Carson would make a good president if he ever got out of the bunker. He was sure the General would pick all kinds of cabinet members from different areas so the “government” would carry on. It was on the bottom of his worry list, he had done what they asked. It was all official and if he made it back here, he’d worry about acting presidential or something. Meanwhile, he had a long way to go and he’d already wasted too much time.
He glanced at his phone again, checking for messages out of habit. None of the apps he had downloaded worked except solitaire. He switched it back over to airplane mode so it wouldn’t search for a signal all day and run the battery down.
The sun was just below the eastern horizon as he threw on some clothes and headed towards the diner. He had told the guys he was convoying with that he was rolling at seven. Be there or be left behind.
The little apartments they were planning on building weren’t finished yet but most of the people had bedded down in the empty broker’s offices so the diner was nearly empty. Martha was up and poured him a cup of coffee as he approached the counter. Gunny could smell biscuits baking in the oven and nodded his ‘good morning’ to Cookie who was at his griddle.
Cobb came out of the back and stomped over to where Gunny was sitting and took a stool beside him at the counter.
“We’ve got a problem,” he said. Typical Cobb. No pussyfooting around.
“What’s that?” Gunny asked
“That General said we’re in a fallout zone if the reactor in Washington goes up.”
“Yeah,” Gunny said “But didn’t he say there were teams that were going to take care of it? Remove all the rods?”
“Yup, but the nearest muzzie mosque is 150 miles away from it. I can’t risk staying. Besides, there’s no future here. We couldn’t get the well to work yesterday. It's bone dry, so in a couple of days we won’t have any water.”
Gunny looked around at the truck stop, at all they had, and all Cobb’s family had built over the last half century.
“That sucks,” he said. “Your family has had this place for what? Fifty years?”
“Just because all the good land was taken,” Cobb said. “This ain’t nothing but desert scrub nobody wanted. Now there’s plenty of lands available. And it’s all free.”
“What are you planning on doing?”
“There’s a big reservoir near Lakota, Oklahoma according to the General,” he said. “It’s in a safe area if everything goes wrong and the Hajjis can’t get all the rods out everywhere. Good water, good land, good hunting, good fishing and not in the wind path of any reactors. We need to get there.”
“Who’s we?” Gunny asked
“Everyone” Cobb replied. “After you took off to your truck to crash out last night, we had a little powwow in here. Wire Bender had flipped the coms on in the diner once you said you’d take the job as President and everyone heard you do the swear in thing with the General. Everybody knows we have to leave and everybody agreed the best way was to convoy down with you and the rest who were taking off this morning.”
Gunny grimaced. He wanted to leave soon and didn’t want to be responsible for a bunch of drag ass civilians.
Cobb saw the turmoil on his face, guessed at what he was thinking. “You have a bigger responsibility now than just yourself,” he said. “Like it or not, all of us are going to depend on you.”
Gunny sighed and rubbed his hand across his eyes. “Okay,” he said. “You’re right. It’s smart to leave anyway, even if you did have water. If they screw up with getting the rods out, you wouldn’t know it until it was too late. How soon till we can roll?”
“Realistically?” Cobb asked “Tomorrow morning. Griz and that deputy you brought back are going to run a refresher course for the vets this morning, make sure everyone is up to speed on communications and tactics and road procedures. Going to be a big convoy. We don’t want to lose anyone. We’ve got a lot of packing to do.”
He continued in his rusty voice. “We’re never coming back and we need to take as much as possible with us. I wish we still had the internet, I could see what kind of businesses were down there so we wouldn’t have to pack generators or welders if there were a bunch already there. But we’re going in blind, so we need to take everything.”
“Right,” Gunny said. “I’ll grab my maps and start planning a route, avoiding the cities. But seriously, Cobb. I need to be on the road tomorrow morning. My wife is trapped in a high rise and my kid is stuck in a room at his high school.” I hope…he added to himself.
“Yeah, about that. I got to thinking and had Wire Bender get a hold of Cheyenne Mountain this morning. You being the president and all, I told him to see if they can pull your wife’s phone records from NSA. She may have emailed or texted you some more and it didn’t deliver. If it uploaded though, they should be able to find it. I told them to check your kid’s too.”
“But they don’t know their numbers,” Gunny said.
Cobb just laughed cynically. “They know everything,” he said.
Gunny gave a sideways grin. “You’re pretty savvy for an old timer,” he said. “Thanks, Cobb. I didn’t even think about something like that. You should be the president, not me. I don’t have the brains for it and you know it. Hell, everybody knows it.”
“Feeling sorry for yourself?” Cobb rasped, glaring at him.
“No,” Gunny replied. “But you know you’d do a better job of it.”
“Probably,” Cobb said. “But it ain’t me. It’s you. And I don’t reckon you’ll screw it up too bad. Just don’t get so big for your britches you forget to take advice from people who are smarter than you.”
Gunny nodded and the old man grunted, grabbed his coffee cup and clomped off.
Chapter 24
The morning started out slowly with the night shift guards coming off duty and the people sleeping in the temporary apartments waking up and wandering in for coffee. Of course, when Scratch, Lars and Stabby came in and noticed Gunny sitting at a table going over his maps, they immedieately ran over. They started bowing and scraping, calling him your Royal Highnessness, offering to shine his shoes and “shall I comb your eminence’s golden hair” and “Shall I wipe your royal butt, your most esteemed one.”
Gunny’s ‘Piss off!’ only brought more bowing and scraping with profuse apologies for being so inadequate for his Majesties most magnanimous Royal Greatness and the world was blessed because they were impotent and wouldn’t curse the planet with their inferior offspring. Each was trying to out bow and out grovel the other. The gathered people were much amused.
Cobb clomped in and put an end to it with a list of everything that needed to be done. Gunny wondered if he ever slept. He started assigning tasks to everyone, including the kids and told them to all hurry up and eat, no time to sit around jack-jawing.
Gunny had an idea and stood up to ask if anyone could fly a plane? A helicopter? It would make things so much easier. But no one could. The closest was Carl of the Prius, and he only had experience on a computer flight sim. He and his girl had seen the mayhem when they left and managed to get turned around and made it back to the safety of the Three Flags.
Later in the evening, when most of the tasks had been completed, when all the materials they had on hand was used to up-armor the trucks and they were loaded and were ready to roll, everyone was called in from their jobs for a hot supper. They were having the last full course meal for the next week or so and Preacher wanted it to be a little something special.
This may be their final supper. They were facing the unknown in the morning. He said a prayer over their meal and everyone dug in. Cookie and Martha and Kim had outdone themselves, making a dinner to remember. Forty people ate with gusto, with the only ones not able to join being the unfortunate few who had guard duty.
Scratch, Stabby and Lars had worked on improving the designs of the stabbing weapons they had used the previous day and made as many as they could for everyone; the wicked, spiked knuckle dusters being a favori
te because they left the hands free to handle guns easily.
Stacy had commandeered much of Lars’ cocaine stash, saying it was originally used as medicine and it was going to be used as medicine again. She left him a small bucket of it and gave them very stern warnings that if she ever suspected their use of it endangered anyone’s lives, there would be swift and serious old west style justice coming at them from the end of a rope.
It was a free country but by God, they better not abuse it. Sara was there giving them the evil eye, clicking her nails on the handle of the 9-inch blade she had strapped to her thigh. They didn’t know if she was kidding or not but decided to take her at her word. She was kind of scary when she was pissed and Scratch told them how cool and calm she was about shoving letter openers into the brains of people still alive.
“Damn,” Lars said as they walked off with a few million dollars’ worth of powder. “They could teach Tony Montana a thing or two.”
“Yeah” sniffed Stabby. “Stacy and Sara. The S.S. sisters.”
A couple of the trucks had PTO pumps on them and they had been modified to be able to pump fuel out of the ground of any gas station or truck stop they came to. That covered resupply for the trucks and the 12volt pump idea Gunny had was still a good one for Sara’s motorcycle. Until they found one, though, they had filled up a handful of five-gallon cans and strapped them on the catwalk of Griz’s truck.
She had gotten her Fireblade around to the shop and Tommy had stripped some of the plastics and built a lightweight exoskeleton frame for her to protect the most vulnerable parts of the bike if she went down. She wanted to ride point a few miles ahead of the main group and let them know if anything bad was coming up. She had shot down everyone who tried to talk her out of it. It was her bike, her life and she was riding. So piss off, as Gunny liked to say.
Wire Bender had been working all day rigging up radios. He built a hands-free mic for Sara’s helmet and mounted a peaked and tuned CB with a small amplifier and its antenna to the back of her bike. He put a better set of antennas, an extra CB and a Ham radio in Gunny’s truck so he could talk to Cheyenne Mountain if needed.
General Carson had tried to speak with Gunny about a few organizational things, but his reply had been the same every time. “Take care of it. You’re in charge of that. Any luck with my wife’s phone?” And pretty soon, the General had quit bugging him.
After dinner, Gunny and Cobb walked around all of the vehicles lined up in the junkyard, checking each for any problems or deficiencies that may have been missed. It was most of the trucks that had been there, modified big rigs and their trailers full of food or supplies. When Tommy cut up the livestock trailer to build the plows, they had let the cattle out to graze what they could from the weeds growing up around the rusting hulks. It wasn’t much, but they would leave the gates open when they left and the cattle could fend for themselves.
There would be plenty more to round up once they got to where they were going. The Cowboys had their tour bus fully fueled and it was to be loaded with the people in the truck stop and the few surviving family members of Tommy’s mechanics. No one wanted to drive their car, they all felt safer in the armored bus. And it had a bathroom. Besides, once they got to where they were going, they could go to the nearest dealer and pick out any car they wanted.
They walked on past the last truck, past the impromptu gun range where Griz had been drilling everyone and to the small graveyard near the back fence. Gunny noticed a cross for Tiny had been erected.
“Preacher do that?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Cobb replied. “We lost some good men that first day.”
Gunny stayed quiet. He had nothing to add to that. They stood in silence for a moment, remembering, and he noticed a small, hand carved sign hanging on the fence above the graves. It read: John 3:16 has conquered Zechariah 14:12.
“What’s that all about?” he asked Cobb. “I know the John verse, ‘God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son’, but what’s the other one?”
Cobb looked at it through the haze of his Lucky Strike. “Preacher said this whole zombie uprising was written about by the Old Prophets. He said there’s a bunch of passages about the dead rising. Like most of the weird stuff in there, everyone just thought it was an allegory or something. Guess it wasn’t.”
“I’ve read the Book a few times,” Gunny said “But I don’t remember anything about zombies.”
“It’s in there.” Cobb said “I just didn’t think it meant what it said.”
“I was thinking.” Gunny started, wanting to change the subject, “Maybe we should go by Cheyenne Mountain, try to get the General and his men out, or at least clear out the zeds for them. They’re just a bunch of egg heads and we’ve got a pretty hard crew here.”
“Already discussed that with him,” Cobb said. “They may be POGs but they ain’t dumb. They made a kind of maze out of the cubicle dividers in their area. They’ll open the door and one or two zeds will rush in and they’ll close it behind them and then stab them to death with sharpened chair legs from behind the maze walls. They set up trip wires, all kinds of things to slow them up so they can kill ‘em.”
“Pretty smart,” Gunny said. “So they are whittling the numbers down?”
“Yeah. They’ve killed about thirty so far. Haven’t lost any of theirs. The biggest problem is the smell.”
“I can imagine.” Gunny said “Thirty bodies piled up in a corner rotting away. How are they set for food and water?”
“It’s a problem. They’ve got water as long as the place keeps ticking along. He said they need to get out to service the generators, but Jack said the electricity is powered by turbines from an underground river. So I don’t know. Maybe they’ve changed since he was in M.I. The place is supposed to be fully self-sustaining. They hope to have all of them killed out of the immediate area over the next day or so. The mess area is only a few hallways away once they clear the communications block they are in now. He said they should get there soon. Then they can go on indefinitely.”
“So they don’t need our help?”
“We couldn’t get in the front doors even if we went there,” Cobb said. “It would take a dozen tanks a dozen reloads to blow the barriers. Besides, General Carson said our priority is to get these people to safety and pick up anyone we find along the way.”
Gunny had been busy all day, hustling to help everyone get their trucks loaded and ready, checking and rechecking weapons and making final improvements on his own rig. There was Griz’s mandatory training class, dropping trailers they had no use for and reloading wagons with supplies they thought they might need. There had been zombie killing duties and he had pulled a shift atop the roof to take them out before they got close to anyone working outside.
He hadn’t had much time to think beyond the immediate. Hadn’t had time to think of his “presidential” duties but Cobb had been on top of things. It was weird having Top defer to him instead of telling him he needed to shave or something. To treat him like a superior when Gunny was just Gunny. Just Johnny Joe Meadows from Backwater Kentucky. Same old truck driver he was yesterday.
Except now he didn’t have a house payment.
Or any more credit card bills.
And he could get himself a new $60,000 fully loaded pickup truck just by walking into the dealership and looking for the keys.
Hell, he could find the fanciest mansion in town and claim it if he wanted. Well, if the owner was dead, that is.
But all of these things were the last of their kind. There wouldn’t be a next year’s model. Once the shelves were empty at the mall, they wouldn’t be refilled. Once they ran out of your shoe size, it would be back to hand cobbled. How would you get a replacement if you broke a window? None of that seemed important at the moment as he looked down at the wooden cross where Preacher had carved Tiny’s name. Death was very close now.
He sighed. He didn’t even know Tiny’s real name. He’d just always been Tiny all the years he’
d known him. Didn’t know where his wife lived. He had gone through his truck hoping to find something with his home address on it. His wallet must have been on him when he went down and he didn’t find anything else in his search. His phone was missing, too. Probably also in his pocket.
“General asked if you would check in around ten o’clock, our time,” Cobb said.
Even that was weird. ‘The General asked if you would.' Gunny had been used to taking orders from officers, not giving them. Not being ASKED to do something by a General.
“Right,” he said, glancing at his watch. “I’ll be along in a few minutes.”
Cobb just grunted and walked off in his limping gait, knowing the man needed a moment to himself.
He stared at the crosses with the names carved into them, at the mounds of sandy soil. Guys he had known only in passing and guys he had known for years. Pure dumb luck he wasn’t one of them buried six feet under or worse, one of the screaming undead. He was lucky he hadn’t been caught outside and taken down in the first few minutes like so many others had. He was lucky he had fifteen years of military training to snap him into the reality of what was happening almost instantly.
But even that was a fluke. Wasn’t part of his plan of years ago. He had been a senior getting ready to graduate from the Tri-cities vocational school with a degree in auto mechanics. He was working part time at the tire store in town and had his applications in at all of the big car dealerships, hoping to land a job as a service tech. Life looked good for him.
He was a great mechanic with a wonderful girl who was going to community college that Fall to study to be a teacher. He had plans to put a ring on her finger in a few years when he was making good money. But life got in the way of his plans. Big Billy Wilson and his crew of guffawing idiot jocks came in to get the oil changed in the new Camaro his daddy had bought him. He could put up with their bullying and being an asshole to everybody that didn’t play football, love football or love them because they played football. Their snide comments rolled right off of him.
Zombie Road (Book 1): Convoy of Carnage Page 23