us. Why?”

  Vanessa shrugged the hand away. For some reason the question had annoyed Vanessa. “Would you have preferred that I made the other decision, Sheriff?”

  “Not really, but…”

  “Then drop it. I chose to be with you, and that’s all you need to know.”

  The SUV began to slow down. Vanessa was applying the brakes.

  “Why are we slowing?” Rat asked.

  Vanessa did not answer.

  Miller went back to observing their surroundings. She wasn’t satisfied with Vanessa’s answers, nor with her attitude. Something wasn’t right. Miller and Scratch exchanged a look.

  Vanessa pointed to a freeway sign and finally responded. “This is the Elko exit. We’re here.”

  Scratch turned and looked around. The woman sure could drive. She’d taken them through the war zone, down the highway and right to the exit with barely a detour. “Vanessa, that was fast as shit through a goose.”