Fulcrum: V Plague Book 12

by Dirk Patton

  Or the assault of females that must have raged through the stranded people. There were a lot of blood stains on the tent fabric, the cars’ sheet metal, and in numerous cases the inside of vehicle windows. There were a lot of bodies, many of them savagely dismembered. And the ripe smell of decomposition was heavy in the air, even with the stiff, desert breeze.

  Just like in the Last Stop diner, the scene was made even more surreal by the complete absence of flies. I had convinced myself they hadn’t been present in the diner because they couldn’t get inside, but there was nothing here to stop them. Glancing skyward, I looked for vultures. None to be seen. That alone was disturbing, even more so since there was a veritable banquet just waiting for them.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” Rachel said as she stared at a pile of corpses huddled against the side of a sedan.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “The state of decomposition. If these people were killed fairly soon after the attack, months ago, the bodies should be much farther gone.”

  “How much farther?”

  “A lot, especially considering we just went through a summer. It’s very hot and dry here. Right?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “So, maybe that explains it, but it feels… I don’t know. Off.”

  “You know what else is wrong?” I asked.

  Rachel shook her head after thinking about my question for several seconds.

  “No scavengers. No insects. They should be carpeted with flies. Vultures and crows should have been at them. Rats. This is a feast for all of them. Coyotes, too, for that matter.”

  “But there’s coyotes around. We heard them!” Tiffany protested.

  “We did,” I said, nodding. “And I don’t get it. They’ll eat anything. Don’t understand why they’d pass this up.”

  “The virus,” Rachel said. “Maybe the bodies are contaminated, and the coyotes can smell it? The same way Dog reacts to an infected.”

  “Maybe,” I said, unconvinced. “But where are the insects? Maybe that’s what feels off. The hot and dry environment slowed decomposition, and there weren’t any scavengers feeding on the corpses. It is off.”

  We fell silent at that point, each of us lost in our own thoughts. I circled the lot once, at idle. There was still nothing that caused me any concern. Well, undue concern. The whole damn scene was a gut twisting reminder of what had happened to the world. Pulling to a stop, I took a final look around, then shut off the rumbling engine.

  The quiet was startling at first after over an hour of the constant barrage of harsh noise. Now we were left with the moaning wind and the hiss of sand being pushed across the asphalt. Several tents were partially torn loose and flapped in the breeze, their ends occasionally snapping hard enough to sound vaguely like gunfire.

  “OK,” I said. “We’re all getting out, and we’re staying close together. People were living in their cars, and that probably means a lot of them will have the keys inside. I hope. You two keep watch on our flanks and rear. I’m going to look for anything that will start after sitting in the heat all summer, and hopefully it’ll have enough gas to get us to Phoenix.”

  Rachel nodded and performed a quick check of her rifle to make sure it was ready to go. After a moment, Tiffany did the same thing. I remembered that she was dangerously low on ammo, and handed her one of my full magazines. Then I rethought things and told her to swap rifles with me.

  “Why?” She asked.

  Despite questioning my request, she was already working the sling over her head.

  “You’re on watch. If you need to fire, I’d rather you have a weapon with a suppressor so we don’t alert the entire town to our presence. I’ll take yours. I’m going to be busy checking cars, so if there’s more infected than you two can handle, it won’t matter much if I fire an unsuppressed rifle.”

  She nodded as we traded weapons. Another slow look around and I popped the driver’s door open. Damn, it was a long way down without a ladder. Twisting around, I swung my feet out into space and, tightly gripping the seat harness, lowered myself until I could drop without worrying about injuring an ankle.

  Immediately, I held up a clenched fist, telling Rachel to stay in place as I scanned a full 360 degrees with the rifle. Still quiet as a tomb. I spun another slow circle, then looked up. I expected to see Rachel staring down at me, but movement in the bed of the truck caught my eye. Stepping back, I could see both girls standing back to back, keeping watch. Dog hung his head over the side, panting as he watched me.

  OK, so I don’t have the market cornered when it comes to good ideas. With the height of the monster truck they had a commanding view of our surroundings, with the added advantage of it not being easy for even a female to reach them. I decided to leave them where they were, but I wanted Dog’s nose and ears with me.

  There was no easy way to do this, so I had Rachel lower the tailgate as I came to stand below it. Dog walked to the edge and looked down, then whined and stepped back. I called him, but he wasn’t stupid. It was a long way to the hard pavement below. But, finally, between my coaxing and some urging from Rachel, we got him to make the leap.

  I caught him in my arms and can’t really say how I managed to stay on my feet. He weighs more than a hundred pounds and hit me solidly in the chest. I staggered back several steps, caught my balance and squatted to put him on his feet. He looked at me for a beat, then trotted to the truck’s rear tire and lifted his leg.

  “You would have left me down here by myself if you didn’t need to take a piss,” I said to him when he was finished.

  He snorted, ignored me, and raised his nose to test the wind. It was coming from the west, out of the open desert, and he didn’t detect anything that caused him to growl. That was good, but the town was downwind from our location and could be full of infected that he couldn’t smell.

  29

  Nearly an hour later we pulled out of the parking lot in our newly acquired vehicle. It was a Chevy Tahoe, and Dog was taking full advantage of the roomy back seat. Stretched out on his back, he had his head resting in Tiffany’s lap while she gently rubbed his belly.

  It had taken some effort to find the SUV. The first challenge had been to locate a vehicle that didn’t have a corpse inside, or the interior wasn’t washed in blood. Then I had to find one with keys in the ignition. The alternative was to start searching the dead, but I’m not too keen on sticking my hands in the pockets of a body that has been rotting for a few weeks.

  Fortunately, I found the Tahoe without too much difficulty. To my great surprise, the engine had turned over and started easily. But the gas gauge didn’t deliver the same good news. The needle was below the big, red E, and a chime warning of low fuel began sounding as soon as I started the vehicle.

  Putting Dog inside, I cut away a couple of tents that were secured to the bumpers, then climbed behind the wheel. There were a lot of corpses in the area, and I didn’t have any option other than to drive over them. I wasn’t happy about it, but I got it done and drove to park next to the monster truck.

  Shutting off the engine, I told Rachel and Tiffany to stay put while Dog and I went in search of a hose. The best option I had was to siphon gas out of the other vehicles to fill the Tahoe, and I planned to start by emptying the truck’s tank into my new ride.

  It took longer to find a hose than it had to procure the SUV, but I finally located one. I started by draining the truck, then drove from vehicle to vehicle to continue the fueling. It was a slow process as the Tahoe’s tank was higher than most of the other vehicles to which I could get close enough to siphon.

  This meant I had to stop what I was doing and go find something that could be put on the ground that I could drain gas into. Finally, I hit the jackpot when I came across a pickup with a trailer that held four ATVs. Four, red plastic gas cans were strapped down in its bed.

  Using them, I was able to work much faster and soon had put as much gas into the Tahoe as it would take. Filling the cans, I stacke
d them on the carpeted floor behind the rear seat and drove back to the monster truck. Parking beneath the open tailgate, I got on the roof and helped Rachel and Tiffany climb down.

  The Tahoe was running, but it sounded like shit. Modern gasoline, with all of the environmentally mandated additives, doesn’t store well. It will quickly start losing its octane, which is simply the measure of how much compression a fuel can withstand before igniting. The higher the octane rating, the less likely the fuel is going to pre-ignite at higher pressures and damage an engine. That’s why performance cars with higher compression engines require higher octane fuel.

  So, as the fuel we were burning had sat for several months, it had degraded and was igniting much too early for the Tahoe’s engine. This throws off the delicate timing balance of when valves open and close, and will destroy the engine. Hopefully that wouldn’t happen before we got where we were going.

  Now, we were on I-40, heading east, the engine making a horrible pinging sound as it labored with the old fuel. It wouldn’t be long before we’d reach the turnoff for the highway that headed down to Phoenix. There were only a few small towns to go through, and I was slightly optimistic that we were finally going to start making good time.

  The day had warmed up, the sun coming through the windows almost hot on my skin. Rachel was apparently feeling the heat, too. She adjusted the air conditioning and leaned back in the leather seat.

  “Maybe we should just keep going in this,” she said.

  “Not if we can get a Humvee. Or better,” I said.

  “What’s wrong with this? Besides the noise from the engine?”

  “It’s made for soccer moms. That’s what’s wrong with it,” I said. “The windows are regular glass and the sheet metal wouldn’t even stop a pellet rifle. We don’t know what’s ahead. And it may decide to die on us at a really inconvenient time. Besides, if we can get onto the air base, there're a few other things we lost that I’d like to replace.”

  Rachel thought about what I said.

  “And what if we get another Hummer and a Russian plane spots us? Didn’t you say they probably attacked the dam because it was military vehicles that were moving?”

  I thought about that for a moment. It’s always annoying when someone is right, and they’re right because they’re using your logic against you.

  “We’ll see what we find when we get there,” I finally conceded.

  “What about an octane booster?” Tiffany suddenly asked from the back seat. “Pretty much any auto parts store, or even a truck stop, should have some bottles of it.”

  I looked at her in the mirror and shook my head.

  “What?”

  “You’re just not what I remember teenaged girls being,” I said with a smile.

  “I’m 20,” she said, sounding slightly offended. “And besides, why the hell wouldn’t I know this stuff?”

  I wasn’t about to touch that one with a ten-foot pole. She glared at me for a few seconds before her face split open into a big smile.

  “I’m just screwing with you,” she said. “Caleb’s into cars, big time. He’s got this Honda he built into a street racer and it takes really high octane fuel or it won’t run. He can either buy racing gas for ten bucks a gallon, or regular gas and throw in some bottles of octane booster. It’s not perfect, but it will work if you don’t have a lot of money.”

  I ignored the smile on Rachel’s face and kept my mouth shut. Hitting the brakes, I turned hard for an off-ramp. There was another truck stop at the exit, and I was willing to try Tiffany’s suggestion.

  The scene was mostly identical to where we’d stopped and changed to the Tahoe. A parking lot full of vehicles that had been lived in. And died in. There still weren’t any infected, and within a few minutes I’d found a whole case of octane booster and added a couple of bottles to the tank. Tossing the rest into the cargo area, I got us back on the freeway. Within a few miles, the pinging from the engine stopped.

  I looked at Tiffany in the mirror and she smiled at me, then rested her head on the seatback. Soon, Dog was snoring like a wood chipper. When I looked around, Tiffany was sound asleep with her hand still on his belly. I started to say something to Rachel, remaining silent when I saw that her head was tilted to the side, eyes closed and lips parted as she dozed.

  Other than occasional drifts of sand, the freeway was clear. I pushed our speed close to 100, not comfortable going any faster in a high-profile vehicle. We had quickly left Kingman behind, and I hadn’t seen any sign of infected or survivors.

  The wind picked up as I drove, blowing hard enough to occasionally shove the Tahoe around. It also brought dust with it, reducing visibility, but not by enough to cause a problem. Besides, I’d lived in Arizona for a lot of years and was used to driving in dust storms.

  Our turn came quicker than I remembered, but then I’d never driven this route at nearly 100 miles an hour. Slowing to make the transition, I pushed our speed back up as soon as we were on the new highway. The road was every bit as rough as I remembered, but the softly sprung SUV made for a comfortable ride.

  The miles, and a few towns, rolled by quickly. I slowed for each outpost of civilization, not wanting to be blasting through at a high rate of speed and have an infected suddenly stumble into my path. But as we progressed, and drew closer to the Phoenix metropolitan area, I had yet to see a single infected. I hoped it would be the same in the city.

  The Phoenix area, prior to the attacks, was home to about five million people. Even with the Russians using their sound control to attract and direct the infected, I’d learned from experience that it wasn’t effective on all of them. Too many cities that had supposedly been emptied still had large contingents, just waiting for a warm meal.

  I knew where Luke Air Force Base was, and at one time it had been well removed from any population. But Phoenix and its surrounding cities had experienced explosive growth over the past couple of decades. Now, Luke was more of a suburban air base than one out in the desert. That meant a higher probability that we’d encounter infected as we approached. Finally reaching the first, far-flung edge of town, I dropped our speed to navigate around abandoned vehicles and the occasional downed utility pole.

  Phoenix sits in a massive valley, surrounded by desert mountains, and we were coming into the extreme northwest corner. The thought went through my head that I should go to my house. Years ago, Katie had claimed a shelf in my large gun safe, filling it with things like our passports, marriage license and stacks upon stacks of photos. I knew our house had burned, but that safe had cost me an arm and a leg and was rated as fireproof for up to three hours. Those pictures were probably still in it, undamaged, and I knew there were a lot of Katie.

  “You OK?”

  Rachel’s voice startled me. The last time I’d checked on her, she’d been sound asleep. I hadn’t realized she’d woken up.

  “Fine,” I said. “Just thinking about Katie.”

  She reached over and gently took my hand.

  “What were you thinking?”

  I took a deep breath, trying to get my emotions under control.

  “Wish I could go by my house and find a photo of her,” I finally said.

  “Then let’s do that,” Rachel replied immediately.

  “No time,” I said. “It’s all the way on the far side of the city. Would probably take at least 90 minutes to get there, if there were no problems on the way, then we’d have to backtrack the same amount.”

  She was quiet for a few moments, and I became aware that she was intently watching me.

  “What?”

  “You’ll probably never have another opportunity,” she said.

  I nodded. She was right. But the round trip drive and time spent while we were there would easily add four hours to our trip. Possibly much more if we ran into infected or survivors. That was time the pilot didn’t have. His life was worth more than a photo of my dead wife.

  “Maybe someday,” I said, making my decision. “Right now, the pil
ot is our priority.”

  Rachel squeezed my hand and didn’t say anything else. She continued to surprise me as I kept waiting for her to press the issue and want to have a discussion about what the future might or might not hold for us. I was thankful she hadn’t done that because I didn’t have any answers for her. There wasn’t much I could think about until after I’d stared into Barinov’s eyes and watched the life depart his body. Slowly and painfully.

  I headed deeper into the city, then turned south on one of the giant freeways that looped around the metro area. We were now moving no more than 30 miles an hour, driving a slalom through the wrecked and burned out cars that had been left behind. More often than not, I had to drive in the median to pass.

  Some time later, I slowed even more for the exit to Luke Air Force Base. It was to our right, but the sight out of the left side windows drew my attention. The giant enclosed stadium where the Arizona Cardinals football team had played. It had burned, or partially burned, and the roof and most of one of the sides had collapsed inwards onto the field.

  In the acres of parking lots that surrounded it, thousands of cars baked in the midday sun. There were half a dozen large trucks with FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) painted on the sides, a veritable forest of tents surrounding them. Stepping on the brakes, I came to a stop on the elevated ramp and stared. Nothing moved. There was no sign of life, infected or otherwise.

  “Think it’s going to be like what we ran across in Kingman?” Rachel asked.

  “Maybe. Too far away to tell.”

  Shaking my head, I accelerated down the ramp and turned onto the broad street that would take us to the air base. From the back seat, I heard Tiffany yawn, then a moment later Dog snorted before letting out with a sneeze so violent he startled her. She squealed in surprise, then began cooing to him and rubbing his head. I could see him watching me in the mirror as he soaked up her attention. Any second, I expected him to smile and wink.

  30

  SEAL Commander Teller Sam sat back and thought about the updated plan that had just been presented to him. The North Carolina’s XO, Lieutenant Commander Adrienne Cable, watched him expectantly, even though she knew it was a good plan. She’d run it by the skipper first, and with his blessing had sought out the SEAL to brief him.