She nodded and took a deep breath. When she started to exhale he pulled smoothly on the tube and it came out. She coughed several times and breathed like she’d been starving for air. When she could finally speak, she rasped through dry lips, “what in hell happened?”
“Mutants attacked your rig,” Garrick told her as he checked her pulse and breathing.
“I know that, Garrick. I ain’t got brain damage. I mean what happened that I ended up here with this bandage on my tit and you looking like I’m at death’s door?”
Garrick smiled. The woman was irascible even when injured. “Your truck rolled over just outside the main gates and when everyone was shooting at the mutant, a ricochet went through the cab of your truck and into your upper right chest.” It was only half a lie, Garrick told himself. The bullet had gone through the cab’s roof, but it hadn’t been a ricochet.
“Shit, shit, shit,” the woman cursed. “Damn, that just sucks.”
“Don’t worry, Jo. We’ve got other rigs. You’ll be back driving in eight to ten weeks.”
“It’s not that, hun. It’s just that I’ve driven more than a million and a half miles and that was my first accident.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Garrick told her. “There were no cops involved.”
“God musta really been watching out for me today,” she said solemnly. Garrick couldn’t disagree. He sat with the woman for another 20 minutes to make sure there were no residual effects from the anesthesia or his surgery. He asked Marissa to find the others and they could have a very brief visit.
When he thought she was up to it, he opened the hatchway and indicated to Marissa to let the others come in, but only three at a time.
Chuck, Yvonne and Danielle were the first through the hatchway. They stayed for only a few minutes and assured Jo a new rig, a better rig, would be found for her and that they were glad she was alive.
CJ and Chloe came in next. Chloe was in tears and took Jo’s hand. They had crossed paths after the plague had killed most everyone, been together when the quake had destroyed Sacramento, watched flood waters rise and fall, leaving a mostly dead California in its wake, and had survived together to watch a community grow from the brink of annihilation.
CJ stood mutely. Jo had saved him on the highway and gave him direction when he was about to step off into the chasm of insanity. The woman became his friend and guided him without him even knowing. She was his hidden strength he didn’t know he had. Without her help, this community might not be here and 250 people might either be dead or living a slow death.
Watching Chloe and her friend, he couldn’t help but shed tears. When Jo saw him, she reached out with her other hand to take his. “The doc says I’m gonna be just fine, CJ. Don’t you fret your pretty little head about Ole Jo.”
“I was so scared for you. I didn’t know how we were going to save you. I couldn’t let your truck inside the gates. And I thought I might have doomed you to die at the hands of the mutants,” CJ sobbed. Chloe took his other hand in her free one. She knew how hard it was for CJ to order that the rig was not allowed to make it through the gate.
“You were damn right to do what you did. I’d’ve given that order myself,” she said flatly. “Even if it was you guys out there because this community is one of this world’s last chances at starting over.”
“I hated to do it, Jo. I hated it more than anything.”
“You did it to save the place, CJ. You did it to save the Perry Compound,” Jo told him, then coughed several times. Some spittle dripped out of her mouth and Chloe wiped it off.
“I don’t want you to die,” CJ whispered through tears.
“I’m not going to die, Pretty Boy. You guys need me. God made you my family. He’s given me a home.”
¤ ¤ ¤ ¤
“Gun it!” Myles screamed into the microphone inside his command HUMVEE to the other two drivers in his convoy. The lead vehicle, driven by Deputy Doug immediately picked up speed and Fred slowly accelerated the bus to speeds no one in the right mind would have tried.
Seaman Waters driving the command vehicle with Myles at shotgun kept pace.
“Barry, get up on the machine gun and pop off a few rounds at them. I don’t want them too excited about catching us.”
Barry, one of the young seamen who had come from Illinois with Myles’ new wife DeeDee, smiled wickedly. He’d been picked because he had been at the training base and could follow orders. He also wanted to shoot the M-2 machine gun at something more than paper targets.
Ten minutes earlier, at precisely 1145 hours, Russ had transmitted to Jerry’s farm that a small convoy including a school bus was on its way to pick up the prisoners. Russ had been very casual on the radio to a man named Tony and told him that the convoy had left about an hour earlier.
Myles had begun to wonder if the Smith Compound had overheard the transmission. They were almost through Louisville and would soon be out of range of the camp the crazy Lt. Col. Smith was running.
That was until they saw two vehicles racing down I-264 in their direction. Myles and his convoy were crossing over the other interstate when he saw them in the distance. They were coming in their direction at high speed and someone on the radio was ordering them to stop under the authority of the United States Army.
Myles was having none of it. He kept their speed constant, telling Doug to keep his speed at about 65 miles per hour to give the chasers a chance to get closer, but when the men in the two trucks started shooting from long distance, Myles didn’t want to give them a chance at a lucky hit.
“We don’t recognize your authority,” Myles said to the man on the radio. “We are under orders of Col. Russell Hammond, commander of the 1st Great Lakes Protectorate of the United States Army.”
Putting the microphone back in its holder he ordered Barry to fire off a few rounds. Barry stood up through the sunroof and pulled back on the charging handle, putting the first round into the chamber and pressed the butterfly trigger on the rear of the machine gun.
Five rounds belched out of the antique M-2 Browning. The basic design for the gun was first introduced early in the 20th Century and tens of thousands of soldiers had manned such a gun through more than a hundreds years of its service. Barry had been familiarized on M-2 for one afternoon more than year ago, but it was a simple design and pressing the butterfly trigger was the easiest thing about it.
The two trailing trucks, still more than two thousand yards behind them, began swerving, but they stayed on pace with the convoy. The distance was about the effective range of the big .50 caliber, but Barry had no illusions about hitting the trailing trucks. His job was to keep them interested in following and engaged for a few miles, taking them further away from the camp.
Barry knew their primary mission was to pick up the prisoners from the Saunders’ farm in some backwater little town in somewhere Alabama, but the secondary mission was to distract the soldiers and keep their attention long enough so Sgt. Bare and her team could infiltrate and reconnoiter the base. Bare and her team would have 12 hours to complete their mission before rejoining the rest of the contingent three hours before R-hour, the time Lt. Jimenez and his team would infiltrate the camp and terminate Smith’s command.
This part of the mission was the most problematic of the plan Col. Hammond had devised. There were a lot of ifs and a lot of guesses during Russ’ briefing. “If Smith is as deranged as I think he is, and if he tries to stop the convoy going for prisoners, he’ll probably focus his attention in that direction and not our real purpose of removing him from command and giving the people living in that camp the chance to relocate somewhere of their choosing,” Russ had said during the final briefing that morning. “I don’t think he believes what we can put together a viable plan in such a short time, but I know he’ll be preparing for us.”
Russ had looked at the military people. They seemed so young and he knew they were inexperienced, but they volunteered to do this and Russ vowed to make sure they knew all the haz
ards he could think of. “I’m no psychologist, but between what I heard in his voice and from what Tony at the Saunders’ farm has said, the man is unbalanced. Maybe everything I think is wrong and he has already out thought us,” he said, rubbing his chin. “There’re so many possibilities I can’t think of them all, so Lt. Jimenez and Sgt. Bare will be thinking on their feet and making decisions on what they see with their own eyes and their team’s.
“What I believe is Capt. Eldred must make it look like we are afraid to face the lieutenant colonel’s military. If he thinks we are going to come in force to face him and the tanks and artillery he probably has, we have to think a guerrilla attack. I’m betting right now, he has his big guns covering every square inch of real estate around his camp and guards patrolling 24 hours a day with night vision and spotlights.
“Lt. Jimenez will command a squad of 12 who will officially relieve Smith of his command and take him into custody.
“Sgt. Bare and her team of three commandos will go in first to ascertain the defenses and personnel deployment by the colonel, and then rejoin Jimenez to infiltrate and execute the plan. She will be responsible for forming the attack plan on the scene. There will be no radio contact between them and us until the plan is completed or our team has been forced to retreat.
“A reserve force of six trucks with medics and heavy weapons will take up position seven miles north of the camp’s outer perimeter to support a retreat or pick up wounded survivors.
“Our goal is to take Lt. Col. Pendleton Smith into custody without causing a full scale war between Ft. Knox and ourselves because they have tanks and artillery. Given time they could easily transport a few of their heavy pieces into range of our community.
“We want to do this without a single casualty, but those people have to be freed from the colonel’s tyranny. Any questions?” There had been none and the soldiers had about 30 minutes to say their good byes to friends and loved ones.
That final briefing had been earlier that morning and Myles felt things were falling into place. “Shoot at them again, Barry,” Capt. Eldred told the sailor, but drop your rounds in front of them a few hundred yards. “We want them to think they can get closer for another mile or so.”
The Deputy Doug had the lead vehicle up to 77 miles per hour, the top speed of the school bus. The attackers could easily keep up and closed the distance as Barry fired two groups of four shots behind them. The rounds dropped well in front of the attackers, tearing up pieces of pavement, but not doing any damage.
Another minute passed before the attackers started firing at Myles’ convoy again. One round of large-diameter projectile put a two-inch hole in the back of the school bus.
“Close enough, Barry! Back those sons-of-bitches off our ass! We’ve done all we can!” Eldred ordered. “And be quick about it sailor!”
That was all Barry needed. He’d already figured the range of the trailing trucks and he began a systematic three-shot burst barrage at them. The HUMVEE shook with each press of the butterfly trigger and the first rounds were impacting even as the second and third shots were being fired.
The first truck following them was hit and erupted in a cloud of steaming radiator and Freon from its destroyed front end. Barry figured the engine was toast as well because smoke started coming from the truck.
The convoy curved out of sight of their chasers and by the time they were five miles further away, they knew they had escaped and had no one following them.
“We’ve done our part,” Eldred said to Seaman Waters behind the wheel, “Well done, Barry,” he added over his soldier to his gunner. “Now it’s up to our commandos.” He picked up the microphone and clicked it four times, then three times. Russ and the radio operator would be listening for the clicks on the radio back at the base. It would tell them the first part of the plan had been successful and that Erica was free to start her action.
Russ, in the clear, called the Saunders Farm and told them their convoy had been attacked, but had survived and would arrive the next day for the prisoners. Erica would hear the transmission and begin her reconnoiter of Smith’s camp.
Sgt. Bare had been a communications specialist with an Indiana National Guard unit before the fall of civilization. She’d been attending a technical school studying electronic. She’d lost her parents, grand parents, fiancé, two older sisters and a younger brother. She’d cried as much as anyone when the world ended and still harbored scars from her hurts.
When first found by Capt. Eldred, she had been searching for food as she waited for the plague to take her. She didn’t die and teamed up with Eldred and a few others. Eldred was a captain of a different National Guard unit, but he seemed to have an idea of a better way to survive.
What Eldred offered paled in comparison to what Col. Hammond proposed that first day they met. The elderly man had clearly been a superior officer in the military and he was a fair and gentle man who seldom raised his voice and was always willing to listen to other people’s opinions, thoughts and problems.
Under his command, she felt like there was something in life more than the sorrows of the past. He encouraged her and she got the radio station working and more people came to the base. With more people came those with more experience and they’d taken over the radio broadcasting, even though she was in charge of the station. She had been monitoring the ham radio when first contact with the Saunders Farm had been made.
It was the attack on the armory which brought into focus what Erica wanted to do with her new life. When the colonel formed a military unit and offered Erica the position as a platoon sergeant she jumped at it and began studying leadership and martial arts. Through the winter she worked out and trained others in unarmed self-defense, small unit maneuvering and commando tactics. She worked out physically during the day and studied at night.
In her regular conversations with Lisa, the older woman occasionally asked about her personal life. She lived with the Marine Lance Corporal, a handsome man about her age, and Fred, a man in his mid-30s with perpetually dirty hands. But the three just lived together as friends and the pain of losing the man she loved and had been prepared to marry before the death that took him in the night, still kept her heart from sharing itself.
The course of her teaching and training brought her to a hillside in a wooded area several miles north of Lt. Col. Smith’s camp. She had three others with her, all members of her commando team who had trained with her. All three were wearing hand-made ghillie suits with Mylar balloon material sewn on the inside to help reduce the heat signature of the four. Each would operate separately and approach the camp once darkness fell. Each had a pair of high-powered binoculars, night-vision goggles, a notepad and two pencils. They were armed only with a personal side arm of choice. They’d been given strict orders to not make contact with anyone.
Their mission was to see how the defenses were set up and look for a way to get inside the sprawling camp without being seen. They were also tasked with locating Lt. Col. Smith and the communications building. They had less than 12 hours and at 0300 had to have all the intel they could gather and return to the platoon led by Lt. Jimenez. His platoon was encamped behind the hill they were now hiding on.
Bare would brief the lieutenant and the two would affect the take over of the camp and apprehension of Smith if everything went as planned.
She looked at her watch. It was 1519 hours. In her ear she heard Russ’ call to Jerry at the Saunders Farm. Erica was glad to hear that Capt. Eldred had survived the attack and was on his way to pick up the prisoners. He was only two years older than her, but she liked the man who was a mentor and friend to her.
Bare looked over at the other three in her team. She nodded to them and the three slunk off in three different directions to do the job they had been assigned. “God go with you,” she whispered. She’d not see them for almost 12 hours, but she had faith her commandos would do as they had been asked and faith that God had brought her here to this moment in time by His will.
<
br /> Russ, back at the armory, hung up the microphone after contacting the Saunders Farm.
“Now it’s in God’s hands. All we can do it wait,” he said to Lisa who had been by his side since early that morning when the convoys left Ft. Benjamin Harrison. “Our next contact will be sometime in the morning.”
“Maybe we should try to get some sleep?” she suggested.
“You go ahead, dear. I’m going to wait here in case I need to move the reserves up to rescue anyone.”
Lisa figured as much. Russ had been very concerned with sending his friends into harms way while he sat back in the relative safety of the base. He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. The previous night he hadn’t slept well and had gotten up unusually early.
She hadn’t seen this side of the man before and was worried he’d work himself into a heart attack or stroke. She rubbed his hand gently and told him she’d bring his meals to him. He smiled a grim smile and nodded to her.
Waiting had always been difficult for Russ. Even when serving in the military he was a man of action and liked to be a part of getting things done. That he had to sit here and wait was not something the colonel wanted to do.
Russ had to trust Capt. Eldred and the young officer had done a magnificent job. He was very pleased with the captain and how well he had matured in the last six months. He had been a competent officer, but he was also becoming an excellent leader who would take over the 1st Great Lakes Protectorate when Russ retired…again.
He admired the dedication of Sgt. Bare to her training and the training of others as well. He hoped she’d find someone with whom she could get personally involved. He felt that would help balance her, but she was still young and had plenty of time for that in her life...if she survived the day.
Hell Happened (Book 3): Hell Released Page 31