“That was too easy,” Andrea said once they got out of earshot of the three men.
Jesse nodded and drove without speaking, continuing until they reached the garage. He got out first. Kate sidled up next to him as he approached the roll up door. Grunting with effort, he yanked up on the metal door. It clattered and inched upward. Kate leaned against it and helped. But the door remained closed. He smiled at her willingness to assist him. Andrea and Eve joined them. Straining, they managed to ratchet the door upward on squealing tracks.
Jesse stepped through into the darkened garage first. Andrea followed, flicking on a lantern and handing it to him. He waved the light around the room until he saw his target vehicle, the giant Humvee. He’d heard it called Porcupine One, and given the many sharpened metal stakes welded to the sides, it was named appropriately. Looking at it with regret, he knew he should have taken it instead of the GTO earlier. The rubber tire marks from the GTO were still quite visible. They’d been so close. Maybe the second time would be a charm.
But where were the keys for the Humvee? Cory had found keys for the GTO, so they had to be somewhere nearby.
“Where are all the keys?” he asked.
Cory raised an arm and pointed then shuffled past on unsteady legs, shambling along like an old man as he headed to the Humvee.
“Load the goddamned thing,” Jesse said to the others and went where Cory had indicated.
He found a metal cabinet bolted to the wall and opened it. Keys rested on hooks inside. As he started looking for the keys to the Humvee, he realized he would not find them here. He’d been stupid. Maybe just too damn tired and not thinking clearly. He returned to the hulking black vehicle. Andrea and Kate had already loaded all their packs inside. He picked up his own, tossed it into the backseat, put an arm around Cory, and guided him into the passenger seat.
“So far so good,” Jesse said, climbing into the driver’s seat. “Now we only have to figure out how to get past all the gates,” he added sarcastically. “Once we get rolling in this beast, I don’t think they are going to just let us go. So, any idea how to get out of here?”
Andrea shrugged and shook her head. He looked at Eve. She had no answer either.
“Great,” he said. “Fail to plan, plan to fail.”
They piled into the Humvee and slammed the doors closed. He checked the dashboard trying to remember how to start the damn beast. Then he spotted the right knob and twisted it. He hadn’t driven a Humvee since his time in Iraq, but it was all coming back to him.
Exhaling, he checked the mirrors and adjusted them.
“What are we waiting for?” Eve asked from the backseat.
Jesse again glanced at the dash, tapping his fingers against it. He smiled at the fuel gauge. The needle hovered over F, for full.
“We going to get going?” Eve asked.
He said nothing. He kept tapping his fingers impatiently against the dashboard, waiting for the glow-plug indicator lamp to wink out. When it did, he turned the starter switch. An electric motor spun, the injectors fired, and the giant diesel engine roared to life.
Then everything went to hell.
Men began to file through the open doorway. Armed men. Men with clubs. Men with bats. Men with spears. Others with axes and bows.
Jesse gunned the engine and clunked the massive beast into gear.
“Everybody buckled up?” he asked, turning to make sure.
Taking his foot off the brake, he stepped on the accelerator. Two shadow-shapes painted by the moonlight near the exit leapt to grab a chain connected to the steel door. They pulled down, and the rollup door began to close.
Jesse kept his foot against the accelerator, pressing it harder and harder. The Humvee built speed, quickly closing the distance with the only exit.
But he knew the door would close before they got there. He was putting his faith in the vehicle’s ability to smash through the door and anything else daring to get in the way.
A man-shaped shadow was yelling and waving his arms, blocking the way. Another moved to stand in front of the closing door, but Jesse wasn’t about to swerve to avoid hitting either of them.
At the last possible second, the two men leapt out of the way. The Humvee smashed through the nearly closed door, impaling it on the vehicle’s forward-facing steel spikes, and wrapping it over the windshield.
“Can’t see,” Jesse said, swerving left and right. The flexible rollup door shifted back and forth across the windshield but did not come off. Going by memory alone, he made a left and punched the accelerator. The engine rattled, and the heavy vehicle sped away, flipping the steel door out of the way just enough to see through a small space at the bottom of the windshield. Over the sound of the engine, he heard yelling coming from outside. He ignored it, trying to recall just how far it was to the next turn. Ducking, he peeked through the tiny peephole at the bottom of the windshield.
Ten feet.
Five feet.
Turn.
He cranked the wheel hard to the right. With a loud bang, the truck came to an abrupt halt. The steel door flipped forward over the hood.
He had run them into the side of a building.
Jamming the Humvee into reverse, he backed away. The steel door flipped forward, mostly landing on the asphalt. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel and repositioned himself in his seat. People gathered behind the vehicle. Others came running out of buildings, though most stopped and seemed to reconsider when they saw the monstrosity they faced.
Flashlights clicked on. The crisscrossing beams lit the vehicle from multiple angles. After a quick search for the light switch, he kicked on the high beams, flooding the way ahead with light.
Briefly, he questioned the sanity of his decision. It was all playing out as it had before with the GTO, and that hadn’t ended well.
Ahead, as he got back on track, he spotted a group of men at the end of the alleyway. He headed straight for them and they scrambled to get out of the way. Some had stopped to hold their hands up to block the glare. A few stepped forward, raising spears, preparing to throw them.
Then they did.
The spears flew, arcing gracefully as they headed directly for the front windshield. Seeing a spear flying directly at him, Jesse had only a few milliseconds to react. He jerked the wheel. The Humvee swerved left. He jerked right to avoid steel poles sticking up out of the roadway. The tires bit and the truck leaned sideways. He held on through the chirping skid and felt two thumps, each coming from the men who’d thrown the spears. One splashed up against Cory’s window, and Jesse had a brief image of the man’s ruined face and an eyeball flattening against the glass. The other guy was impaled on the front like a human hood ornament, before being shredded and sucked underneath the charging vehicle.
Gunshots followed. Quick snaps of small arms fire. One shot cracked the rear window. Then a straggle-fire ricocheted off the left side of the vehicle. Jesse continued swerving. Orange muzzle flashes came at him from all directions like camera flashes. He drove on, hoping the Humvee would protect them from the fusillade of lead.
Fishtailing through corners, he followed the same path he had taken earlier with the GTO, knowing he could get the Humvee over the ramp. He also knew what was behind the gates in the arena. But he didn’t know much beyond that. He would just have to get them all there alive to find out.
Andrea was shouting directions from the backseat, but he tuned her out to focus on the way ahead. Two more left turns and he was back on the road that led to the ramp. As he closed on it, he noticed the ramp lay in ruins. It had collapsed against the side of the truck trailer where the GTO had plowed its way through. He hadn’t anticipated that. Still, it seemed like enough remained to get up and over through the gap made by the GTO.
Jamming his foot to the floorboard, he aimed straight at what little remained of the wooden structure.
“Hold on!” he yelled.
“No!” came a chorus of voices from the back seat. Out of the corner of his ey
e, he saw Cory bouncing in the seat next to him. But this time he’d been smart enough to buckle up.
The Humvee raced for the ramp. Jesse braced for impact, his fists white-knuckled on the wheel.
They hit the remains of the wooden platform. The change in direction slammed him down hard against the seat. The vehicle shot up what was left of the wooden ramp and plowed into the remains of the trailer.
Metal scraped metal in a cacophony of shrieking noises.
Then it all went quiet.
After a brief moment of weightlessness, the Humvee landed with a heavy thump. Jesse blew out an explosive, deeply held breath. The thick, coil springs compressed and rebounded wildly. He whipped the steering wheel back and forth, seeking to regain control of the bouncing vehicle. It skidded into a turn, rolling up on two wheels before straightening. He twisted hard, back and forth. The tires screeched as they sought traction. Then they bit and started to guide the beast toward the closed gate at the end of the arena. The twin skulls mounted on the gateposts seemed to be grinning down at him.
Jesse kept his foot against the floorboard, crushing the accelerator. The large automatic clunked as it shifted into a higher gear. Remaining fragments of the rollup door still attached to the front spikes threw up a glittering shower of sparks, bright enough to light the interior. He pointed the nose of the Humvee at the gate as the new barrier rapidly approached. Eve screamed in terror from the back seat. Andrea was yelling something else entirely. The voices registered as only a blur in his mind.
Aiming for the small crack in the gates where they came together, he planned to punch his way through. A piece of the steel roll up door still attached to the spikes had formed into a vertical V-shaped wedge. He knew if he could just drive the wedge into the wood deep enough, the gate would split apart.
At least that was the plan.
Twenty feet.
Ten feet.
Zero feet.
The Humvee slammed mightily into the gate, pitching the heavy vehicle forward. Jesse fell hard against the wheel, his seatbelt keeping him from being ejected through the front windshield. He snapped back into his seat violently. The gates buckled and crashed open as they ripped from their hinges. The vehicle slowed dramatically, but he again wrestled it under control. Directly ahead, the white-hot bank of headlights lit a new threat.
Hundreds of teaming shapes interspersed with hundreds of squirming shadows.
Raptors. Hundreds of raptors.
The mass of creatures was frantically pushing against each other while leaping against the bars in the pens holding them, squashing many of their brethren against wire mesh barriers.
Jesse grinned manically. He decided to seize the silver-plated opportunity and went for it.
Weaving the Humvee left and right, he let the steel bars welded to the sides of the Humvee cut into the holding pens. Woven wire mesh snagged on the metal spikes. In the side mirrors, he watched the mesh stretch out behind them like a long-trained wedding dress.
Raptors screeched and screamed. Those that couldn’t jump out of the way fast enough piled up on the front spikes, stacking like skewered fish. Chunks of spongy meat spattered across the windshield in wet slapping globs. Jesse reached for the wiper motor switch and flipped it, but that only smeared the gore and blocked his view. Again, he could no longer see the way ahead. He hit another button to squirt wiper fluid on the windshield and was amazed when it worked. As the blades flicked, the glass slowly cleared of the sticky ichor.
Glancing in the side mirrors, he saw what he’d first thought were hundreds of raptors. Now he realized they numbered in the thousands.
He’d opened the gates of hell on all those they’d left behind.
“Deal with it,” he said to the mirror.
Another gate was rapidly approaching. This one presumably led outside. Shadow-shapes appeared along the wall to his right, moving swiftly. They were preparing to throw whatever they had at hand. He saw a couple of bows rising to fire and the orange strobe of a single muzzle flash. Pressing the accelerator against the floorboard, he gritted his teeth. The Humvee growled toward another gate, ready to carve a path through.
Nothing was going to stop it.
“Hold on!” he shouted.
The Humvee struck the metal barrier, jamming it open, bending the bottom hinges, but not breaking them.
With a screeching sigh of metal on metal, they came to a complete halt.
“Damn it,” Jesse said. He jammed the gearshift into reverse and backed up. Gunfire spattered off the bulletproof side windows, pinging noisily. He shifted again, stomped on the accelerator.
The Humvee built forward speed.
Faster.
Faster.
They hit the gate like a battering ram, and the hinges bent further but did not break.
He reversed and tried again, smoke pouring from the tires.
This time the gate sprang open, exploding outward, tearing off the hinges and crashing into twin heaps behind them.
Bouncing about madly, Jesse wrenched the steering wheel left and right again until he regained control. Finally, the violent rocking ceased, and all he could hear was the angry growl of the engine and whine of the tires.
With a dawning realization that they’d actually escaped, he released his death grip on the wheel and checked the mirrors.
No signs of pursuit.
Gripping the wheel in one hand, he checked on Cory. The guy was holding onto his seatbelt while struggling to keep his head against the seatback. He looked as if he was going to be sick.
Voices from the back seat started making sense to his rattled mind. Eve was speaking. What she was saying didn’t seem right.
“What? What did you say?” he asked, heart pounding in his throat.
Then a tingling sensation of dread returned as his mind fully caught up with what he had just heard.
Eve shouted at him again. “She’s been shot!”
-11-
AIN'T THAT BAD
THE GORE-COVERED Humvee next to Jesse let out an occasional metallic tick as it adjusted to the ambient temperature. He cupped his hand and swatted at a fly unfortunate enough to have landed on his forearm. Surrounding him was a collection of doors. Most were open, a few closed. Many had been forcibly kicked in, leaving the interiors exposed to the elements, allowing all sorts of windblown debris to pile up inside. A sign about fifty feet away, at the end of a weed-filled parking lot read: FREE HBO. Or at least that was how it read to him, given that he needed to fill in the missing E and B. He was in the parking lot of a motel, an old structure, built sometime in the late 1960s when families traveling cross-country stayed in motels. Later, it had probably catered to a less reputable clientele. Later than that, the raptors had come. Now the place was just two floors of ransacked, decaying rooms, most wrecked beyond repair.
The others were with him: Andrea, Eve, Cory, and Kate. In the sodden mess of the motel, they had found two rooms in serviceable order, with no raptors in them, and no signs of recent infestations other than a few withering bones of the dead. The morning had come and gone. Most of that time had been spent driving hard, chewing up the miles. But he had slowed the pace an hour ago, knowing he’d put enough miles between him and the chaos he’d left behind.
It had been one hell of a night.
He’d already checked the perimeter, twice. The motel offered the best shelter he’d seen so far. They could build barricades if necessary, or hide in one of the rooms, or retreat to a nearby rooftop.
Pinching one side of his nose closed with a knuckle, he blew, and then cleared the other side in turn. Finally, he snorted, tasting his own coppery blood. His stuffy nose was the least of his immediate worries. He had too many injuries to start counting. But he was still vertical. Cory, on the other hand, was suffering. The man was now less than twenty feet away, with one hand propped on the edge of a concrete curb, and the other flat against the pavement, all hunched over, looking like a cat working at a hairball.
Jesse sigh
ed. A concussion was a nasty thing. He’d been smacked in the head before. Knocks all kinds of things around and makes you feel sick for a week. It was difficult to tell just what had gotten rattled inside Cory’s skull, or what sort of damage had been done. Some people recovered quickly, some didn’t. He could be dizzy for days, or he might recover fully, or he might suddenly drop dead. But maybe, just maybe, it would fix his personality a little. Make him a little less of an asshole.
There was also Andrea to consider. She had come out better than he’d expected she would, given his record. He’d thought during the first few miles of their escape that she was as good as dead. She was hit by an extremely lucky shot, one that had bounced off the pavement and into the vehicle from below. A real once in a million shot. Maybe once in a billion.
Kate had impressed him greatly after Andrea had been hit. How she’d so quickly moved to staunch the bleeding and keep it at bay until they were able to pull over and regroup. That little girl was full of surprises. Her quick thinking had also impressed Andrea and she couldn’t stop praising her. Considering that Kate had been with her only for a couple of weeks, it said something about them both, something almost magical.
Eve had pretty much been what he’d pegged her for: useless, but not totally so. She tried to help, which took her out of the threat category. Still, he would have rather left her behind with the women inside the mountain.
His thoughts kept coming back to Kate and what else was she capable of. He was curious to find out. And now that she was back, he’d never let her out of his sight again.
So, now what? he thought as he watched a tangle of weeds tumble across the motel parking lot. It was moving slowly under the control of a light breeze, rolling once, then twice, before coming to rest against a cluster of fresh green stalks growing in the cracked asphalt. The ball sat there, blown from behind, deforming, flattening, and pushing against the new barrier, but not making any further progress.
He rubbed his nose once again. A trickle of fresh blood ran down his throat, which he sniffed and snorted, and used the back of his hand to wipe.
Righteous Apostate: Raptor Apocalypse Book 3 Page 9