by Drew Avera
“This is Jenny,” Fuller said, his raspy chuckling sounding something like a mild heart attack. “She knows things.”
“Is that your official job title?” Roach wondered, pushing herself back to her feet, careful to keep her handgun pointed in a safe direction. She noticed Ramirez still aiming his right at the older woman and she pushed his barrel down with a finger. “Relax, Mule.”
“Ain’t nothing official about Jenny,” Fuller answered for her. “But she’s worked for about everyone who knows anything all up and down the east coast and if anyone knows what we need, it’s her.” He nodded to Jenny. “You get the file I sent you?”
“I got it.” She didn’t seem too talkative to Roach. In fact, once the smile faded from her amusement with Roach’s reaction time, Jenny’s expression transformed as if she’d bitten into something sour. “If you weren’t an old, old friend, James, I wouldn’t have come at all.”
“You sound scared,” Roach said, a challenge giving the words an edge. “You brought us out here into no-man’s-land and that didn’t seem to scare you.”
“If these people kill me,” Jenny snapped back at the younger woman, “it’ll be by accident. The people I could piss off talking to you, they could swat me like a fly. That’s why we’re out here. Nothing else moving out here, no cars, no drones, nothing but us and the zombie horde.” She nodded toward the squatters with a contemptuous sneer. “We stick out like a whore in church, but so would anyone else.”
“You didn’t haul me all the way out here to tell me you weren’t going to help,” Fuller said. “You could have done that with a secure message.”
She shifted her feet, a child called to the carpet by her teacher.
“Maybe I just brought you out here to tell you to stop sticking your damned nose into something that could get you killed, you wrinkled old coot.”
Roach felt a raindrop on the back of her neck and cursed under her breath.
“Shit or get off the pot, lady,” she said. “This place gives me the creeps and I don’t know either of you well enough to stand out here in the fucking rain and wait for you to find your backbone.”
Jenny regarded her sidelong, the corner of her mouth turning up.
“I like her,” she decided. “She’s a lot better about not taking my shit than you ever were, James.”
“Well, she didn’t used to be married to you, sweetie,” Fuller reasoned.
Roach’s eyes went wide and she stared between the two of them in disbelief. Ramirez was shaking his head as if he didn’t believe he’d heard Fuller right.
“You two were married?” Ramirez asked. His gun was still in his right hand, hanging down at his side, and Roach was about to tell him to put it away.
She never got the chance. The sound interrupted her, a familiar whining, growing deeper in tone as it grew louder…
“Incoming!” she and Fuller yelled the word in antiphonal chorus, each of them lurching forward to protect the person most important to them.
Roach grabbed Ramirez by the shoulder and pulled him to the ground, while out of the corner of her eye, she saw Fuller throwing himself across Jenny, shielding her against what was surely to come. The former chicken restaurant saved their lives. The mortar round punched right through what was left of the roof, hitting with a gut-level crump before the walls blew out in a wave of pressure and sound. It rolled over Roach like an ocean breaker on a rocky shore, slamming into her in an almost solid blow against every bit of her body at once, sending her and Ramirez rolling out across the broken pavement.
Jagged rock dug into her back, but she barely felt it, numbed by the blast. Her brain didn’t seem to want to work, but she slugged it into gear and pushed herself off the ground. She’d barely made it to her knees when the next round hit, felt more than heard because her ears were still whistling from the first explosion, but this one was on the other side of the building. The ground shook but she stayed upright and was able to keep her balance long enough to grab Ramirez by the collar and haul him beside her while she ran.
He was trying to yell something, trying to pull away, but she couldn’t hear him and wouldn’t have cared if she could. She wasn’t a hundred percent certain where she was running, but she sensed the rounds were walking north to south and she wanted to make sure she went east or west. An ancient dumpster beckoned only twenty meters away, perhaps more a psychological comfort than cover capable of stopping mortar fragments, but she’d take what she could get.
The next round detonated nearly fifty meters away, down the street, sending sprays of smoke and debris into air thick with moisture, but she and Ramirez were already behind cover, ducking amidst shredded truck tires clinging loosely to rusting wheels. She still couldn’t hear anything, but she could imagine the screams. People were running headlong through the smoke, some pushing carts with all they owned in front of them, more afraid of losing the little they had than of losing their lives. Others carried children on their shoulders or pushed them ahead, mouths open, yelling in fright and desperation and ultimately, futility. The only home they knew, as dank and hopeless as it might be, was being torn apart around them.
Welcome to the club.
Roach remembered her sidearm with one heartbeat and Fuller and Jenny with the next, trying to pull the gun out while she tried to see back through the billowing, dark clouds rolling off the ruins of the fast food restaurant, tried to figure out where the other two had gone.
“I dropped my gun!” Ramirez was yelling it in her ear and she could still barely hear it over the ringing.
Damn, this shit is loud outside of a mech cockpit.
“What do you want me to do about it?” she snapped at him, not sure whether he’d hear it or not. “I’m not giving you mine!”
She had a feeling she was going to need it. This wasn’t a random attack—she didn’t believe in that sort of coincidence. Fuller might have been confident this Jenny wouldn’t betray them, but someone had been after them, specifically, and she doubted they were going to give up after a few mortar rounds.
“Keep your eyes open, Hector,” she yelled, trying to make sure he heard this time. Her words sounded muted in her ears, abused by the concussion of the mortar rounds. “Watch behind us.”
Nothing through the swirling smoke, not yet. The wind was catching it, wafting it across the street toward the dumpster along with the smell of cordite and ozone and just a hint of burning human refuse. Had there been anyone inside the building? The thought nagged at her. She couldn’t dismiss these people as quickly as Jenny had. Yes, they could have risked leaving, tried to make it to one of the government refugee camps and been resettled farther west, but taking to the roads on foot, unarmed was nearly as big of a risk as sitting in the stew of pollution and radiation Norfolk had become.
Ramirez was trying to say something, but she couldn’t make it out. He shoved at her shoulder and she turned, ready to snap at him to keep his hands to himself, but she saw he was pointing frantically down the street toward the roadblock. There were six of them that she could see, and they weren’t trying to be stealthy, weren’t hiding in the shadows or even staying to the sides of the streets under cover. They just walked along the broken pavement, assault rifles held at low port, walking slowly and steadily, visored helmets scanning back and forth.
They know who they’re dealing with and they’re not afraid of us one bit.
And maybe they shouldn’t be. None of them was an infantry soldier, none were used to fighting dismounted and between the three of them, they had exactly two handguns, and that was if Fuller was even still alive. These guys wore body armor and helmets, their camouflage an older Russian pattern and their weapons old AK28’s, which could have made them Spetsnaz, Naval Infantry or just mercenaries who’d bought the equipment surplus.
We have to get back to the truck and get the hell out of here.
She grabbed Ramirez’s arm and ran, slipping between the dumpster and a two-meter-tall stack of tires and nearly tripping over debris pi
led around them. She thought hard at the soldiers behind her, urging them to see her and Ramirez as just another couple of refugees running away in a panic, not to notice their flight suits or the gun in her hand. There was smoke, haze, they were a good thirty or forty meters away…they might not notice.
The petulant chatter of a 5.45mm assault rifle dashed those hopes, punching through both sides of the dumpster just as she and Ramirez cleared its shadow. Jacketed slugs ricocheted off the street only meters to her right and she ducked reflexively and ran harder, aiming for the crumbling hulk of what had once been a garbage truck. It had slammed into a power pole decades ago and only a stump and the rusted-through remains of a dent were left as a monument to the accident, but the metal looked thicker than the old dumpster and it was the closest thing to cover she could find.
She thought she’d make it, thought the dumpster and the smoke and the running squatters would distract the soldiers just enough. The running squatters were the downfall of those hopes, a particular wide-eyed, wild-haired teenage girl who had been crouching in the shadows of a makeshift tent, plastic tarps stretched over a pair of traffic barriers. She’d dashed out as the gunfire grew closer, deciding to run just a moment too late and too frightened to look where she was going.
The girl slammed into Roach’s right shoulder, bowling her over and taking them both to the ground in a tangle of limbs. Ramirez’s arm slipped out of her hand and she barely held onto the gun, twisting around to take the impact on her left shoulder. Roach tried to pull away from the girl but she was clinging with desperate strength, her greasy hair falling across Roach’s face, the air thick with the stench of sweat and unwashed grime.
The soldiers were advancing, skirting around the dumpster, only thirty meters away. Ramirez stood there, his face frozen with indecision, looking like he very much wanted to run but was unwilling to leave her, which she thought was commendable but incredibly stupid. Roach pushed the girl away long enough to bring her pistol around, hoping she could at least get a shot in before they mowed her and Ramirez down, not that the handgun rounds would even penetrate the Russian body armor…
There was a sound. She knew her hearing was returning because she made out the deep-throated “thunk-thunk-thunk” from off to her right and behind her. Three smoke trails traced arcs overhead and landed in the midst of the enemy soldiers, erupting with a kettle-drum concussion, filling the air with brief flares of explosive white and roiling billows of black smoke. When it cleared, two of the soldiers were running, three more were writhing on the pavement, their camouflage turned from grey and green to scorch-black and blood red, limbs blown off or hanging by bits of flesh. One was just gone, nothing left of him she could identify.
Ramirez had hit the ground, at least a half-second too late but still covering his head instinctively, and she saw blood stains on his flight suit. She wondered if he’d been hit, but then she saw more droplets in his hair and realized he’d been splattered by the remains of the soldier who’d exploded.
Roach looked around, pushing away again from the girl, who’d fallen quiet in shock from the explosions, and saw two figures walking through the smoke from the mortar blasts. She brought up her pistol, thinking it was more of the soldiers, but these people weren’t wearing helmets. It was only another second before she recognized them as Fuller and Jenny. The older woman was holding the drum-fed weapon at the ready, a thin wisp of smoke curling away from its barrel. Roach had assumed it was a shotgun, but it was obviously a mini-grenade launcher.
“Where the hell can I get one of those?” she asked, picking herself up off the ground.
“We hang around here much longer,” Jenny snapped, unamused, “and you can salvage it off my dead body. We need to go.”
Fuller said nothing, limping as he tried to keep up with her, the big, metal .45 filling his right hand. He and Jenny were upright and walking, but looked a bit worse for wear from the mortar blast. Fuller was bleeding from a cut above his right eyebrow, his clothes ripped and covered in soot and dust, while the right sleeve of Jenny’s cloth jacket was shredded between elbow and shoulder, blood seeping through her shirt sleeve from a shrapnel wound beneath it.
Too damned close.
“Our truck is that way,” Roach said, pointing back toward the roadblock. “Unless your vehicle is closer?”
“My vehicle was an electric motorcycle,” Jenny told her, tone somewhere between annoyed and bitter. “And it was behind the damned fried chicken joint.” She pointed back at the collapsed and burning building. “And I ain’t walking out of here, so shag your tiny little ass back to that truck and I’ll cover you from back here and let you spring any ambushes them sorry-assed excuses for mercenaries left behind for us.”
“I lost my gun,” Ramirez whined, finally getting back up to his feet, the front of his flight suit stained by whatever filth had been on the street. The teenaged girl was gone, presumably to whatever new hole the refugees had found to crawl into.
“Shut up, Hector,” she told him, waving forward. “Let’s get out of here while we still can.” She fixed Jenny with a final, hard glance before setting off for the truck. “It’s a long drive back to our base. I expect we’ll have a lot to talk about.”
Chapter Eleven
“I never said I was going to help you,” Jenny reminded her, sullen and taciturn in the front passenger’s seat beside Roach. “As a matter of fact, I think I said in no uncertain terms I was not going to help you. And I don’t want to go back to whatever hole in the wall you’re calling a base. You can drop me off in the Fry.”
“Jenny,” Fuller said quietly from the back seat, where he’d gone without protest, which was more than she could say for Ramirez, “I’m afraid we may be past that. You keep a low profile, but you ain’t exactly a state secret. People know who you are, and now the wrong people know you’ve been seen with us.”
Roach wanted to speak up, wanted to get tough with the woman and tell her she was going to share what she knew with them or get a boot in the ass, but Fuller knew her better so she stayed silent and drove. The road back through Norfolk to the old Coast Guard base was rough and broken, jammed with old cars and downed cell towers in places, treacherous even in good weather, and this wasn’t, and it was better she kept her full concentration on it.
“I should’ve just deleted your damned message,” Jenny grumbled, her voice strained. Roach didn’t know how much of that was frustration from her situation and how much was pain from the shrapnel wound. Fuller had dressed it in the truck with the small field medical kit they kept in the glove compartment, but it needed stitches. “Should’ve known you were nothing but trouble.”
“To be fair, darlin’,” Fuller said, “we didn’t know what we were dealing with. And we still don’t. Given that you’re sort of stuck with us now, maybe you should fill us in on what you know.”
Jenny said nothing for several seconds, the silence broken only by the thump of the tires on ruts in the road and the squeak of the truck’s suspension. Roach felt like turning on the radio and playing some music from her phone, but she just drove and waited patiently. Patience was not an easy thing for her and she was feeling quite proud of herself.
“The guy you showed me,” Jenny finally broke the silence, “used to be a Russian operative. I don’t know what his real name is, but everyone called him Prizrak.”
“Used to be?” Roach interrupted. Jenny glared at her, but she shrugged it off. “You mean he doesn’t work for the Russians?”
“It’s complicated. What’s happening isn’t quite as straightforward as the Department of Defense tells you. This isn’t as much an invasion by another country’s army so much as it is different factions in the Russian government trying to seize strategic areas to prove they should be the ones in charge. Which means what we’ve wound up with is the equivalent of a gangland turf war.”
“Does that make us the cops?” Ramirez wondered from the back seat. “I’ve never liked cops.”
“You’re not much o
f a cop,” Roach said scathingly. “You can’t even hold onto your damned gun.”
“Regardless,” Jenny went on, an edge of annoyance in her voice at the interruption, “a lot of FSB agents and Spetsnaz operators who’re sent over here on what are ostensibly government missions wind up going into business for themselves. I don’t know for certain that’s what this Prizrak did, but it’s as good a possibility as any, because he’s definitely in it for himself now.”
“He’s in what for himself?” Roach asked her. “What does he want if he’s not working for the Russians?”
“He sometimes works for the Russians,” Jenny corrected her, “but like a contractor. He has a lot of former FSB and Spetsnaz working for him, too. He’s a fixer, goes in and cleans out the opposition for drug cartels, weapons traffickers, whoever has the money. I’ve heard he even works for the US government if the price is right.”
“If he’s in it for the money,” Ramirez said, “what does he want with Nate?”
“It’s not just money. He’s been building a power base of his own, from what everyone says. The money’s just a tool. He’s getting ready to make a play for something.”
“Okay,” Fuller said, “at least that gives us some idea who we’re dealing with, if not the exact reason why. But why does this Prizrak guy look just like Robert Franklin?”
“Beats the hell out of me. I haven’t heard that name in twenty years.” She shut up again for long seconds, staring out the window at the ruins of an old strip mall, burned down to the foundations. “I can tell you where to find him.”
Roach’s head snapped around and she had to remind herself to keep her eyes on what was left of the road.
“You know where he is?” she demanded.
“I ain’t doing you any favors telling you,” Jenny warned her. “This guy is too much for you to handle.”