The four inch foam mattress that should have been there was long gone.
He’d slept on its fiberglass base and didn’t even notice.
“Man, I must have really been beat.”
He climbed out of the sleeper and onto the pavement below, then relieved himself in the middle of the highway.
He didn’t have a lot of time left before it got too dark, but he needed to replenish his supplies.
Before he went to the back of the trailer to cut the lock and rummage through it, though, he looked to the western sky.
And he suddenly realized why it was that none of the trailers behind him had been looted.
The view in front of him was absolutely majestic. The sun was a flaming deep orange in color and hovered just over the horizon.
And oh, what a horizon. Mountains to each side of him, and again far out in front, many miles to the west.
He could clearly see the California town of Needles off in the distance, just on the other side of the Colorado River.
Between Dave’s present position in the western edge of Arizona and Needles was three miles of thirty degree down grade.
The residents of Needles didn’t hike up to the trucks to rummage through them simply because it was too much work.
Three miles of steep climbing would have exhausted them. Unnecessarily so, for the town itself was relatively flat. And it was a small town. There were likely enough tractor trailers on the other side of town, where they were easy to get to, to sustain them.
The miles of unlooted trucks now made sense. Nobody from this side of the traffic jam had the inclination to make the effort. On the other side of the traffic jam, to the east, was over a hundred miles of Arizona desert. No highway nomads would travel that far with no promise of nourishment or even water.
The line of trucks was like an oasis in the middle of the Sahara, full of treasures and too far to reach.
Dave remembered when he was a boy, driving from San Antonio to California with his parents. They were headed to Venice Beach to visit some friends, then on to Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm.
He remembered this same panoramic view, driving down this same long grade into the State of California.
He’d forgotten where it was, exactly. For seven year old boys don’t spend a lot of time studying geography and where they are in the world at any particular time.
Except when they’re in school and have no choice.
Now, though, as he stood at the scene, he remembered.
And it was exactly as he’d remembered it. The long grade downward, the raging river at the bottom, the city just beyond it.
All the memories of that day came flooding back now.
The way his dad had put the car in neutral and coasted down the grade.
He even remembered what his father said.
“Can you imagine if they got enough snow in this part of the country, what joy it would be to go on a three mile sled ride?”
At the bottom of the grade, just outside of Needles, they’d pulled over and taken a family photo in front of the Colorado River.
Dave still had that photo, tucked away in an album in San Antonio.
For several minutes he waxed nostalgic, reliving one of the favorite vacations of his young life.
Then he shook the thoughts free from his head and headed to the Walmart trailer before he lost his light.
He had all night long and a long drive ahead. He could enjoy his recovered memories then.
Now he had work to do.
Chapter 29
An untouched Walmart trailer was becoming more and more rare lately, and Dave had his choice of an abundance of foodstuffs.
He decided on a case of chili, a case of canned ravioli and a case of Campbell’s soup. He could eat them all right out of the can, heated or cold, and all had plenty of nutrients and protein to sustain him.
He added two cases of bottled water to his stash and placed it all in the cargo bay of his Explorer. Then he covered his provisions.
He finished just after the sun set, and wanted to wait another hour before he got rolling again.
He’d learned that the highway nomads, especially in and around populated areas, typically didn’t bed down until nine p.m. or so.
He wanted to wait until they were mostly off the highway in Needles. There was less chance of accidentally mowing them down as he drove almost silently through town in the dark.
Then he chuckled.
Perhaps “mowing down” was the wrong term, since his top speed was something less than twenty miles an hour.
But he could still hurt them by knocking them down if he didn’t see them fast enough.
He’d almost run over people several times in recent nights. People these days had a tendency to freeze when they heard a vehicle coming. They were almost like a deer in the headlights. They were so surprised to hear a vehicle coming, when vehicles weren’t supposed to be running anymore, that they merely stood in the same spot and listened.
Instead of getting out of the way.
Add to that the problem that at the speed he was driving… around fifteen miles an hour on average… the Explorer didn’t make a lot of noise.
The engine wasn’t roaring as it would have been at highway speeds.
It just wasn’t loud enough to make itself heard from any great distance.
The nomads didn’t hear it until it was almost upon them.
Dave had to swerve several times to keep from hitting nomads who’d suddenly appeared in his path. And he’d actually bumped a couple of them with his side mirrors as he’d driven past them.
He told himself he didn’t hit them hard enough to hurt them.
And he probably didn’t.
But he still felt bad about it.
It was just another factor which made his night driving even more stressful.
His solution: waiting until most of the nomads were off the road before heading out, wasn’t perfect.
It cost him a lot of time and reduced the distance he traveled each night.
But at least it lessened the possibility he’d injure or kill somebody who did nothing wrong other than walk down a highway in the dead of night.
To kill an hour he reentered the sleeper cab and used a bottle of water to shave and wash up. He tore open a package of black t-shirts he got from the trailer and put one on.
Personal hygiene was becoming a luxury more and more people were giving up. Dave noticed that most of the people he’d encountered in Albuquerque didn’t even make the effort any more.
He didn’t understand why, exactly. There was nothing better than feeling fresh and clean, even knowing it wouldn’t last very long in a world without air conditioning.
But giving up was something Dave would never do. Giving up was tantamount to admitting one wasn’t quite human anymore. That they’d become more animal than human.
No, he couldn’t shower any more, for there was simply no place to do it. He couldn’t shave and wash up and put on clean clothes as often as he’d like. But he’d do it when he could.
He put on a new pair of briefs and socks, then his jeans and boots.
As a last act before heading out, he refilled his backpack with bottles of water and several cans of soup and chili.
He had no way of knowing it now, but that routine act would make a very big difference in his life in the coming days.
Chapter 29
John Parker wasn’t a man who went off half-cocked. He wasn’t really that way before he joined the Army, and grew even more so when he went into combat.
For going off half-cocked in combat meant good men got killed.
Now he was a bad guy. Instead of fighting to save lives and to preserve democracy he was serving his own needs.
But he’d still do his due diligence and homework before assaulting the pillbox and taking over the underground bunker.
Scarface called everyone together at their camp in the woods. There were twelve of them in total. Joe “Scarface�
�� Manson was the undisputed leader. Parker was second in command. The rest had no distinguishable hierarchy or rank, although some were more vocal and pushy than others.
The first thing Parker did, even before Scarface called the meeting to order, was to chastise one of the men for smoking.
“Put that thing out,” Parker snapped. “What in hell is the matter with you?”
The man protested meekly.
“But… I thought it was okay in the daytime. They can’t see the burn in the daytime.”
“No, you fool. It’s not okay in the daytime. The smell of a burning cigarette can travel a long way on a gentle breeze, and a man with a keen sense of smell can pick it up and know we’re out here. We told you men if you couldn’t do without cigarettes for just a few days you weren’t welcome here.”
“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“It better not or I’ll shoot you myself.”
Savage said, “Tell them what your plan is.”
Parker got comfortable by sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree.
“We can’t assault the pillbox outright because it’s surrounded by land mines.”
The troops were incredulous.
The smoker said, “Land mines? Shit, I don’t want to have to cross no mine field.”
Parker said, “Shut up and listen. It’s my turn to talk, not yours.
“Like I said, we can’t assault the pill box. Half of us would get blown up before we even got to it. I’m going on a recon mission today to the other side of the roadway. The bunker side. I’ll go into the woods on the far side of the bunker and see if I can find their ventilation ports.”
“Ventilation ports?”
“I told you guys to shut up. It’s my time to talk.
“Yes, I said ventilation ports. They get a limited amount of fresh air coming into their bunker through the pillbox. But in order to keep their air from getting stale they have to vent it in some way.
“We can use those ventilation shafts to smoke them out. We can drop highway flares into them and cover the tops. The smoke will force them to come out, or to huddle into the pill box. Either way we’ve got them.
“If they come streaming out of the bunker we’ll pick them off. They cleared the land out for two hundred feet in all directions, so they can’t make it to the woods before we gun them down. We’ll shoot down the men like dogs. We’ll let the women make it to the woods, where we can capture them.”
He looked around and smiled.
“I assume you men will agree that the women will be more useful alive than dead.
“Their only other option is to huddle in the pill box. If they do that they’ll have air to breathe.
“But they won’t be breathing for very long. Because we’ll fire a couple of hundred shots into their firing ports. There will be so many bullets ricocheting inside their pillbox there’s no way any of them will survive. The women will die too, but there’s no way to avoid that.
“The key is we have to drop flares into all the vents at the same time. If we miss one, they can just hole up in that part of the bunker and block themselves off until the smoke clears from the rest of the bunker.
“So it’s essential we find all the ventilation pipes. Every single one of them.
“Jones… Peterson… you guys come with me. Santos and Vega… you guys go to that truck stop we saw up on the highway. It’s about four miles away. You can make it back by sundown. Grab enough highway flares to fill that bunker with heavy smoke. I don’t know how big the bunker is, but I figure three or four flares for each of the ventilation pipes should do the trick. Each of you take a backpack and an extra bag to carry by hand.
“Okay, now you guys have a chance to talk. Any questions?”
There were none. The men had been cowed. They now knew their place wasn’t to speak, but simply to follow orders.
And that was fine with Parker.
Chapter 30
Parker made his way through the forest with Jones and Peterson, and crossed the road well out of view of the pillbox.
They reentered the forest on the north side of the road and slowly made their way through it before heading back in the direction of the bunker.
After a little more than an hour they were looking at the pillbox again, but this time from the opposite side of the clearing.
“That one’s gonna be a problem,” Parker whispered to the others.
He was referring to the bunker’s first ventilation pipe, which stuck out of the ground about two feet. It was located in the clearing, about halfway between the woods and the pillbox.
Atop the vent pipe was a rain hood, made of galvanized steel, not unlike the ones on the roofs of the farmhouses in the area.
“Let’s split up. The rest of the vents will look just like that one. Let’s see how many we can find and count them. I’ll cover the woods east of here. Jones, you cover the woods north. Peterson, you go west. We’ll meet back here in an hour.”
Now, Adrian Jones wasn’t exactly the smartest of Scarface’s Savages.
It wasn’t his fault.
He was the product of two parents who weren’t very bright themselves.
In fact, Adrian Jones came from a long line of inferior stock. On both sides of the family.
Poor Adrian had a hard time from the very beginning. He struggled during school and begged his parents not to make him go. The other kids made fun of his lack of abilities, he said. And the teachers hated him.
His folks finally let him drop out in tenth grade. The Philadelphia Public School system seemed not to care. They never came looking for him because he fell through the cracks. Just another dumb poor kid nobody cared about.
His parents figured they both dropped out of grade school, and they were doing all right. Between the welfare checks, the food stamps and the hustling they did on the streets their kids went to bed most nights with full bellies.
Rumors had been flying around camp that Scarface was going to appoint a couple of men to be sergeants. They’d report directly to Parker, Scarface’s lieutenant. But if anything ever happened to Parker they’d be next in line for promotion.
Adrian Jones had always hungered for a position of authority.
As dumb as he was, nobody had ever taken him seriously. Nobody ever thought him capable of doing much of anything, except selling dope and shoplifting.
The Army had given him a chance, in an era when recruiting was particularly hard and they were briefly accepting high school dropouts.
He never rose above the rank of private before he was busted for dealing marijuana in the barracks and sent to Levy for twelve long years.
In Adrian Jones’ mind, he’d never be able to succeed unless he did something bold.
Unless he showed Scarface he was a cut above the rest.
Unless he proved he was worthy of being called “sergeant.”
Just because the United States Army didn’t deem him worthy of being a sergeant didn’t mean he couldn’t accomplish the goal in another way.
When he made his way through the woods and came across a clearing perhaps fifty feet wide, it was easy to see the ventilation pipe sticking two feet out of the ground.
It did, as Parker said, look just like the first one they’d seen.
Now, any other man in the gang would have followed Parker’s orders and done no more.
They’d have made note of the pipe’s location and moved on in search of others.
But Adrian Jones had something to prove.
He wanted to go a step beyond.
He wanted to remove the rain cover, and to peer down inside the pipe.
He wanted to see if it was blocked by a wire screen. Or whether the screws on the rain cover had been ground down so it couldn’t be removed.
He wanted to be the one who discovered any kinks in Parker’s plan. Anything that they had to resolve ahead of time.
He wanted to be the one to impress Scarface. To make Scarface believe this was a man who went the extra mile.
This was a man worthy of promotion.
Adrian Jones would get his wish.
He’d get Scarface’s attention big time, and he’d let Scarface know there were indeed hidden obstacles he’d have to overcome for his plan to succeed.
For example, he’d let Scarface know that like the pillbox, the ventilation pipes were also surrounded by landmines.
Chapter 31
The blast was loud, but was muffled by the fact the explosive had been buried beneath the ground.
It could be heard for about two hundred yards in any direction. Parker heard it, cursed under his breath, and instinctively knew one of his team had done something incredibly stupid.
He immediately suspected it was Jones.
Peterson heard it as well and was confused.
Obviously something bad had just happened. Should he continue his mission? Finish searching in the woods for additional vents and then to report back to Parker at the end of the hour?
Or should he consider the mission scrubbed? Should he report back to the rendezvous point immediately to get further instructions?
He paused for five minutes or so to see if there was any enemy activity, then resumed his mission.
He figured the hour would be up soon enough anyway. No sense running the risk of being yelled at for aborting the mission early.
Inside the bunker, in a buried shipping container, Lindsey was reading a book directly below the ventilation pipe Jones had discovered.
She heard the muffled explosion but didn’t have a clue what it was. The roof of the shipping container shuddered above her.
She put the book down and went to see if anyone else had heard the noise.
Her mother was napping in another part of the bunker. Her Aunt Karen was doing laundry and wondering about the sound as well.
Jason had run to the pillbox to join the two sentries who were already there to discuss what had just occurred and what their options were.
Jason’s brother Mason had gone to the tiny control center, which consisted of monitors attached to wireless cameras hidden in several of the trees in the area, and turned everything on.
Payback: Alone: Book 7 Page 10