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Hard Road: Deadly Horizon (Dark Plague Book 2)

Page 19

by Bradley West


  Until two minutes ago, the only hiccup in the trio’s sojourn through the Valley Life Science’s Building was the time it had taken Specs to clamber through the ductwork and free them from that putrid tunnel. They’d hiked the considerable length of the building only to be surprised by the security guard stationed near the main entrance. When they’d ignored the geriatric’s order to halt, Specs shot him and all hell broke loose. Now Specs was dead and Mike Norris’ lucky streak had run out. Without missing a beat, Katerina picked up the box with the Dark Cure and ran past him. Norris’ attention snapped back to his assailants as a round chipped concrete at his feet. He fired twice at the next muzzle flash, turned and looked for cover. There wasn’t so much as a shrub or a park bench for yards around—nothing but secondary roads, bike paths, and dried-up lawns.

  Katerina recognized the Englishman’s exaggerated hop-limp as the bandaged and masked man labored toward them. “Fraser?” she cried as she sprinted away from Norris and the gun battle.

  “Katerina!” Burns replied in a mushy English accent. “Follow me!” He saw three armed men burst out of the building thirty yards away and wanted nothing to do with them. As he turned and fled, dragging his bad leg, a white pickup careened around the corner and roared up before slamming into a controlled skid that left the cab facing away from the shooters. “That’s Muller! Get in!” Burns felt the frustration as first Katerina and then Norris passed him, climbed in and slammed shut the rear door.

  Behind them, someone fired on full auto and sprayed bullets everywhere, miraculously missing Burns’ shaking body. Goddamn Muller. He ruined my knee, and he’s about to drive away and leave me to die. The XLT’s engine throbbed, and the tires screeched as the pickup surged backward and slammed to a halt four feet away from the hyperventilating Brit.

  Muller leaned over and popped open the front passenger side door. “Get in” he deadpanned. “We don’t have all night.”

  Norris reached forward from the back seat and helped drag Burns into the cab. Muller floored it as rounds struck the pickup. The CIA’s Defensive Driving Course graduate put his training to use and evaded both bullets and followers. An awkward silence arose as the thrill of escape faded and the occupants realized that they were in the collective company of mortal enemies.

  Norris held the trump card, a loaded .45 pointed at his nemesis. Muller didn’t see any pursuers; he slowed to sixty and turned on the lights. His eyes met Norris’ in the rearview mirror. Before Burns could catch his breath enough to speak, Norris broke the ice: “Thanks for that. I owe you.”

  “Consider it a professional courtesy,” Muller replied. “What happened to your third?”

  “Caught one through the heart. Kid was only twenty.” This was as close to sentimental as Norris came. He holstered his weapon. Katerina pushed the two rucksacks off the seat onto the floor and examined the box with the Dark Cure.

  “We’ve worn out our campus welcome,” Muller said. “Any place special you need to be?”

  “If you’re at loose ends, I’d take secondary roads to Stockton. Go north on the 99 until Sacto and take the 50 all the way into Tahoe. The Souls have a house in the hills, and any of my boys who escaped that shitshow will head there. We can rest, resupply and rearm. We also should have a couple spare Dark Cure jabs.”

  Burns could scarcely believe that Muller’s archenemy was offering a Covid treatment. What was next, dogs and cats living together?

  Katerina spoiled the mood. “Before we pull over for a hugfest, my fucking batch of Dark Cure’s ruined.”

  “Ruined?” Norris asked as he turned to stare at her in the dark. “What do you mean?”

  “A bullet hit the box and shattered the flask. There’s nothing in here we can use.” She dropped it onto the floor with a wet rattle to underscore her point.

  Norris’ only reply was to cough convulsively.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Skipping Towns

  Friday, July 17, 2020: California and Nevada highways at night

  Jaime and his crew transited Winnemucca without seeing anyone, only abandoned vehicles, trash piles, and peculiar signs. There were no bodies or bones, but plenty of scavengers’ red eyes glowed in the high beams he flicked on every few hundred meters. The road was fine, the weather was clear and he varied the SUV’s speed and path sufficiently to make them a tricky target with only a waning crescent moon providing ambient light.

  Jaime admitted to himself that he’d exaggerated his attraction to Barb partially as a lifestyle upgrade. As a bilingual Mexican American with a soldier’s physique and quiet confidence, he’d never lacked female attention, but Barb was his first millionaire’s daughter. She’d picked him up last Halloween at a garden supply warehouse where he’d driven a forklift by day and read dead philosophers by night in his room above a garage. Barb fell hard for the man from Juárez and he’d moved into her tiny San Rafael home two months later. Jaime and Barb were highly compatible in the sack, particularly after a couple of beers or weed and wine in Barb’s case. The rest of the time he felt like a wild animal with one eye on the cage door.

  Barb was attractive and smart. She was also a cause-hopping progressive with a matching set of immaculately dressed and coiffed urban Trustafarian friends. She’d graduated from UC Davis with a degree in Save the Planet agriculture, a love of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and a remote-based consulting role for a tech billionaire’s regenerative agriculture organization. After her second glass of pinot noir, Barb would pontificate on the world’s pending end because of climate change, pollution and food shortages. In the Covid-19 era, she’d stepped up her proselytizing to the point where Jaime couldn’t stand to be in the room with her when she started up one of her rants.

  Jaime had eventually come to understand that this was all just subliminal hatred for her father. That hatred stemmed from Sal neglecting to put his children at the center of his world as did all his daughters’ friends’ parents. He worked long hours, involved himself in community activities, and missed many unimportant sports and school activities.

  Interestingly, over the past week Barb had shifted from damning her father for causing Tyson and Steph’s abductions to lionizing him for their rescues. Needing a new target, Barb had turned her ire on Jaime, and he’d had enough. Since the convoy was well underway and Jaime had played a vital role in protecting it, his status would remain secure if they broke up. Whether he could stand sharing a homestead near the North Pole with Barb until the end of time was a question better answered at the journey’s end.

  Jaime’s backstory had two versions—the sanitized Marin County cocktail circuit snippet and the gritty reality. He had emigrated to Southern California under a false identity with his widowed mother when he was fifteen and enrolled in the Marines after high school for the adventure and a fast track to a green card. He served tours in Iraq and Syria, working his way up from the infantry to a special operations detachment that helped liberate Mosul and supported Delta in Syria. He’d been out of the Marines for more than a year, doing grunt work and hanging out with other veterans, when he met Barb. That was the short and sweet version.

  Behind the scenes, Jaime Gonzalez was born Julio Alvarez to a husband-wife team of mid-level drug distributors for the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Organization, aka the Juárez Cartel. His father died violently when the Zetas pushed to control the cross-border business into El Paso and beyond. Teenaged Jaime had been into bodybuilding, not flake or herb, but he’d known what his parents did for a living and finding his dad’s head in a sack on the front doorstep one morning was a shock but not a surprise. That he had to leave the city on short notice with his mother wasn’t unexpected either. What pissed him off was Maria’s decision to keep wholesaling coke in Los Angeles rather than start fresh and stay legal. She claimed it wasn’t an option since she had to earn a living, but Jaime knew his mother well enough to see that she was addicted to the game—the money, the flamboyant personalities, the risks and, yes, even the violence. The day he turned eighte
en, he signed a six-year USMC contract and walked out of the house. He never saw his mother again given that they only fought on their increasingly infrequent phone calls. If the bullets hadn’t got her, Covid-20 would have.

  Recalling his past had caused him to lose focus, and the Telluride struck a good-sized animal running across the road. Jaime locked up the brakes and the SUV slewed off the highway, across the breakdown lane and into the desert beyond. By the time they’d stopped, he’d blown the right front tire and steam hissed out of the damaged radiator. They were less than a mile north of Winnemucca on Route 95. “Everyone all right?” he called out. Melvin, Yonten and Johnny replied in the affirmative.

  “Melvin, use the radio and alert the convoy to look out for us. We need to unpack the back. The spare is underneath the rear deck and held in place by a long screw up through the floor. Johnny, you’d better look under the hood too.”

  * * * * *

  The three men contemplated their woes: Muller’s through-and-through abdominal wound plus skinned fingers and palm; Norris’ hacking cough; and Burns’ shot-up face. Katerina feigned worry but felt relief that she’d given herself an injection. With Specs dead, there was no one to spill her secret. “Norris, let us know if you feel feverish,” she offered, though she’d be happy to see him dead.

  “I feel like shit,” Norris said. “What do I have, two or three days to get a shot?”

  “Katerina, can you make more?” Muller asked.

  “Not without the equipment back in the lab and plasma from someone immune. Burns, have you recovered for real? If so, you’re a potential donor.”

  The Englishman had expected the question. “I received a half-dose of the vaccine just before I was shot two nights ago. The Army surgeon said they transfused two liters; that’s almost forty percent of my body’s total blood supply. I don’t have a fever at present, but that was true previously and Covid came back and almost killed me.” That two-liters statement was a lie—he had no idea how much blood they’d transfused, if any.

  “Previously we didn’t have anything else to treat you with but a Covid-20 survivor’s raw blood,” Katerina said. “It was a stopgap and that’s why the disease came back. If your fever doesn’t return by tomorrow, you’re immune.”

  “In a few days I’ll be dead,” Norris said. “And so will you—you can count on it.”

  Burns’s face ached like hell and he needed those Percocets but he didn’t want to show weakness in front of these sharks. Besides, he was on the verge of unveiling the grand plan. “If we find the Maggio caravan, they have Covid survivors. Carla Maggio worked at Livermore Labs and has the vaccine formula and maybe extra vaccines. They may even have the lab equipment Katerina needs to make more.”

  “They have a forty-eight-hour head start,” Muller said. “All we know is they’re headed to Canada and they drive a big mobile home. That’s not much to go on now that Norris doesn’t have a dozen bikers to search for them.”

  “Sal Maggio said something a few weeks ago that narrows the search,” Burns said. “Before I tell you, I want us to agree on a new business partnership.”

  “I hope it turns out better than the old partnership,” Norris said. “Between this little bitch’s fuck-ups and the law, we’ve shipped zero cures and collected . . . Hey, you owe me a hundred grand in Bitcoin.”

  “If I can get online, I’ll spend the Bitcoin in ways that help us capture that convoy,” Burns said. “All the old agreements are invalid as there’s no Dark Cure to sell and no way to make more. But I have a proposal to still make us all rich. I own the rights to the 896MX adjuvant vaccine. Carla Maggio has the formula. Help me take it from her and I can license it to a pharma giant. On a royalty-per-dose basis, we can earn hundreds of millions. I’ll have to pay a lot of that away to lawyers and contract enforcers, but there will be plenty left over. I’ll keep half and you three divide up the other half, with your terms agreed now to avoid arguments later. No more double-crosses, at least until Carla Maggio’s in custody, her uncle’s dead and the money is in our accounts. Those are my terms. Agreed?”

  “Sounds fucking thin,” Norris said. “I don’t see you flying to New York to negotiate a deal with Purdue Pharma.” He coughed hard. Muller adjusted his face mask, improving the seal.

  “I’ve been through it with him in more detail,” Muller said. “It can work, but we might not get paid for months. We all need the vaccine or the Dark Cure in the next few days and then stick together until the funds hit the account.”

  “We’d better find the convoy in a hurry,” Burns said. “Otherwise, we’re out of luck.”

  “The convoy will have lab equipment,” Katerina said. “Stephanie told me they raided a warehouse for plasma processing equipment. I can make the Dark Cure if you find the Maggios.”

  “Now we’re talking,” Norris said. “I’m in.”

  “I’m not working for free,” Katerina said.

  Norris gave her a look that could have killed, but said nothing.

  “No one’s expecting you to,” Muller said. “It’s twenty percent each for the three of us and forty percent for Burns.”

  “That’s not what’s on offer,” Burns objected.

  “We can do better than forty if you find us the caravan,” Norris said. “What’s the clue?”

  “Around the office, I heard Sal ask about Mormons. He said he was negotiating with a polygamist, one of those fundamentalists who the LDS threw out a hundred years ago. He wanted to know if they were trustworthy. The convoy is traveling through Mormon territory, headed north. That narrows things down.”

  “One Soul was a lapsed Mormon from Bonners Ferry, up at the top of the Idaho panhandle,” Norris said. “His daddy had a few teenage wives. If the Maggios haven’t run out of gas, they’ll be somewhere between here and there.”

  “I’m glad that proved useful,” Burns said.

  “It’s worth forty-six percent and the three of us will take eighteen percent each,” Muller said. “That’s the last offer.”

  Norris had another coughing fit. “And if we don’t find them within two days, I’ll shoot you all dead before the Covid kills me,” he rasped.

  Things were looking up, Katerina decided. Once they’d taken down the convoy, she’d ensure that Norris received a fake Dark Cure dose and died. She would give Norris’ stake to Muller to handle the muscle, and Burns would be so happy that he was alive that she’d take points off him too. But renewing friendly relations with Muller, not Burns, took priority.

  * * * * *

  The convoy’s occupants saw the hand-lettered signs nailed to Winnemucca roadside poles: “Can you Save our Children?”, “Looking for a Miracle” and “We have NO HOPE without YOU.”

  “Hand me the walkie-talkie,” Carla said. “Let’s stop outside of town and talk. Jaime can fix the SUV while we help these people.”

  Sal did no such thing. “It’s far too dangerous to stop and look for people to help. Gardnerville taught us that.”

  “We have eight extra doses. If we stop and I give them two, we could save many lives.”

  “How? Are you going to stay here and assemble their lab equipment and train them? Maybe we leave Kyle behind to run the process?”

  Kyle was behind the wheel and quick to respond. “Whoa! No, thank you. We can save the most people by uploading the how-to video on YouTube in digestible segments, plus the precise separation and purification instructions.”

  Pat wandered up after a nap. “Did you hear anything from Steph?” she asked. “I’m so worried.”

  “We won’t hear anything for at least a day or two,” Sal said. “When they reach Vegas, it will take a while to treat Tyson, and that will be their top priority.”

  Carla sat and fumed, but she didn’t bother to argue the point with people who didn’t care one iota about anyone outside their inner circle.

  * * * * *

  The Mountain House sat in the hills outside Kingsbury, Nevada, close to Lake Tahoe. One of the member’s grandmas had pass
ed several years ago and left it to her no-good grandson. The ironies were that the lucky sperm club lottery winner was so worthless that the Souls were on the verge of throwing Cleary out when he announced the windfall, and that same Cleary was now doing a nickel inside Folsom State Pen. The Souls hadn’t had the Mountain House long enough to trash it, though they’d thrown several epic three-day parties and the police knew them by sight, smell and sound. At the end of a gravel road well out of town, at least they didn’t have too many complaining neighbors.

  As Dirty Pete pulled up at the end of the road, the lights were on and out back a generator chugged. In the headlights, Pete and Bails recognized the two bikes parked up the drive as Worm and Zax’s, two righteous brothers of the highest order. The two men stiffly dismounted and lit up, enjoying the first smokes in almost four hours. Next was an obligatory piss against the garage door before stomping up the front steps and banging on the door.

  “Open up, motherfuckers! We need beers!” Bails shouted.

  When no one answered, Dirty Pete opened the door and walked in to see Worm and Zax unconscious on the twin sofas. Both of them looked like shit, with red blotches on their faces and sweaty foreheads. “Bails, you and me are gonna have to find another place to crash.”

  * * * * *

  Johnny Gratton was an ace mechanic when he wasn’t chopping up stolen vehicles and selling the parts. He’d had to wait for the radiator to cool sufficiently to plug the crack and adjust the fan belt. The front grill was toast and he cut most of that away, but the Telluride would ride fine once they’d changed the tire. Jaime and Yonten had that under control while a one-armed Melvin cradled an M-4 in his giant left hand and used his sling-limited right arm to sweep a flashlight across the foreboding landscape.

 

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