Vengeance in the Badlands

by Brian J. Jarrett

  “You’ll help then?” Dave asked.

  “Come with me, and we’ll talk.”

  In the light of Jessie’s flashlight, Dave saw Audrey’s familiar form standing just in front of Jeffrey. But when he looked around for Calvin he found only empty darkness.

  “No, no, no,” Dave muttered.

  “What is it?” Audrey asked.

  “Calvin’s gone.”

  “We’ll find him,” Audrey said. “We’ll find him, and we’ll find Gideon, and we’ll make all of them pay.”

  Voices sounded from the darkness. Gideon’s men were headed down the stairwell.

  “We got company,” Jeffrey said.

  “Quick, come with me,” Jessie said. “I’ll buy us some time.”

  Audrey and Jefferey followed, but Dave hesitated.

  “Dave, come on,” Audrey said. “We won’t stop until they’re both dead. That’s a promise.”

  As much as Dave wanted to pursue Calvin into the darkened recesses of the basement, he knew that he’d never find him with a band of armed men on his tail. If they could trust Jessie (and that was a big if) then maybe they could buy themselves some more time.

  “Okay,” Dave said. He got moving, following behind Audrey and Jefferey as Jessie led them deeper into the darkness.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “Head up these steps,” Jessie said, pointing with the flashlight toward a set of metal stairs that led of up to a corrugated metal platform topped with shelves. “You wait up there ’til I tell you it’s okay to come back down. And for fuck’s sake, don’t make any noise. They’ll kill us all if they find you.”

  Dave and the others headed up the steps as directed, making as little noise as possible. At the top of the steps, they reached the metal flooring. Above their heads, the ceiling hung only a foot or so. They stopped and crouched, waiting.

  A few moments later the sound of Gideon’s men grew louder. Flashlights pierced the darkness as the men made their way into the depths of the warehouse’s basement. They approached, passing the foot of the steps Dave and the others had just climbed, stopping maybe a dozen yards past it.

  One of the men spoke to Jessie, his voice loud and hostile. “You seen anybody down here, Jessie?”

  “Like who?” Jessie replied.

  “Like any fuckin’ body who shouldn’t be here, that’s who.”

  “Ain’t nobody down here but me and the rats,” Jessie replied. “And neither me nor them has seen jack shit.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Harvey, if somebody else was down here, I’d know it.”

  “You getting smart with me, Jessie?”

  “Nope. Just stating a fact,” Jessie replied. “You wanna search down here, be my guest. But this basement is fuckin’ huge. It could take a while.”

  “I bet they went up to three, Harvey,” another man said. “For the guns, you know?”

  “If they get there first—” another man began to say.

  “I don’t need to be reminded,” Harvey said, cutting him off. He turned his focus back to Jessie. “You see anybody running around down here who shouldn’t be, you put a bullet in them, and then you come get me. That clear?”

  “Crystal,” Jessie said.

  The men turned, heading back the way they’d come. As they made it just past the bottom of the stairs, Dave breathed a sigh of relief.

  But that would prove to be short-lived.

  “Gomez, check up those steps,” Harvey said. “And make it snappy.”

  “Sure thing, Harvey,” Gomez replied.

  Dave’s stomach twisted up into a knot. The platform shimmied as the steps took the man’s weight.

  Dave’s heart raced, and his hands went clammy as he gripped the rifle tightly, waiting.

  Another step as Gomez ascended.

  Dave swallowed hard.

  Then a scream erupted from below them.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Calvin felt his way through the darkness, navigating the basement as best as he could. He’d been down here a few times when that prick Gideon had had him doing labor like a mule. But that was what these fucks did; they killed anybody who wouldn’t cooperate and then worked those who did nearly to death. Not entirely different from his own game plan, Calvin had to admit, but Gideon had no vision. He wasn’t building a new world order like Calvin had been doing before he’d been so rudely interrupted. No, Gideon ran what amounted to a post-virus biker gang, primarily concerned with drinking, raping, and pillaging. Gideon had no long-term plan, no creativity. He was a cheap knockoff, The Designer Imposter of leaders.

  But this wasn’t why Calvin hated him.

  Calvin hated Gideon because he’d killed Rand.

  And that’s why Gideon was a dead man walking. Porter wanted his revenge. Fine, maybe he’d get it, but not until Calvin had finished up his own business. He’d been wrong about Porter. Not about his abilities—Porter was as tenacious and capable as they came—but about his motivation and his loyalties. Right after they’d met, Calvin had done Porter a solid by offing his pregnant bitch.

  Now Porter had gone all melodramatic and had turned that into a big fucking deal.

  But he’d deal with Porter later. Now, he had other shit to take care of.

  The good thing about stupid people, Calvin figured, was that they talked too much. They couldn’t resist it any more than a cat could resist chasing a string. Not only did these idiots talk amongst themselves (usually loud enough to be heard across a room), but they also loved to talk about themselves.

  A few well-timed questions to some of Gideon’s moronic cronies had earned Calvin an earful about their boss’ operations. He only had to act a little meek, to put on subservience, and everyone underestimated him.

  They wouldn’t be underestimating him now, that was for goddamn sure because now he knew about Gideon’s little pets.

  The white carriers. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what they were. Whatever humans had devolved into because of the virus, they were now evolving into something else entirely. What came out of those cocoons wasn’t human, not anymore. Whatever it was it was an animal. A fearless predator. And a damn hungry one to boot.

  Gideon and his merry band of assholes had found the cocoons in the basement when they rolled into the place, Calvin learned. Gideon was intrigued, so he moved them into an old meat freezer in the basement so he could keep an eye on them. They’d been there for a week or so, fully hatched and starving.

  Oh, how the simpletons loved to tell stories.

  It didn’t take long for Calvin to find the defunct freezer where Gideon’s pet’s lived in captivity. All he had to do was follow the muffled growls and screams coming from the monsters trapped within.

  Calvin stood in front of the door and removed a ring full of keys from his pocket, the same keys Audrey had lifted from the guard that Porter had killed upstairs. In all the commotion, the girl hadn’t noticed that Calvin had stolen them from her. That was the beautiful thing about amateurs; they were easy to dupe.

  Calvin thumbed through the keys until he found the one that fit.

  He grinned wide.

  Flashlight beams shone through the small windows in the door at the foot of the stairs as another group of Gideon’s monkeys trundled down the steps and crashed through the door.

  Calvin smiled wider. He couldn’t have planned it better if he tried.

  “Hey, assholes!” he yelled. “I’m over here!”

  The men turned, blanketing him in the light of a half-dozen flashlights.

  Calvin turned the key.

  The lock popped open with a satisfying snap.

  Then the door exploded outward as Gideon’s pets erupted from their prison and sprinted toward their prey.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Rifle fire flared brightly in the darkness, the sporadic flashes of light leaving splotches of temporary blindness on Dave’s retinas. Below them, Gideon’s embattled men yelled obscenities as they rapidly unloaded their
magazines toward the sound of approaching snarls and growls. One of the doomed men screamed in the choking darkness, his finger tightening on the trigger and emptying the rifle’s magazine as he was taken down to the cold, concrete floor.

  Dave didn’t have to see the creatures to know what they were. He recognized them all too quickly from back at the Costco.

  More screams erupted from the chaos below. One of the creatures shrieked in a high-pitched, pain-ridden voice before another flash-bang silenced it for good. Bullets flew everywhere, some ricocheting dangerous close to Dave and the others hiding above. The acrid smell of spent gunpowder tickled Dave’s nose, the nauseating smell of spilled blood and guts growing stronger with every passing second.

  Rifles stuttered in the darkness until the last few bullets had been sent their way. Silence quickly settled in. Audrey reached out and touched Dave’s shoulder. He’d almost forgotten she was there.

  Dave’s ears rang from the succession of gunplay, exacerbated by the reverberation off the surrounding walls. Under the drone of his brutalized eardrums, Dave heard random sounds drifting up from below.

  Slurping sounds, following by the smacking of lips.

  The unmistakable sound of an animal eating its kill.

  Dave sat still, trying not to breathe. Trying not to make the slightest sound. If they could avoid detection, he figured, then maybe the bloodthirsty creatures would move on of their own volition, searching for prey elsewhere.

  A noise sounded from behind Dave, where Jefferey sat. The creatures below heard it too. Agitated now, they scurried about, razor-sharp claws making click-clacking sounds in the darkness.

  Dave reached over to smack Jeffrey to get him to keep quiet, but instead, his hand came back covered in warm, sticky blood.

  At least one of those errant slugs had found a home in Jeffrey, and he’d collapsed to the floor.

  A howling came from below them, the sound of a pack of predators communicating with each other.

  Audrey gripped Dave’s shoulder tightly. The seconds ticked by slowly, pregnant with tension.

  Dave didn’t dare move, much less breathe.

  Then a throaty howl resonated throughout the basement before the metal platform shook violently.

  One of the creatures raced up the steps after its next meal, its silhouette barely visible in the low light.

  Dave pointed the rifled down the steps toward the approaching creature’s dark form, pulling the trigger twice. Bright light flashed as flames licked from the rifle’s barrel. The beast in the lead took both bullets to the chest, collapsing backward and tumbling down the steps, shaking the entire platform.

  Excited grunts and growls drifted up from below as the creatures scuffled about.

  Then a second white monster attempted to climb the stairs for its next meal.

  Dave fired off a shot. It went wild.

  The creature took two more steps. By now it had nearly made it to the top of the steps.

  Then a blindingly bright light flared, showering the steps and the platform in its glow. Disoriented, the creature at the top froze, shielding its eyes from the glare. It shrieked as if someone had sunk hot pokers into its eyes.

  Two gunshots rang out, the reports echoing off the walls as the creature at the top of the steps collapsed over the side of the railing, flipping end over end before landing in a heap on the unforgiving concrete floor.

  The light changed direction, and more gunshots echoed throughout the large room. The creatures protested with screams and growls, but they were quickly silenced.

  Then it stopped. All that was left was ringing in their ears.

  “Come on down,” Jessie said from below. “They’re all dead.”

  “Are you sure?” Audrey asked.

  “Sure as I can be. You want to wait around for a second batch?”

  Audrey didn’t argue. She stood and prepared to head down the stairs. “Where’s Jeffrey?” she asked.

  “Dead,” Dave said.

  She hesitated only a moment before she proceeded down the steps. Dave followed. After he’d placed his feet on hard concrete once again, he surveyed the carnage basking in the glow of Jeffrey’s massive flashlight. There were at least a dozen bodies, mostly human but some not, lying in the narrow hallway.

  A groan sounded from the carnage. Jessie’s light quickly revealed the source; Harvey lay on the floor amidst the severed limbs and slippery innards, gutted, his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water.

  Harvey locked eyes on Jessie, reaching out a bloody hand. For his effort, Jessie retrieved a pistol from a holster around his waist and put a bullet into Harvey’s head.

  “Fuck that son of a bitch,” Jessie said, re-holstering the pistol.

  Another time, another place and Dave might have been surprised watching a man murder another man. Now, it was just another day in Hell.

  “We’ve seen these things before,” Dave said. “We don’t want to be here if more of them show up.”

  “You’re fuckin-A right,” Jessie said. “These ugly fuckers are Gideon’s pets. Had ‘em penned up so he could watch ‘em hatch.” He paused, thinking. “They were locked up pretty good. I don’t know how the hell they got out.”

  “Calvin,” Dave said. “Had to be.”

  “He the other fella who was with you? The one that ran off?”

  Dave nodded. “He’s not a friend, though. In fact, the next time I see him, he’s a dead man.”

  “Fair enough,” Jessie said, seemingly unaffected. “What about the other guy that was with you? The one we had locked away upstairs.”

  Dave shook his head. “He caught a bullet in the crossfire.”

  Jessie nodded. He scanned the pile of bodies lying on the floor. “I count five of these pale-face motherfuckers laying here, so that means we got ten or eleven more running amok around this place. My guess is the others headed upstairs for the fresh meat.”

  “Everything has gone sideways,” Audrey said, the exasperation thick in her voice. “What the hell do we do now?”

  Audrey was right. Everything had gone sideways.

  “I say we see this through,” Dave said. “We take out Calvin and we take out Gideon, or we die trying. Really, what else is left?”

  Audrey nodded. “I’m in.”

  “Then we need to make it up to the third floor,” Jessie said. “We can get our hands on some firepower there.”

  “What about the weapons down here?” Audrey asked.

  “No guns here, just supplies and whatnot.”

  “Calvin,” Audrey said. “That lying sack of shit told us there’d be weapons down here.”

  “No wonder you want to kill him,” Jessie said.

  “What do we have on us then?” Dave asked.

  Jessie held up his pistol. “This plus a couple of full magazines.”

  Audrey held up her pistol.

  “Two pistols and this rifle,” Dave said. “Now we need a plan.”

  “I can help you out there,” Jessie said.

  In the darkened warehouse basement, amidst the corpses of man and monster, the trio discussed plans for their last stand.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The sound of a gunshot echoed from somewhere in the warehouse, interrupting a card game that had been going on for nearly two hours now.

  Gideon looked up from his hand, glancing around the table at the three other men who sat with him. They were his right-hand men, the only men he truly trusted. The others he ruled with strong words and even stronger fists.

  “What the fuck was that?” Hunter asked. He was a thick and stocky man with a dark complexion and a small scar above his right eye. Gideon remembered the day Hunter had received the wound that caused that scar. The fight hadn’t lasted long, and the other man who’d inflicted the injury didn’t live much longer than that.

  “Gunshot,” Gideon said.

  “I told those dumbshits no more target shooting,” Hopkins said. A man of average height and build, his aggression knew nothin
g of the word average. Hopkins did most of the day-to-day management of the crew. You didn’t cross Hopkins more than once, and the team had lost a few of their numbers when Hopkins made an example out of someone. Hopkins was the kind of guy you were glad to have on your side and not fighting against you.

  “Nah, that sounded like it came from inside the building,” Khan said. Gideon didn’t like towel-heads too much, but Khan had been born on US soil. He’d also proven that he was as smart and capable as any red-blooded American…and twice as mean.

  “Khan’s right,” Gideon said, placing his cards down on the table. He ensured they remained face down as he didn’t want the others to catch sight of his hand before they resumed their game. He turned to Hopkins. “Have somebody check it out.”

  Hopkins nodded. “Will do, boss.” He went to the door, conferring with one of the two men standing guard outside. After a brief discussion out of earshot, one of the men headed off.

  Hopkins returned to the table and the game resumed. But Gideon found his head wasn’t in it. He was concerned about the gunshot they’d heard. Shit like that happened from time to time, especially when running a crew stocked by hellions and miscreants. They weren’t a necessarily well-behaved crew like Gideon had seen in his three long years in the service. Most of the men were used to operating outside the law in their old lives, and rule-following wasn’t something you could just beat into a guy overnight.

  Probably nothing, he figured. But that nagging feeling continued to tug at him.

  “Let’s play,” Gideon said.

  The other men picked up their cards and the game resumed. Khan drew a card from the deck and inspected it. His right eyebrow raised just a little, a tell that Gideon knew all too well. Fucker had picked a sound one.

  Another gunshot echoed, the noise muffled through the door but unmistakable in its distinctive sound.

  Gideon tossed his cards on the table and stood, his imposing frame towering nearly seven feet above the floor. He didn’t give a shit about his hand now. “I don’t fucking like this,” he said. “Not one bit.”