He immediately turned on his radio and sent out a mayday call.
“There are men in the woods, guys. I can see movement in at least two places. One on each side of the road.”
They’d gotten lax. They’d gotten complacent.
They’d gotten stupid.
For weeks they’d gotten out of the habit of monitoring outside activity twenty four hours a day. It had seemed such a waste of time, devoting a body to sit in front of monitors for every hour of the day when there was nothing worth seeing.
Nothing except for an occasional robin building a nest.
So they’d taken a vote and decided to stop.
Their timing left a lot to be desired, for it was only a couple of days later that Parker was hunting in nearby woods, spotted the pillbox from a distance, and went back to tell Scarface what a great headquarters it would be.
Parker and Peterson met at the rendezvous point at the designated time.
“What in hell happened?” Peterson asked.
“Apparently your dumb friend found himself a land mine.”
“Now what? Should we try to find him?”
“No. He’s either dead or dying. Either way he’s out of the club. We make our way back to the camp and listen to Scarface yell.”
Jones was lying face up in a sea of carnage, both legs gone.
He didn’t understand what happened. He was approaching the ventilation pipe, getting close to it, and next thing he knew he was flying through the air. Now his whole body tingled and he was getting very sleepy. He tried to roll over, but his body wasn’t cooperating. He thought maybe he hurt his back.
He didn’t know his legs were missing, nor that he was in shock.
He also didn’t know he was bleeding out, and would be dead in a couple of minutes.
By their very design, anti-personnel mines are underpowered. And that’s okay, for they have a completely different purpose than, say, anti-tank mines.
A mine planted for the purpose of disabling an enemy tank is designed for maximum explosive power. The bigger the boom, the more likely it accomplishes its mission: to disable the enemy tank.
If it has too little charge it might disable a small tank but a bigger tank might laugh at it.
A bigger charge might flip a small tank onto its top. Unnecessary force, yet still effective.
But that same bigger charge might be enough to knock the track off its link on the biggest of tanks.
For an anti-personnel mine it’s possible to pack too big a punch.
That might sound counter-intuitive, but it’s true.
With an anti-personnel mine, less is more.
Less has a bigger affect.
Picture this: An enemy soldier steps on a mine with a one kilogram charge. It blows him to bits. Only a few pieces can be found besides his intact head, still strapped securely in his helmet.
We win in that he’s dead and won’t be able to shoot at us anymore.
On the other hand, a smaller charge, perhaps one third of a kilogram, may or may not kill him.
But it will most certainly maim him.
In normal battle conditions, that same soldier would step on the weaker mine and lose one or both legs.
He’d suffer substantial injury to his groin area, and perhaps some internal bleeding.
He’s out of commission for the duration of the war. And he’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
But, assuming he has a buddy or a medic nearby, he’ll survive the blast.
And that’s actually better for us.
Yes it is. Here’s why.
Because a dead enemy soldier only takes himself out of the game.
A wounded enemy soldier requires a medic to field dress his wounds. Hopefully while another soldier somewhere else isn’t getting the help he needs and dies a miserable death.
That same wounded soldier requires two of his buddies to take a break from the fighting to carry his dumb ass to an evacuation site.
Those are two fewer enemy soldiers shooting at the good guys.
That same wounded soldier will tie up the helicopter crew who comes to pick him up and a whole passel of doctors and nurses trying to save his life.
(Passel: that’s a group of doctors and nurses, in the same way a gaggle is a group of geese.)
The fact that it would take several minutes for Jones to die wasn’t a mistake. It was done that way by design.
Of course, it didn’t matter much to Jones.
Jones was too stupid to know he was dying. He thought he was just drifting off to sleep.
Jones had made a serious mistake and took away the element of surprise for Scarface.
The group in the compound had made their own mistake.
They were luckier than Adrian Jones.
At least they’d recover from theirs.
They were now on the war footing Scarface had hoped they wouldn’t be.
From here on out it certainly wouldn’t get any easier for either side.
The people in the bunker, they’d defend their property to the last man.
Many people in Joe “Scarface” Manson’s position would cut their losses and leave.
But Scarface was stubborn. So was Parker. They’d attack the property until the last of their men were dead.
They were in what cowboys used to call a “Mexican standoff.”
Chapter 32
Dave was making good time now. The long traffic jam just outside the California State line had an unexpected consequence.
The bottleneck had stalled so many vehicles the highway just inside the big state was very sparse.
For a time Dave was able to get up to the breakneck speed of… twenty two miles an hour.
It wasn’t much, but it helped him to regain a little bit of lost ground.
All was going well until he neared the town of Barstow.
It was getting close to morning and he expected the freeway to be crowded with abandoned vehicles as it passed through the town.
That was almost always the case in and near cities, since on the day of the blackout through traffic was mingled with local vehicles.
That meant he’d have to slow down again, and increase the chance an early-bird nomad could run him down and try to climb his way into Dave’s back seat.
He didn’t want to start a new day by having to shoot someone.
So he chose instead to stop for the day on the east side of Barstow, then to navigate the town the following night.
As he’d done many times before, he passed a truck with a sleeper cab that looked like a good place to get some rest.
And as he’d done many times before, he pulled about fifty feet in front of the rig and parked.
He took his pistol from the dashboard above the steering wheel and returned it to his holster. Then he stepped out of the vehicle, placed the keys in his pocket and looked around. Not seeing anyone, he pulled his backpack and rifle from the vehicle and headed for the truck.
He’d followed this procedure almost a hundred times since he’d left San Antonio almost six months before.
And he’d never been spotted. Not even once.
His luck finally ran out.
Dave had looked around when he got out of the Explorer. First to the east and then to the west. With his night vision goggles he should have been able to spot anyone lurking about.
But it had been a long night. He was exhausted.
And tired people are more prone to make mistakes.
He’d looked east and then west.
But he didn’t look to the north, to the rolling hills alongside the highway.
Rocky and Skaggs were members of a biker gang from Chino. They’d known each other and ran together for years.
Neither had any family to speak of. None they’d speak of in good terms, anyway.
They were on their way back from Sturgis when the blackout stranded them in central California.
They weren’t there for the annual rally. It wasn’t going on. They wer
e there to visit the ruins of their favorite saloon, which had recently burned to the ground.
It was a pilgrimage, of sorts, for many bikers all over the country.
At least for those who had a lot of time on their hands.
Since the blackout Rocky and Skaggs had been walking up and down the highways of California, sticking mostly to Interstate 15.
They’d followed the I-15 into Vegas, only to find out Sin City was really living up to its name.
Like many other big cities it had been taken over by the gangs and divvied up into sections, each section controlled by a different gang.
The Vegas strip was its own version of hell.
Each one of the luxury hotels was controlled by a different faction, who’d claimed it as their “world headquarters.”
The strip itself was designated a “safe passage” zone, where thugs who hated each other could pass each other by on a daily basis but do nothing more than glare at one another. Violence, by mutual agreement of all parties, was forbidden there.
Once the gangs got away from Las Vegas Boulevard, however, the gloves were off.
People, gang members and innocents alike, were dying in large numbers.
Rocky and Skaggs took a pass.
They were on their way back to Los Angeles when Dave happened through.
Rocky had a very weak bladder and tended to get up two or three times a night to empty it. Though only forty years old his friends teased him, called him “old man,” and told him it wouldn’t be long before he was wearing adult diapers.
He personally didn’t think it was funny.
The pair tended to camp away from the highway at night, preferring the bedbug-free environment of their own tents to the increasingly-infested sleeper cabs.
And so it was that on this particular night Rocky had crawled out of his tent not long before sunrise to relieve himself.
He was busy watering the weeds and looking toward the highway below him when he saw the darkened shadow of a vehicle pull up in front of an abandoned semi and park.
He was equal parts confused and amazed.
Amazed because vehicles weren’t supposed to be running.
Confused because he wondered whether he was dreaming. If he was dreaming, why did a mosquito just bite his ass? But if he was awake, what in the heck did he just see?
He heard the door on the vehicle in question open and could just barely make out movement in the shadows.
The crescent moon and stars above gave him just enough light to make out the shape of a single figure, most likely a man, who made his way from the vehicle to the tractor trailer fifty feet behind it, and then climb in.
He rubbed his eyes with both hands, expecting the shadowy vehicle to disappear.
It didn’t.
Rocky didn’t want to wake up his partner and be ridiculed. Not until he verified he really saw what he thought he saw.
He put his socks and boots on and slowly and deliberately worked his way down the hill.
Slowly because he didn’t want to wake either Skaggs or the guy in the truck.
Deliberately because the hill was made up of very loose rock. And he’d rather walk down than roll down.
He made it to the highway without so much as a squeak, and placed his hand upon the hood of the Explorer.
The hood was hot. The vehicle had been driven recently, and probably for awhile.
The engine was still cooling and popping softly.
He wasn’t crazy, and he wasn’t dreaming.
And he wasn’t quite sure what to do.
So he quietly made his way back up the hill.
As the sun was coming up, Rocky collapsed his tent and flattened it out, then rolled it up and placed it into his backpack.
He let the air out of his air mattress and did the same thing with it. Then collapsed his tent poles and shoved them in as well.
He’d been hoping his activity and the morning birds singing would wake his partner so he wouldn’t have to. He hated it when he had to wake Skaggs up. He was such a grouch first thing in the morning.
But he felt he had no choice.
There was a chance the shadowy figure would step back out of the truck and back into the Explorer. If he drove off again before Skaggs saw him, he’d spend the rest of his natural life telling Rocky he was crazy and ridiculing him.
And even more important, there was a working vehicle within reach of them, if they could only figure out how to get it.
And Rocky was damned tired of walking.
Chapter 33
“Are you sure?”
“Man, I swear to God. I was standing there doing my business when all of a sudden that Explorer down there drove up. Somebody got out of it and crawled into the sleeper cab on that Adams Freightline rig.”
“And you’re positive you weren’t dreaming?”
“Hell no, I wasn’t dreaming.”
“So what do you want to do about it?”
“I want to take it, that’s what I want to do about it. You said you already went down to take a look at it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, are the keys in it?”
Rocky was caught short.
“I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t think to look. I just mainly went to see if it was real. Because I thought maybe I was going crazy.”
“Get back down there while I break camp. I’ll be down in a few minutes to join you.”
“What do I do if the guy comes back out of the truck?”
“What do you mean, what do you do? You draw on him, you idiot. You hold him at gunpoint until I get down there. Then we give him a decision to make. He can give up his vehicle or he can die.”
Rocky made his way down the hill again as Dave was stretching out and sleeping peacefully in the rig’s sleeper. It was cleaner than most, and had an extra thick mattress to boot.
He’d fallen asleep thinking how lucky the driver had been to have been issued such a rig, and how lucky he was to have stumbled across it.
Yes sir. In Dave’s view this was his lucky day.
Rocky made it down the steep hill without losing his footing and sliding down on his butt or rolling end over end.
Now that it was fully daylight he was a lot more concerned about being seen.
The rig was only fifty feet away.
He could see that the cab was empty through the big Kenworth’s expansive windshield. But the curtain to the sleeper was closed.
He knew it could be drawn wide open without any notice at all.
Shoot, for all he knew there was someone on the other side of it peeking through the seam and watching him.
Someone who might have a gun on him, just waiting for him to make a move to the Explorer.
Rocky did the prudent thing. He pretended to be just another highway nomad wandering the open road, and walked past the tractor, then ducked beneath the tractor’s wheels.
Only then did he draw his weapon and wait.
It was only a couple of minutes before Skaggs came down the hill. He lost his footing and slid about half way before recovering.
Rocky chuckled. Maybe a bad case of rock rash would make him move a little slower next time.
Skaggs couldn’t help it.
The prospect of a running vehicle… any vehicle… was making him salivate.
Once on the blacktop he went directly to the Explorer and placed his hand upon its hood.
The engine had cooled by now, and he couldn’t get a reading.
He was skeptical.
He stuck his head into the broken out rear window behind the driver’s seat.
There were no keys in the ignition.
But there was a rather odd array of wires stretched from beneath the dashboard and onto the dashboard itself. The wires led across the dash to the passenger side, where they connected to an odd contraption which had been screwed onto the dash.
A contraption which had a key hole and looked suspiciously like a second ignition.
Far less skeptic
al now, he looked around for his partner, then saw him waving from behind the tractor.
He double-timed to where Rocky sat crouched.
“Well?” Rocky said. “What do you think?”
“I think you may be on to something.”
“So what do we do?”
“We could spray that sleeper cab with gunfire. Shoot it up twenty or thirty times, then drag his body out and take the keys off it.”
Skaggs looked at his partner like he had three heads.
“What are you, the king of stupid?”
“What?”
“First of all, we may not be the most virtuous of people, but we’re not murderers.
“And even if we were, ammo is too damn valuable to waste. And even if we did shoot up the sleeper, we’re shooting blind. He might get lucky. Are you gonna go in there to drag him out just to find out he’s not dead?
“I’ll tell you what, though. If he’s not dead he’s gonna be plenty pissed off.”
“Okay, okay. I guess it was a bad idea.”
“Ya think?”
“Well, do you have a better one?”
“Yeah. We wait.”
By nine a.m., when there’d been no activity, the pair figured out that Dave had traveled all night and was catching up on his sleep.
By one p.m. it dawned on them that if Dave was in the habit of driving at night he likely wouldn’t emerge again until dark.
That took the stress off them to a degree. They could now relax a bit.
“I’ll tell you what,” Skaggs said. “Dig out your air mattress and blow it up. Stick it underneath the trailer where it’s in the shade and where the north breeze catches you. Crash for a little while. When you wake up in a couple of hours, come and relieve me and I’ll do the same thing.”
“What if he comes out while I’m sleeping?”
“I’ll hold him at gunpoint and yell for you.”
The two of them had an incredibly long day, watching and waiting.
Dave had the easy part, lying on the bunk sleeping the day away, out of the sun and reasonably cool in a t-shirt soaked with water.
His day would get much worse. But not until later.
Chapter 34
About two in the afternoon three other nomads appeared on the horizon to the west of them, walking their way.
Payback: Alone: Book 7 Page 11