by JJ Zep
I did the move now, employing the little foot shuffle that Sully had taught me. Arturo looked momentarily confused, like he’d just been dazzled by a particularly brilliant piece of magic. He tried to adjust but I unloaded a left to his kidneys then went upstairs with a right uppercut that knocked him out and at the same time undid all the hard work Dr. Yonder Cartwright had done on my wrist.
twenty six
“I told you this kid was the shit,” Joe said, “And you got him on the cheap too.”
“For once you weren’t bullshitting me, putana. I think maybe your boy here could have taken Chavez and De La Hoya. Just like maybe Tiger could have made a put with that piece of shit bent putter you gave me.”
“Yeah, whatever, homes. Next time I’m in town maybe we’ll play a few rounds.”
“Whip you ass again, white bread.”
“In your dreams, Chi Chi Rodrigues.”
“Listen, before you go, I got something I wanna give your homeboy here.” Julio nodded towards the house and one of his kids, a boy of about ten, went running up the path and game back hauling something almost as big as him. As the kid approached I recognized the green leather strip with the decorative metal disc at its center. Julio insisted on putting the WBC Championship belt around my waist and proclaiming me the ‘world champion of East L.A.’.
We left with me riding pillion to Joe on a BMW 650. My wrist was throbbing like crazy despite the anti-inflammatories I’d taken and I wasn’t able to operate the throttle well enough to ride. All the way to Yorba Linda, Joe complained about the belt pushing into his back, but I wasn’t about to take it off. It had been exhilarating to be in the ring again and despite the damage I’d done to my wrist, I felt a familiar old buzz that I’d never thought I’d experience again.
We reached Yorba Linda in the early morning and made our way to the encampment where I’d met Sam Suchet just a few days before. With all that had happened, it felt as though it could have been lifetime ago.
“Never figured we’d see you again,” Suchet said. “We went back down to Palos Verdes and saw the bike there, figured the Corporation had either killed or captured you.”
“Oh, we tried,” Joe said. “Takes a lot to make this son of a bitch cry uncle.”
“We?”
“Yeah, I’m Joe Thursday, Head of Security, Pendragon Corporation.”
“What the fuck is this Collins? You set us up?”
“Chill,” Joe said, “How about you rustle us up some chow, and we tell you the whole story.”
“How about you tell me the whole story or I throw your ass out on the street.”
“I thought you said these people were hospitable, Chris.”
“Hospitable? Who the fuck…”
“Whoa!” I said, “Time out. Lets calm down, okay.”
“I don’t like his attitude,” Suchet said.
“You and my ex-wife both, buddy.”
“Guys?”
Joe and Suchet stopped trading insults and took to glaring at each other instead. “Right, let’s try this again. Joe Thursday meet Sam Suchet. Joe saved my ass back in New York City and a few other times besides, and if it wasn’t for Sam, I’d never have made it to Palos Verdes alive.”
They continued glaring until I said, “You can shake now,” and then they gripped hands in what was more of an arm wrestle than a shake.
“Pleased to meet you,” Sam grunted.
“Charmed,” Joe said with a healthy dose of sarcasm.
“Sam,” I said, “We really could use something to eat if you’ve got anything going begging. I could do with a shower too, if that’s not to a problem.”
“You can use the staff showers in the department store across the way, Mike will show you. And we’ll fix you some breakfast. But then I’m going to need some answers as to why you’re here and why you’ve brought this corporation man with you.” Joe started to say something, but I shot him a look and amazingly he shut up.
Mike walked us over to the department store and suggested we pick out some toiletries and shaving gear before our shower. I also found a brace for my wrist and some aspirin. The showers were single units, one in the men’s quarters and the other in the ladies, which Joe insisted that I use.
By the time, I’d finished showering and shaving, Joe had already left. I walked across the lot towards the Sunshine Realty office that served as Sam Suchet’s headquarters. As I approached I could hear the sound of raucous laughter.
“You’re shitting me,” I heard Sam Suchet say.
“I shit you not,” Joe said, “She says, so are you going to do me or not.”
“So what did you do?” Suchet giggled.
“Mister, I hightailed it out of there like someone lit a cherry bomb in my ass.” Suchet laughed so loud I actually thought he might choke.
“Glad to see you too have kissed and made up,” I said walking into the office.
“Where’d you find this crazy son of a bitch?“ Suchet said, his face flushed with laughter.
“I think he kind of found me,” I said.
“Cherry bomb up your ass,” Suchet giggled to himself, shaking his head.
twenty seven
After breakfast, Joe and I faced Sam Suchet over his desk and explained our plan to him. “An attack on Pendleton?” Sam said, “Man that sounds risky, and what would be the point anyway? Surely the Corporation’s got other bases.”
“They’ve got lots of bases,” Joe said. “But we take Pendleton and we take them all.”
“How’s that?”
“I’ve got lots of friends on the inside and we’ve been working on this for over a year now. The thing is to take down Rolly Pendragon. Once he is out of the picture I already have the people in place to step in.”
“But surely Pendleton’s going to be well guarded? I doubt we have the manpower to take on a base that size.”
“They’ve got about four hundred men down there…”
“I’ve only got about eighty,” Suchet said.
“More than enough. The troops down at Pendleton, across the entire Corporation for that matter, would have laid down their lives for Knox Pendragon. I can assure you, they don’t feel the same about Rolly.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“I’m not wrong, but even if I am, we can take them. Rolly will have removed most of the commanders and booked them into the Pendleton Hilton. He’ll have put a bunch of sycophant, yes men in charge who don’t know shit about soldiering.”
“The Pendleton Hilton?” Sam asked.
“It’s a prison, not important now. The important thing is that we take Rolly down before he does some damn fool thing like using the trigger. He does that and we’re in a world of shit. Us and everyone else still left on the planet.”
“Okay, now I’m really confused,” Sam said, “What the fuck is the trigger?”
“Yeah, I’m confused too,” I said. “I thought the trigger is what caused the infection in the first place?”
Joe paused then, and looked like a man preparing to unburden his soul on judgment day. Eventually he took a deep breath and said, “Gentleman, prepare yourselves for a tale so twisted, so fucked up, so thoroughly unbelievable, it makes Days of Our Lives look like normal life.”
He paused again, this time I was sure to deliberately keep us in suspense.
“Oh for fuck sake, Joe,” I said, “Just spit it out!”
“Knew I’d get you,” Joe said, and then continued immediately, “You remember that story I told you back in New York, Chris? About the runaway scientists and BZ and the trigger.”
“Yeah, of course, I remember.”
“Load of bullshit.”
“You lied to me?”
“No, I told you the truth. As I understood it back then. Thing is, that truth is not the whole truth. More like the cover story to mask something infinitely worse.”
“I’m totally lost now,” Sam said.
“Okay let me bring you up to speed. How do you think all this happened?
The Zs, the infection, the end of the world as we know it?”
“Figured it was some kind of virus, maybe a biological weapon.”
“Correct and correct,” Joe said. “Picture the scene, Senator Knox Pendragon and some of his right wing buddies are sitting around bemoaning another humiliating American withdrawal from the battlefield. This time Iraq and Afghanistan, to go with Vietnam, and Laos and Sudan. So these guys are just shooting the shit and someone mentions BZ.”
“BZ?”
“An experimental drug that was given to soldiers in Vietnam, supposed to make them more aggressive. Wouldn’t it be great, they say if we could cook up a new improved version of BZ, one that actually works this time.
“So the single malts keep coming and now they’re puffing on a couple of Cubans, and some genius, no doubt inspired by the 16-year-old Lagavulin soaking into his brain, comes up with this flash of brilliance, why bother putting our boys at risk, why not drop some new improved BZ on the enemy and leave them to tear each other apart.”
“Jesus!” Sam said.
“So now that it’s out there they all look at each other, and you can imagine the tension in the room. Who’s going to be the one to say, fuck it, let’s do it. But no-one has the balls, and eventually someone changes the subject and they let it slide. In the morning they probably all wake up with five hundred dollar hangovers and most of them don’t even remember the conversation.
“But one of them does remember, and not only that, he’s prepared to take action. Any guesses who that someone is?”
“Roland Pendragon?”
“Correct. Roland Pendragon, COO, in name anyway, of his daddy’s empire, Pendragon Pharmaceutical.
“Rolly walks around for weeks, months even, with his head in the clouds thinking how he’s going to save the world for liberty and democracy and free speech. And then he acts. Using some secret slush funds Pendragon has stashed around the world, he recruits a motley crew of geniuses and lunatics, sets them up in a few secret laboratories and gives them all the toys they want.
“Coming up with a rage virus is easy. Rabies will do the job for you, but Rolly wants something nastier, something that works faster. He also, surprisingly, has the presence of mind to consider the possibility of friendly fire, of our own troops becoming infected, so he begins thinking about developing an antidote for whatever witches brew his techies come up with.”
“But there isn’t any cure for Rabies is there, let alone for some Frankenstein version of the virus?”
“Correct. Pre-exposure vaccination is required, but don’t try telling that to Rolly, who feels he’s on the brink of greatness here. So now, someone on the team comes up with something that looks promising, let’s call it R2. Rolly has his contacts in Afghanistan try it on two captured Taliban fighters and, holy crap, it works like gangbusters. These guys basically rip each other to shreds. A home run for the team.”
“I’m confused” Sam said, “Are you saying the U.S. military are involved in this?”
“No, I’m not saying that, just that Rolly had some contacts in the military who thought this might be a good idea and therefore helped him with test subjects and the like. Okay, so Rolly has a working virus, now for an antidote.
“He pulls in four MIT boy geniuses who he happens to have some dirt on and gets them working on his problem. Pretty soon they have something promising and he ships one of them off to the Middle East to see if it works in the field. They bring in a subject, strap him down and infect him with R2. The guy goes ape shit as expected, and they give him the antidote. Big disappointment, the guy dies on the table. Oh well, says Rolly, no big problem, back to the drawing board and all that. They take the test subject and drop him in the desert and everyone goes home to a hot dinner. And this is where it gets really fucked up, gents.
“A couple of days later, the local base commander starts getting reports about unusual activity in some nearby villages, so he sends out a patrol to investigate. I’m sure you can guess what happens next?
“The guy they tested on became a Z and infected some locals and when the soldiers came in…”
“Eight man patrol, six of them come back with wounds that are going to negate any plans for an open coffin funeral. The other two come back with wild stories of drugged up cannibals. And now more reports come in and more patrols go out. Are you getting the picture?”
“That explains an outbreak in the Middle East,” Sam said. “How did it get here?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Joe said. “You need to remember that the military had no idea of what they were dealing with at this point. We know now that the re-animation rate can be seconds or minutes or days or even weeks. In the first couple of days of the Afghanistan outbreak, twelve military transports left the Middle East carrying what they believed to be the remains of fallen heroes. Those who opened the coffins Stateside got a nasty surprise.”
“Jesus!” Sam said again. “It’s half past nine in the morning and I need a drink. Anyone else?
“I’ll take one,” Joe said.
“Chris?”
“No thanks.”
Sam poured two stiff measures of Makers Mark and handed one to Joe, who took a slug before continuing.
“So now you have a rampant virus loose on several US military bases, and there’s no antidote. In fact, the four guys Rolly put together to come up with the antidote now know the shit storm they’ve created and they do a runner carrying, not the R2 virus as I first thought, but the trigger, the thing that turned a killer virus into something that re-animates the dead. A contract goes out on the four runaway scientists. You know that part, Chris.”
“I don’t,” Sam said.
“It’s not important to the story. The important part is that you now have an outbreak that can’t be controlled. By the time it starts turning up in major US cities the military is already fucked.”
“That explains why there was hardly any response from the military in New York,” I said.
“Correct,” Joe said, “And also why the troops they did send in were young pups like, what was his name? Dangerman?”
“Dangerfield,” I corrected.
“Yeah, they sent in these rookies, cause that was all they had.”
“One thing I don’t understand Joe is, the trigger. You said that the trigger was the antidote gone wrong that actually caused the Z outbreak. So what’s this trigger you mentioned that Rolly is planning to use?”
“Here’s the thing,” Joe said, “You’d think that after the shit storm he caused, Rolly would pack away his chemistry set for good, but not Rolly. He has teams of geeks pouring out a production line of chemicals. He managed to convince Knox that his team was close to a breakthrough in developing an antidote, but once again Rolly’s more interested in working the angles. “You’ve seen the effects of Blueberry Hill, Chris? Well, this latest batch…”
“What’s Blueberry Hill?” Sam asked.
“Something that gives you control over the Zs. But as I was saying, this new batch, Strawberry Fields, is even more powerful.”
“So Strawberry Fields is the trigger?”
“Not yet, but it could be in time. Let’s just say that you could feed a Z a vial of Strawberry Fields, and then maneuver him around like a remote control toy.”
“But surely that’s a good thing,” Sam said. “If you can control the Zs you could command them to march themselves into the ocean or into a giant trash compactor or something.”
“I doubt that’s what Rolly has in mind. What he’s thinking of is more like putting together a Z army to take over the country and then conquer the world. I think Rolly Pendragon has plans to make himself king of planet earth.”
“Jesus,” Sam said for the third time.
twenty eight
Once he knew what was at stake it hadn’t taken much to convince Sam Suchet to join us in our assault on Camp Pendelton. Joe Thursday had called a briefing to show us the lay of the land and explain the objectives we needed to achieve.
“None taken.”
“You also have to understand the mindset of the Corporation hierarchy. They’ve had things pretty much their own way up to now. No one has ever really stood up to them, and they’ve got to thinking that’s the way it’s going to be forever. They’ve become complacent. The last thing they’ll expect is an attack. We do this right and it will be over before they even know what hit them.
“Let’s talk objectives. We need to secure three main areas.” He drew our attention to a flip chart where he’d drawn a cursory map of the base. “Our objectives are, the airfield, the HQ buildings and the hospital.” Joe indicated each of these areas on the map.
“How many of those dump trucks you got Sam?”
“Four,” Sam said, “But only three of them running, and only one with a 50-mil onboard.”
“That’s good enough,” Joe said. “I’m figuring we roll into Pendleton in those monster trucks at first light tomorrow, catch them with their pants down. We go in convoy to here. Chris, you peal off to your right here and secure the airfield. Sam, you and me keep going to the t-junction then I go left and take the hospital, you go right and lock down the HQ.”
“You make it sound like we can just breeze in and have our way with the place,” Sam said. “What kind of resistance can we expect?”
“Minimal. Like I said, they’re not expecting an attack. You have to understand that the base itself covers a huge area. At its peak it had a strength of 100 000 marines and support staff. Now you got 400 men, scattered around the place with vast tracts of open land in between. By the time they get their boots on it will all be over.”
“Where’s Ruby being held?” I asked.