Gunny snapped back to the present when he heard them piling equipment in the back of the ambulance. As soon as someone unloaded everything they were carrying, they spread out looking for targets. There were none. The crawlers were still half a parking lot away and weren’t worth wasting a bullet on. Stabby’s blades were still dripping as he and Lars climbed into the Pete, breathing hard.
He watched until everyone else was either in Griz’s truck or the ambulance before he took off, heading back to Lakota.
“Find everything?” he asked, winding sixteenth gear out as he got back on the long straight heading out of Beulah.
“Yeah, easy money,” Lars said as he grabbed one of the last boxes of 9s and started reloading his magazines. “Sara knew exactly where to go.”
“A lot of undead inside?” Gunny asked.
“Not really. Once we got through the lobby, it was run and gun.”
“I had to tell them to save a few for me,” Stabby said. “They were having all the fun.”
40
Leaving
Day 27
Gunny sat in the glider swing on his back porch overlooking the lake. The moon was half full and reflecting on the water. He had a warm beer in his hand, letting it get even warmer. His arm still ached, but the bullet hole was scabbing over, healing nicely. The night was quiet except for the occasional sounds of owls and the soft noise of insects. It had been three days since Scratch had been shot. Three uneventful days where the only memorable thing to happen was the train rolling in with boxcars full of ammo and guns and grenades and all manner of explosives. Gunny still couldn’t believe it. The General had known the McAlester munitions plant was there. Of course, he had. That’s why he had insisted on Lakota. Even with the secure communications, he hadn’t wanted to tip his hand, just in case the wrong ears were listening in. Cadillac Jack and Cobb knew why they were coming here all along, also. They hadn’t realized no else did. It wasn’t like the base was a secret or anything. They figured anyone that served knew. But it was one of those hundreds of places the military has that most soldiers never get stationed at, so it isn’t on their radar.
Tina and the Linemen had cut the wires that went over the bridge to the outside world and snipped them at the first pole past the wall. They were ready to turn the power back on, but first they had teams going to every house and turning off the main circuit breakers. They didn’t need any stoves or coffee pots to come on and start a fire.
The gas and diesel they had in the ground at the two stations were more than enough to last them for a long time. Cars weren’t being driven much and bicycles were at the top of the list for the supply run trucks. If they needed more fuel, they could always take the tanker to one of the depots outside of Oklahoma City. As long as they didn’t mix the additives in, the pure fuel would last for years before it lost too much octane to be useful. All the government mandated chemicals they mixed in as it went into the trucks is what made it break down after a few months and start gumming up fuel systems. Diesel would last even longer with some additives. Maybe a decade.
People were getting comfortable, finding their place in this new world. The work was meaningful, important. There was no more license and tag office. No more insurance agents. No more IRS. All that would come back eventually, he knew, but for a generation they would mostly be free of government intrusions. When everybody knew everybody else, folks tended to mind their manners. Or an armed society is a polite society. Either way, it worked.
The hair salon was going to reopen. School started on Monday. Bastille was already collecting all the DVDs he could get his hands on so he could show them on the big screen at the little theater. He anticipated movie nights on the weekends, once he got the sound system wired up to a projector he was trying to cobble together. The church was full on Sunday and Preacher had to move out of the Baptist one and into the Catholic Church, since it was the only one that could hold everyone.
He couldn’t see the wall a half mile away, but he knew it was there. It was imposing in its height and length, the constant patrols of guards on top keeping the town secure. Griz and Captain Wilson had started a training roster. They still had the Muslim problem to contend with and he knew those people wouldn’t just leave the survivors alone. It wasn’t in their DNA. They could hold a grudge for generations. Gunny wasn’t seething with rage and eager to go burn down mosques like some were. It was something he was dreading, he’d done enough killing. This wasn’t going to be like fighting another warrior. An equal opponent. He knew how they operated. They would never attack unless they had superior numbers, then they would be ruthless, so you had to hunt them down and find them first. It would be easier now, though. There were no innocents. If they were here on American soil, they were the enemy. Period. You couldn’t leave their women and children alive, either. Maybe babies or toddlers, but if they were already six or seven years old, the hate was already too ingrained. He would never trust them. He’d seen kids that young kill his friends. It was going to be an ugly and brutal campaign and the men eager for battle now, would be scarred forever when it was over.
To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.
That was one of the few quotes from Sun Tzu that he could remember. There had been a copy of it floating around one of the Green Zones he’d been in. Boredom was the biggest enemy whenever they got stuck for weeks on end with nothing to do, so he’d read anything he could get his hands on.
America’s first war, after the Revolutionary war, was with the Muslims. Thomas Jefferson sent the Marines over to kick some Barbary Pirate ass and they did. They still sang about that victory in their Marine Corp Hymn. “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli” danced unbidden through his head. His mind was off on another weird tangent. He tipped the warm brew again, pushing the song away. He wondered about the men who had butchered the Indian women and children a hundred and fifty years ago. Did they have nightmares and lifelong regrets? On their deathbed were they still asking for forgiveness?
He wondered if the Israelites of old had regrets when they were commanded to kill every man, woman, and child of the Amalekites. Even their animals. That was almost prophetic, he thought. History constantly repeating itself. The Amalekites had picked off the stragglers during the exodus from Egypt, the sick or crippled. The women and children. So, when the Israelites were strong, they paid them back with interest. The Amalekites were ancestors of some of the most radical Muslim people. The Palestinians mainly, but they had all intermarried over the centuries. Now, some three thousand years later, their descendants had killed nearly every man, woman, and child in the world. It was so ridiculous, ancient rivalries and feuds had built up and led to this. The death of billions. Gunny didn’t know all the ins and outs and little details of history, but he’d read a little on the subject. He’d read the books that had traced the ancient Muslim and Jew feud all the way back to the same man. They both claimed Abraham as the founder of their tribes. Their differences followed the split between his two sons. One group eventually became the modern-day Jews and the so-called lost ten tribes, the other son’s descendants became the modern-day Muslims. They were the same breed of cat. What a different world this would be if the old man had fallen off his camel and never had any kids.
Gunny took another sip of his beer. It was nearly midnight, the time of night when a man’s thoughts wandered freely and it was easy to believe in ghosts and other unnatural things.
A lot of people had voiced their concerns about him leaving and going over into the heavily populated areas East of the Mississippi. He could sense that a lot of them thought it was a fool’s journey. Bastille was the only one insensitive or stupid enough to just come out and say it. In front of everyone, he called it a suicide mission and asked why didn’t he just send a team of men out for his family. He was the President and it was his job to be here. Not out there. Why did he have to go himself?
“Because that’s what a man does,” was the only answer he had, finding it a lit
tle ironic that his biggest hater had become one of his most ardent supporters.
He was leaving in the morning. The General didn’t like it, but Gunny was going whether he helped him or not, so he had relented and plotted a course for him on the train tracks that was clear all the way to Atlanta. It wound up adding hundreds of miles to get around a few trains stopped on tracks and there were some spots where cars were on crossings, but the engine would easily knock them out of the way. Tommy had welded steel beams to the front of the loco he was taking. Gunny nearly had to pick his jaw up off the floor when Carl told him how much fuel the engine would likely use. If he kept it at around 50 miles an hour, it could use a hundred gallons or more every hour. He didn’t know for sure, he was only guessing, the games he’d played only calculated loaded trains. He never played it just running around with a locomotive. He said with a fully loaded train, he might use four hundred gallons an hour. No wonder they had a five-thousand-gallon fuel tank. It should take him there and back, though. Or pretty close. Jellybean topped off the tanks from the loaded diesel tanker they had picked up near the beginning of their journey. Tommy had also added some other armor to it and now the windows were caged and the railings had spikes all along them so nothing could climb aboard without opening one of the gates on the catwalks. Someone had found a nearly new dirt bike in a shed and now it was strapped to the platform at the back of the engine. Plan B, if necessary. He had enough food and water on board to last for weeks and more ammo than he could carry. He had a couple of .22 rifles and twenty thousand rounds of ammo for them if he got stopped and had to just shoot the zombies for days until they were all dead. Captain Wilson had brought back whole pallets of it. Some branches of service used it for training, apparently.
He was ready to go. All he had to do was meet up with the crew going with him in the morning. He told them he was leaving first thing tomorrow. Be at the train or be left behind. Two hundred men and Bridget had volunteered to go. He had picked out twenty. It was the minimum the General and Cobb would allow. They wanted him to take one of the boxcars and another hundred with him, but he’d put his foot down. He wanted to be able to go backward and see where he was heading if he had to.
The Sisters had sewn Scratch up and he was already trying to get out of bed and walk around. Griz had happily said he would strap him down and brought in some three-inch-wide ratchet straps from his truck. Big, dirty ones with rusted hooks. Scratch had believed him so he was still bedridden, afraid to get up, and healing nicely. His lung hadn’t collapsed, there didn’t seem to be any infection and his spirits were high. Sara had grabbed blood typing packs at the hospital and people had lined up to donate. He was enjoying Kim’s attentions, but was wanting to get a posse together and track Casey down. He made Gunny promise he would wait until he was healed up enough to go when they went after him.
Gunny had, readily enough. Scratch owed Casey a little more than he did.
Wire Bender was working on the phone system. He said as soon as they had electricity, he’d have it ready to go. It would be old-fashioned though, with an operator needed to connect calls. The mayor had shown him the old civil service switchboards they had stopped using in the ‘60s. Since it was government property, it couldn’t be disposed of easily without all the proper paperwork, so it had found its way to the basement of the courthouse and was busy collecting dust. He couldn’t imagine them having a whole lot of use for it here in town, but the lines were already run that stretched out all across America. He envisioned getting phones out to the Hutterites. From there, who knew? Once they cleaned out all the foreign invaders, it would be safe for other communities to start establishing themselves behind walls. The zombie problem wouldn’t last forever. The Chinese scientists thought they would all be dead within the decade.
Wire Bender had brought all of his computer gear and with a generator running his equipment until Tina got the power back on, he had established a secure internet link to Cheyanne Mountain with his satellite receiver. One of the linemen had climbed the now dead cell tower on the outskirts of town and mounted his dish. With that link established, the boys under the mountain could send them nearly any kind of information they needed if they had access to it from the NSA databases.
When Gunny had asked about the nukes in the missile silos spread out across the Midwest, General Carson had told him they were useless. Without actually being there and rewiring everything, there was no way to make them fly without the launch codes. They were harmless, he had assured him. They weren’t radioactive or in any danger of exploding or melting down. Gunny didn’t understand everything, but basically the bombs weren’t really bombs unless a lot of very precise steps were taken. Conventional explosions had to cause a reaction to plutonium and then that had to be placed in conjunction with some other materials and then Gunny was lost. All it meant to him was they weren’t in any danger of them going off accidentally. The General had expressed doubts that the Russians could get their nukes to fly, either. Maybe the Chinese, their army was mostly intact. They had talked at length, the General somehow sensing that Meadows was just about through with the whole “Mr. President” thing. It had been fine for the few weeks it lasted, during the chaos and crisis period where everything hung by a thread. When no one knew if they would survive from one day to the next.
He still thought he did the right thing, giving thousands of survivors something to believe in. Giving them hope in the most hopeless time this country had ever been through. It had gotten hundreds of people to Lakota and they were in a position to start over again. Without any authority, if it was just some truck driver wanting to go there, he doubted if anyone would have followed him. It wouldn’t take that Mayor, or maybe even the Councilman, long to start going through the law books at the library and figure out the way the General had explained the order of succession wasn’t quite right. Maybe he could talk to them, explain why he did it and they wouldn’t make a big fuss about it. And if they did? Carson doubted the people would even care, now. Meadows had proven himself time and again. They’d probably just demand an election and vote him right back in.
The Germans had been pulling people from rooftops as fast as their helicopters could be refueled and sent back out off of the ships. More and more enclaves of survivors were being spotted with the satellites. The world was slowly starting to regain its balance after the knockout blow that had been delivered. The Muslims had tried for a one-shot killing punch, but had failed. Maybe, just maybe, the tide would start to turn now that their one and only trick was used. Their power had come from the trust of others. The people that believed pure evil didn’t exist. The countries that welcomed them with open arms and then convinced themselves time after time that only a few bad apples were ruining it for all the peaceful Muslims. They couldn’t police them because they wouldn’t police themselves. Gunny felt sorry for people like Hasif. There were a lot of them, just not enough. Somehow, starting in the 70s, the radicals had quickly taken over. A minor annoyance on the world stage became a huge problem. Political correctness wouldn’t let the war be won like all wars had been in the past. Crush them completely, destroy everything and decimate their numbers into insignificance. That’s how you won a war, not with snipers and precision bombs and the media splashing photos of innocents accidentally wounded. You had to kill people and break things. A warrior had to be as cold and vicious as the enemy. He had to look into the darkness and become the monster. Otherwise, you lost. You butchered them all and salted the earth so any survivors couldn’t live either. You nuked Hiroshima. You fire-bombed Dresden. The battleground should be littered with five hundred thousand dead and their cities left in ruinous heaps where no life could exist. In World War Two, some campaigns left over a million lifeless bodies strewn across the battlefields.
That’s how a war was won, but most of the world changed after those massive numbers of casualties. It became less fierce, less willing to be a part of mass slaughter. Nations gentled their warrior class of men. Most of the world bec
ame kind. A generation later, it lay in ruins because of it. Well intentioned people had stopped the strong arm of retribution that was needed when the enemy was weak.
Gunny looked down at his watch. It was a few minutes past midnight. It was tomorrow. He had kept his end of the bargain. It wasn’t his fault if every rational thinking person would assume he meant first light. After breakfast.
He set the empty bottle on the porch rail. He wasn’t going to risk anyone else’s life on his trip. Losing Tiny and nearly getting Scratch killed had hurt him, he wouldn’t lose anyone else. They were all needed here and by using the train, most of the danger was eliminated. He took one last look over the lake. “The woods are lovely dark and deep,” he thought. “But I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.” He shouldered his pack and started walking toward the locomotive.
Epilogue
Under the Catskill Mountain
Daniel was spit-shining his shoes. Literally, spit shining them. They didn’t have any polish, but that wasn’t any excuse, as he and a few others had found out. He was angry and the scowl on his face let the others in the tiny barracks know it. Madame President had insisted they wear their dress uniforms at all times. She liked the way they looked. It didn’t matter that they were uncomfortable, hard to keep clean, and that there was no reason to wear them. Except that she liked the way they looked. He had been reprimanded by the Chief of something, some oily civilian they had been informed was in charge of them.
The Zombie Road Omnibus: The Road Kill Collection Page 65