by Kirk Allmond
Inside that truck, he found Maya, Holly, and two soldiers. The two girls looked frightened, and Maya had tears streaming down her face as she held on to Holly's hand, but she made no noise. Renee had taught her to be quiet at all costs, and it tore Victor's heart out of his chest to see his little four-year-old niece forced to be so brave. Lightfoot had Victor's people spread out throughout the convoy, something Victor would have done too. Victor moved forward again, this time into a transport that reminded him of a bus.
None of Victor's friends was on the bus. The squad of shooters and the Hulk Squad were sitting in orderly rows. None of them was talking; they sat in silence, so he moved forward one more time, landing in the back of a truck with Max and Reggie. "Hi, Dad," Max whispered.
"Hi, Max. Are you okay?" Victor whispered.
"I'm okay, but they hit Mister Walton in the mouth when he wouldn't let them take me."
Vic looked over at Reggie. He looked hurt, but he was smiling at Victor. "I'll be okay," he said, patting Max on the leg.
"I gotta go, buddy. But I'm going to get us out of here, okay?" Victor held up his hand, pinky, index, and thumb out, the sign for “I love you.” Max returned the sign and smiled before Victor's ghost disappeared and re-appeared in the next truck up the line.
He could see two more trucks in front of him. He wasn't learning much except that everyone appeared to be all right. The more he thought about it, the less he wanted to end up in the truck with three guys with roughly the same abilities he had. They would probably be in the truck with the general. Tookes doubted Lightfoot was ever very far from them. He blinked forward one more time into a transport truck like the one his body was in. There were wooden benches lining the edges and a thick camouflage canvas tarp. The back had more of the people that had surrounded them outside the garage.
In the cab portion of the truck, he found what he was looking for. Shelton was sitting in the passenger seat; a very average-looking soldier was driving.
"He won't join us," Shelton was saying when Tookes stuck his head through the cab. "He is stubborn, and he is resourceful. We should negotiate with him. I told Lightfoot this show of force wouldn't bring Tookes in line."
"The General has kept us all alive and comfortable since all this went down. He takes care of his men. General Lightfoot is the best shot we have at turning this thing around," said Captain Average.
"We killed a quarter of a million zombies back in Atlanta, and Tookes had just three immunes with him. Hell, he killed Laura by himself while protecting his friends. If Lightfoot isn't careful, he's going to get us all killed. I didn't set all this up just to get killed," said Shelton.
"Why did you set all this up then?" asked the driver.
"My wife is dead. There aren't very many unattached women around," said Corbin. "Lightfoot offered me the pick of all the women he has, a thousand acres of land surrounded by a concrete wall, a solar-powered house, and enough food and seeds to start a farm. Who could turn that down? I've been living in a barn loft with two hundred people for the last two months, or I've been driving that fucking train on this suicide mission across the country. I want to live, and Lightfoot offered me a pretty comfortable life."
Tookes returned to his body and opened his eyes. The rest of the color drained from them as Tookes sat there seething with anger. Marshall looked across the dimly lit truck and arched an eyebrow.
Victor risked one thought. He sent it to the whole team. “Shelton betrayed us.”
The man sitting at the back of the truck held his hand to his ear and then stood up half bent over in the short truck. He smashed his rifle stock into Victor's cheek. "No talking. Don't even think to each other," he said as Victor lost consciousness.
None of them saw the transport bus peel off from the group and slow down while the rest of the convoy drove up onto the overpass and merged onto I30.
Chapter 14
Fort Hood
Renee watched the middle bus peel off from the group as they passed by her position. She was hiding behind a rock, despite being invisible. It felt good for her to have something solid between her and those looking for her.
The bus pulled off and stopped at the edge of the road. A dozen men piled out. They have to be looking for me. How do they know I'm here? Renee thought as she ran down the on-ramp that lead away from the bus and the men.
She ran as hard as she could, farther than she'd ever run in one sprint before, and she wasn't catching up to the bus. Her legs were on fire. Her babies were being taken away from her. Every second she ran, she concentrated on the need to be faster. Her legs pumped; her feet pounded the asphalt highway. Faster. She focused and willed her legs to move. Holly and Maya were alone in a truck with strange men who were taking them away from her. Faster.
As she ran, she clutched her kitchen knife in her hand. It was the same one she'd pulled from the Chinese restaurant. Renee looked up just in time to see the convoy of military vehicles move around a curve. She was slowly gaining on them, but she could feel herself tiring. She had to go faster. She focused on the sound of her feet hitting the pavement, concentrated on shortening the time between each of her feet hitting the ground. Faster.
As she ran, something Victor said to her years earlier came to mind. She and Victor had been running together, miles from home, and she was lagging behind. "Keep up, Ren," he'd said, his breath ragged.
"I can't!" she gasped. “My side hurts too much. I can't breathe."
"Do you know how I keep going?" he'd asked her as she tried in vain to catch him.
"No," was all she could reply.
"Never save anything for the trip home," he'd said.
She thought about those words as she ran. There is no trip home without my family. There is no home. And she ran faster.
The rear bumper of the trailing Humvee was just feet away. There was a spare tire in a cargo net attached to the angled trunk. Just a few feet to go. Her shins were almost touching the rear bumper, but she couldn't reach the cargo net. She ran along behind the truck, wondering how she was going to get on, feeling like her legs were going to fall off any second.
Never save anything for the trip home, she thought again as she coiled her legs under her and jumped for all she was worth. If she didn't make the jump, she knew she wouldn't have the strength to catch back up, plus rolling across the pavement at this speed would leave little skin on her body. She flew forward and caught the last bar of the mesh with one hand. Her knees smashed into the back bumper, just barely keeping her feet from dragging on the ground. Renee scrambled up onto the tire and rode the rest of the way to Fort Hood sitting on the back of the truck, invisible to everyone.
The trip was cold and miserable for Renee. She’d worked up a sweat chasing the trucks, but once she was riding on the back at sixty miles an hour, she quickly remembered that it was December. She hunkered down as much as she could, but after three hours of riding, she was shivering so badly she was afraid the soldiers would hear her teeth chattering. By the time the truck rolled to a stop at the Fort Hood gate, she couldn't feel her legs or her fingers. The gate was huge. There were six lanes leading in and out of the base. A huge garage had been built over the entire twelve-lane gate. The building had red clay tiles on the roof and was painted “desert tan” on the exterior. Only two of the lanes were operational, one in and one out. The rest dead-ended in a double-stack of concrete highway barriers one hundred feet from the building, funneling all the traffic down to the middle lane. There were ten gun turrets on the roof, and as the trucks pulled up, Renee saw that all ten were manned. Ten massive guns swiveled to point at the convoy.
The huge roll-up door opened. The lead truck pulled into the garage, and the door was closed. After several minutes, the large door was opened again. Each truck rolled into the garage, was inspected, and then rolled out the back door and into the military base.
As soon as the roll-up door opened for the last time, Renee jumped off the back of the truck and wobbled as she tried to run on her numb legs. She braced h
erself against the wall for a second before running to the other side of the room. She'd never used her abilities to this extent; she'd never been invisible for this long before. She had no idea if it would give out or be used up or if she could stay this way forever. In a few hours, she was going to need to go to sleep. She doubted she could stay invisible while she was asleep.
Better make the best of the time that I have, she decided and bolted out into the base. The fence ran for miles in either direction. Plenty of space to hide. Now to find the kids.
She flew off down the road, noticing in the fading evening light that the grounds of the base were all perfectly maintained. They were still mowing the grass, and the streets were swept clean. She passed two blocks of houses that each had a trashcan out by the street. They were all the same galvanized metal cans, the lids tightly fitted to the top. Not a single can was overflowing or too full to put the lid on.
Renee followed the signs to the Soldier Readiness Processing Center. It was the first building she came to and seemed like a logical place to start. She slid along the glass windows at the front, peering inside. There were dozens of men in there doing normal looking things. They all wore camouflage uniforms, and all looked very similar. Behind her, the convoy made its way down Battalion Avenue, past her position. The convoy stopped two blocks down in front of a huge apartment complex. I guess it’s a dormitory or barracks, since this is a military base.
She watched her family from a block away. They were all walked into the barracks, one vehicle at a time. Maya held Holly's hand as the men herded her into the building. None of them seemed injured, and she knew where they were. It wasn’t much, but she at least felt she could breathe a little easier. It was time for her to put the first phase of her plan into action.
She ran block after block until she found the building labeled Clothing Exchange. There was just one soldier in there, sitting behind a desk. He appeared to be looking at a computer screen that was just to the left of rack after rack of combat uniforms. They had every color of camouflage, even jet black. Perfect, thought Renee as she pushed the door open just enough to quickly slide sideways through. The door chime went off, and the soldier looked up. He walked to the front door and opened it, looking around outside.
"Who's there?" he asked.
Renee moved quickly back towards the solid black BDU's, selecting a pair of size small pants and shirt. She removed the pants from the shelf and pulled them in close to her body, where they disappeared. When she pulled the shirt from the hanging rack, the hanger scraped very loudly. The soldier raised his rifle and pointed it directly at the sound. "Don't move, dude. I can see you," he said. "Stealing is a capital offense, even for you MP's. Lightfoot will give me two nights in the ladies’ dorm for shooting an invisible thief. I should get a refund for my last trip after that fucking blonde fought the whole time I was fucking her. Fucking bitch bit my shoulder so hard she drew blood.”
Renee thought about what he said. Lightfoot must be using people with her abilities as police. He called her dude, which gave her a solid clue that he couldn't actually see her or he would have called her “ma'am” or “lady.” And there was a women's dorm, and Lightfoot was passing out visits as rewards. Thinking back on it, she hadn’t seen a single female soldier since she arrived on the base. There were no women in the group that had taken her family. She felt her stomach drop as she put the lack of women serving under Lightfoot and the ladies' dorm together.
Renee crept up on the rapist-soldier slowly, soundlessly moving around behind him. As she pressed the long blade against his throat, she said, “I’m not a dude.” The kitchen knife severed his left carotid artery, all the way through his windpipe, and through the right carotid artery. Renee was out the door and half a block away in the pitch black of night before the corpse hit the ground.
For the first time since she got off the train, Renee allowed herself to be visible behind a gigantic house way back in the residential section. There was a pool, a pool house, and a three-car garage in the back yard, giving it a lot of privacy. After six blocks of abandoned houses, she felt safe enough to settle on this one. The house wasn't the biggest or the most luxurious on the street, and it wasn't the most obscure. It only took a couple minutes of poking around the front door area to find the key to the front door. She lifted the doormat in front of the door and poked through the planters on either side before she spied the fake stone hide-a-key in the shrubs.
Renee unlocked the front door and let herself in, invisible again. She was certain the houses would have been cleared, but she didn't want to risk running into a family of undead. Slowly, the invisible mother crept through the dark house looking for any sign of the undead and any weapons she might find. Satisfied that it was clear, she became visible again and turned on her small flashlight.
In the master bedroom, she found a display rack with two KA-BAR knives displayed over a brass plaque memorializing “Specialist Roger Jennsen” who died in 1991 in Iraq. Under the two knives was a blue and green shield with a lightning bolt in the middle and the word “RANGER” printed under it.
"Thank you for your service," Renee said, pulling the pair of knives down. She tested the edges with her thumb and found them to be razor sharp. Next, she stripped out of her civilian clothes and put on the black ACU's. She unscrewed the light bulbs from the lamps in the bedside table and wrapped them up in a towel. A quick blow from the handle of her new knife smashed the bulbs. She rolled up the long rug in the hallways, sprinkled the glass on the hardwood floor outside the bedroom door, and replaced the rug. Anyone sneaking up on her would crunch the glass, giving her enough time to hide.
Before she climbed into the huge king-sized bed, she locked the bedroom door and opened the window facing the back of the house. Renee removed the screen and slid it under the bed, giving her an easy escape route.
Tomorrow, I'll start figuring out how things work around here and learn the lay of the land, she thought as she clicked her flashlight off and slipped it into the cargo pocket of her pants. Until then, she was as safe as she could be and ready to get some sleep. She wanted to get moving before daylight. “I love you, Maya. I love you, Holly,” she said in a whisper before falling into a light sleep.
Chapter 15
Intelligence Gathering
Renee's night passed uneventfully. The alarm on her watch woke her at a quarter to five in the morning. With so much to do, she rolled out of bed quickly, ran her fingers through her short blonde hair, and dug around in her pack for a power bar. She ate quickly and drank a cup of the stale water left in the tank of the commode.
The woman in black locked the front door behind her and slipped the key into her pocket before heading out into the inky black darkness to look for the parade grounds. She had no real idea where to start, but if this was an active military operation, it seemed likely that there would be some activity there first thing in the morning. As Renee moved, she regretted killing the man in the clothing shop. She should have interrogated him. It wouldn't be long before they figured out what had happened. Lightfoot's men would discover the body and know that something was wrong, if they haven't already. "Sloppy, Ren," she said under her breath as she ran. For about forty-five minutes, she made ever-expanding circuits around the base, remembering key locations. It was 5:30 in the morning when she found the parade grounds. There were already four men standing around near the bandstand. Renee crept up into earshot and listened to their conversation.
"... thought Lightfoot was gonna kill him," said the first soldier. He was taller than the rest and had dark olive skin. "I can't believe he stood up to him like that with all of us standing there."
"Lightfoot will beat that fight out of him pretty quickly today," said the second man. All the men laughed.
The third man to speak had a thick southern accent. "It’s gonna be a helluva show, watchin’ them newbies get broke in good. They'll be beggin' to help any way they can."
The first man spoke again. "Harrison, I have a two
-night pass to the ladies’ dorm that says the shooter and the big man won't break for at least three days."
Southern accent must’ve been Harrison, because he said, "No way, that feller is huge. They's always the hardest to break, but even Rodney broke the second day. I'll take ‘yer bet, but y'all gonna be sad when I spent a week gettin’ fucked every way I've ever thought of."
The two men shook hands, sealing the deal. Then the fourth spoke. "I'm gonna go take a piss. You fucks bet away the best thing about this place if you want. I'm just gonna enjoy the show." He walked away towards a small building on the far side of the field, near the tree line.
A fury was building ever stronger inside Renee, and she realized that her hands had been balled into closed, tight fists throughout their entire conversation. She had to force herself to loosen her grip. There were deep marks in her palms from how tightly she had her hands clenched, and she was simmering with anger. These men were talking about breaking her brothers as if it was a sick sport. She hadn't heard any mention of the kids or any other children on the base, but the casual way they talked about raping the women on the base was almost more than she could handle. What sort of an army was this? As the man left to go to the bathroom, Renee followed silently, leaving the other three to continue their conversation. She had some questions for this soldier.
While the man was in the restroom, Renee opened up her pack and pulled out a small bundle of five-fifty cord and a pair of socks. She stood with her back to the wall just beside the door and waited for her quarry to finish his business. He made it two steps out of the latrine before he found a pair of dirty socks stuffed in his mouth, tied in place with the cord. In a blur, Renee wrapped the other end of the cord around his wrists and yanked his hands up to his neck. The man didn’t even have time to make a sound. She had him hog-tied on the ground before he even knew what was happening.