by JT Sawyer
LB pulled him up while they both looked down the roaring black tunnel, whose mouth he had come close to entering. With wide eyes and heavy panting, they felt the rain hammering down into the shrinking cavern. “We have to go, come on!” Travis shouted. He grabbed Jim by the arm and pushed him to the top of the rock pile. “Get your ass up there now.”
He and LB coaxed Jim’s limp figure up towards the others’ waiting arms. With the water’s edge lapping at his boots, Travis motioned for LB to climb up on his shoulders and ascend. After LB crested the rim, Travis leapt up and grabbed Pete’s and Katy’s hands. He could feel the rock pile slide out from under his encrusted boots as a whirlpool carried away the remaining foundation.
Chapter 9
The two-story cobblestone building at Northern Arizona University looked like any other hall of academe on campus. The wooden sign in front of the building simply read, Sciences. Beyond the sandstone-block walls were double doors, where hundreds of students had passed on a daily basis, unaware of the secure facility that lay three levels below. Back in the 1960s, the university had been one of several institutions to receive substantial grants from the Department of Energy to conduct experiments on microwave radiation. The facility had, in recent years, been used for experimental biology research.
“The new HQ in Flagstaff is almost operational. I’ve got my usual team of twelve mercs, and recon efforts for the professor will commence from here,” said a dark-haired woman dressed in tactical gear with a rose tattoo on her left arm. She spoke into the laptop at an older man’s televised image. “The former cartel members and their thugs will soon be dialed in to what I expect and the consequences if they fail.”
“We scoured the river-rafting company warehouse in Flagstaff, but no signs of any intel yet on the passenger list. We did find some photos at the river guide’s apartment and I am uploading the scanned images now. Your facial software database will pull up anything we have,” said the woman, with a heavy southern inflection.
“And your presence is low profile still?” said the clean-cut man on the laptop.
“We drove in two nights ago from the north without incident. We come and go through the underground walkways between buildings and have control over the main facility down. Several of my men are working on insinuating themselves amongst the local rabble.”
“Excellent. And what of Flagstaff and the surrounding towns…are they all under the control of the bikers?”
“Their leader is being brought to me as we speak. Our proxy war is about to get underway and, with our backing, they will be able to crush any resistance in northern and central Arizona and help us close the noose around the man we’re looking for. We only control a portion of the city at present. The rest is still overrun by the undead mutants. Containment efforts are impossible at this point other than around our immediate facility and the downtown area, which has been barricaded.”
“Once you are done employing the local thugs, incinerate the HQ and dispatch the bikers however you see fit. Despite the distraction posed by the global pandemic, it’s never a good thing to have any loose ends. Are we clear, Nikki?”
“We sure are, darlin’,” she smirked, then clicked the video conference off and closed the laptop. Nikki walked over to a table beside the wall of the stark room. The oblong mirror, with its wood trim, seemed out of place amidst the rifle magazines and ammo cans on the floor below it. Standing in front of it, she pulled her shoulders back and glanced down at her arms, then moved her gaze slowly up to her neck and face. She exhaled and brushed a lock of hair aside from her temple. Her lithe figure was that of an athletic thirty-six-year-old, but the parallel scars on her neck, from an IED blast, and a deep furrow on her left temple, made her look much older.
She stood transfixed by her eyes, lips, and hair. She tilted her head, trying not to focus on the unsightly scars. Nikki scanned the contours of her face and powder-blue eyes. She knew that her lovely figure and southern charm were only surpassed by her brilliant intellect. She was the best of the interrogators in a largely male-dominated agency. Her track record during the past nine years of rogue operations had caused her employer to recognize her considerable psychology skills and, most importantly, moral flexibility when it came to completing assignments.
Nikki grabbed a Sig Sauer pistol off the table and walked towards the elevator doors at the far end of the room. She wasn’t used to being in such modern settings. Most of her work had been spent in psy-ops in third-world countries with little more than a handful of crude instruments and a few vials of persuasive meds to peel back her subject’s psyche.
She walked through a series of steel doors and then down a dimly lit hallway to the library. Inside were three of her men. One of the men was leaning against the concrete wall, flipping a toothpick between his fingers. The other two stood in the center of the room around a burly figure that was zip-tied to a wooden chair. Each of Nikki’s men had their MP-5 rifles strung against their chests in a relaxed fashion. Two of the men had neatly trimmed beards, while the man by the wall sported a mustache with a single stud earring on his left side. On a nearby table were several walkie-talkies, a neat stack of MREs, and trauma kits, alongside a single row of rifle mags.
The man squirming in the chair was a bear-sized figure clad in a leather jacket, who went by the name Enrique. He had formerly headed up the Sanchez Cartel in northern Mexico and his claws had run deep into Tucson and Phoenix before the collapse. His massive, hunched form barely fit on the seat portion of the chair.
Nikki strode up to him. He squirmed his wrists in the zip-ties and threw his bearded chin up, revealing a smile as she approached.
“Hey, alright. Now this is the kinda action I was hopin’ for,” he said with a heavy accent. “I ain’t done it tied up in a while, not since last week, and that was in a backstreet, not at some fancy college.”
Nikki moved closer. The burly man’s breath and body odor were overpowering. “Your putrescent demeanor reminds me of a hostage I once tortured. I left him tied at the bottom of a mass grave in the desert heat for a few days before his mind peeled back. Looks like there’s no point in applying that tactic to you, though.”
The smile left Enrique’s face as he stared into her eyes. As she walked around him, she removed a folding knife from her vest pocket and palmed it behind her back. She knew there wasn’t time for more sophisticated tactics, and a man like Enrique would respond well to an act of tremendous violence displayed towards him.
The giant man sneered over at the two armed men beside him and then back at Nikki. “Nobody talks to me that way, bitch. What the hell kinda place is this and what am I doing here?”
“Don’t you know, sugar?” she said in a honey-sweet voice. “This is a new kind of bed & breakfast in town where we ask you questions and, if you answer correctly, you get to continue enjoying the ability to eat solid food.”
“I just took ownership of this city and I don’t recall seeing you or your pretty soldier-boys here in these parts before. What do you want, chica?”
She leaned forward and placed the shiny blade against his right cheek, the tip near his brown eye. “So many questions, but you just leave those to me.”
“Your laughs will turn into screams for mercy when my men come for me and level this building. Then, they’ll skewer the three of you pendejos on the flagpole outside.”
“You must be someone to reckon with. Maybe we messed with the wrong guy,” she smiled. “Though it was pretty easy to ambush your small convoy and separate you out from the rest of the garbage,” she said, walking around the front of him. The two guards let out a faint chuckle and glanced at each other.
He swung his head around, smiling. “Do you know who I am? What I’ve done to people? You better let me go, you scar-faced whore.”
Nikki’s eyes narrowed and her lips tightened. She lunged forward and with a single blinding stroke, sliced off half of the man’s left ear. He screamed and landed on the floor, like a piece of fallen timber, wri
thing in pain. “What have you done….you crazy fucking bitch. You cut off my ear….”
She sprung upon him and delivered another slash across his right cheek, exposing the thin muscles and gums below. Grabbing his greasy hair and yanking his head back, she thrust her knife towards his eye, pulling back at the last second with her hand quivering. Her face was red and a bead of sweat rolled down her forehead as her mind reeled back to his comment. Before the IED explosion that had raked open her neck, Nikki was always a collected, calm operator. Now, comments on her looks unraveled her, sending her into a rage she could barely contain. The nature of her work had long provided an outlet for her personal demons, but she could never seem to quell the anguish arising from such assaults on her marred beauty.
She held the tip of the blade before the man’s eye with a white-knuckled grip. She took a deep breath, rocking the knife back and forth. The guards looked at one another with hesitation. The seated guard jumped to his feet. Nikki looked up, studying each man, all of whom were new in her unit. “Don’t worry your pretty faces. I only shred a person back to the point of their perceived physical collapse. The mind fails long before the body,” she said.
Enrique was silent, his eyes swollen with terror while his ear leaked onto the tiled floor. Nikki eased her grip on his hair and flung his head back. She held the knife inches from his face while straddling his body. Then she wiped the blade across his leather jacket and slowly closed it, placing it back in her vest. Nikki stood straight, took a deep breath, and gently brushed a lock of her hair back. She clenched her fist behind her and turned back towards the wailing man.
“The next words that come out of your mouth should involve more forethought or my blade will strike much, much lower and your days of taking innocent women will be over. Savvy?”
The squirming man nodded and attempted to sit up on his knees, his sliced facial muscles quivering uncontrollably.
Nikki motioned to the guard on the right. “Cut him loose and get him some gauze. I need him to be coherent.”
The guard moved forward and severed the zip-tie around Enrique’s wrists, then retrieved a package of gauze from the table and flung it down at the man’s boots. The man sat back on the chair and packed the gauze around his ear and cheek. He looked up at Nikki with darting glances, then back at the floor.
“If you are done bleeding, I am going to explain how you and your gang are going to reign supreme over northern Arizona, having all the resources you need,” she said, folding her muscular arms across her chest. “After today, you will answer only to me, and when you have done my bidding, you will be an untouchable force in the Southwest. Now—isn’t that worth an ear?”
Chapter 10
Several forms began to stir under the massive grandmother juniper trees on the plateau as the first orange slivers of sunlight issued forth from the east. Covered in a thick layer of duff and leaf litter, Travis sat up as a mound of brown debris fell off his chest and sides. The cool morning air was permeated with the scent of rain, mixed with the cedar-like aroma emanating from the grove around him. The cavern-top mouth they had emerged from sat a half mile off.
He looked up at the juniper tree with gratitude and understood why the local tribe called it Bittahatsi—the one that provides for us. With twilight upon them last night and the temps dropping, their soaked bones would have struggled to fend off hypothermia. Like a band of prairie dogs, they burrowed into the duff layer under the ancient trees and covered themselves generously with the fluffy, insulative material. Travis had slept before in such improvised natural beds, well below freezing and with only the clothes on his back. Not the most comfortable of accommodations, but then survival and comfort didn’t go together, he had reminded them.
From the familiar configuration of distant mountains, he estimated that they were around twenty miles southeast of the ranch house. The terrain about them consisted of undulating layers of beige slickrock peppered with orange lichens. Littering the ground were occasional piles of antelope and jackrabbit droppings. Their juniper grove was nestled in a valley between two immense mesas that rose a few thousand feet off the desert floor. Beyond this stretched a backstop of sand dunes that resembled large ships.
Sprawling in sandstone depressions in front of Travis were hundreds of glimmering pools of water born of the recent thunderstorm. Some of the water pockets were tub-sized while others spanned fifty feet. To outsiders, such a region seems like it could provide for all of one’s needs, but ephemeral water sources evaporated quickly in the heat of the afternoon, causing the landscape to quickly reclaim its arid reputation.
Travis crawled out from under the twisted maze of branches and sat down on a flat rock, near LB, to empty his boots of silt. Dotting the ground were purple-colored juniper berries. LB was picking up the berries, rolling them around between his fingers like an inspector. “They look tempting but don’t eat ’em,” said Travis. “Juniper, in quantity, stimulates the appetite, and most people get sick from more than a few berries.”
“Damn. I thought I wasn’t going to have to venture far for breakfast,” said LB.
“The most useful thing about the berries is the white coating on the outside. It can be used as a yeast substitute for baking bread, so just keep that in mind for future calzone recipes.”
Travis laced up his boots and walked over to a water pocket. He knelt down to drink and noticed his face mirrored in the surface. A sight he’d not seen in three weeks. Spreading his mouth over the surface, he dipped his lips and began drinking.
“Aren’t you going to purify that first?” said LB.
“The water scouring through here last night blasted these holes out pretty good. I’ve drunk from such sources for years. Now, if these had been sitting a few days and were filled with animal shit and bugs, then I’d rethink that,” he said, sitting back. “We oughta save our remaining iodine tablets for less than desirable waterholes. Besides, there’s no cure for death from dehydration that I know of, so find a water pocket and start gulping—just remember to grit your teeth to strain out the big stuff,” Travis said with a half-smile as he resumed drinking.
“Whatever you say, boss,” said LB.
‘Boss.’ That’s a term I haven’t heard in a while and hoped not to have in my next job title.
The rest of the group began stirring from their tree-bound cocoons. Travis went back and sat down by his gear to do a quick inventory. The food was gone, water bottles empty, and everything else was caked with sand. He sat down and pulled out his pistol and began field-stripping it to remove any grit wedged inside. Afterwards, he cleaned the mags as best he could with a bandanna and then commenced cleaning the filthy lever-action rifle. Unlike the Glock, it was a fickle weapon when it came to maintenance. His mind ran back to a mission he had done in northern Afghanistan with a small contingent of Uzbekis his unit had trained. He recalled an old Uzbeki man, after one battle, field-stripping his Glock and cleaning it with the powdery gray dirt at his feet. Some weapons and some people are just made to keep on going no matter what the day throws at ’em.
LB sat down next to him and began dismantling his 1911 pistol. In a series of flowing actions, the man detached the magazine, emptied the chamber and removed the slide. Travis handed him the bandanna and then began reassembling his own weapons.
Pete came up and stood beside the two men, letting out an overdue yawn and wiggling the sand out of his right ear.
“Doesn’t that look like Picacho Butte over there?” said Travis, pointing to a large conical rock jutting out of the ground.
“Sure does. That would put us about twenty-five miles southwest of the town of Ashfork,” replied Pete as he sauntered over to a waterhole and swigged down some water. He stood up and wiped the droplets from his scruffy blond chin and paused for a minute, squinting into the distance. “Do you see that reflection out there? There’s something moving a few miles away.”
Travis and LB put their weapons aside and began scanning the area two miles up. They notice
d what looked like a long metallic ribbon coasting towards the east on what appeared to be the interstate. Travis reached back and grabbed the binoculars from his pack. After quickly dusting them off, he glassed the horizon. “Looks like a convoy of trucks and choppers,” he said. Travis scanned towards the direction from which the riders had just come and saw a single plume of black smoke in what looked like a house near the highway.
“Do you think these guys are connected with the people at the hotel?” said LB.
“Maybe. Who knows? This looks like a well-organized gang who’ve been surviving on the road quite nicely. Question is—where are they based?”
The convoy continued east until they were out of Travis’s range. “I imagine the world is now divided up into those who simply want to live and those who live to kill,” he said, placing the binos atop his pack.
Jim was curled in a fetal position under a nearby juniper, still sleeping. Becka, who had slept in between Katy and Evelyn, was sitting up while Evelyn was gently brushing her fingers through the girl’s hair, trying to untangle the bunched-up strands.
“LB, can you rouse everyone and have them gather around?” said Travis.
“Sure thing,” said LB, who walked over to the three ladies first.
Travis stood next to Pete. “It looks like there’s a pretty good-sized canyon about three miles south of here. My thought is, we head there and set up camp for a few days to rest, hydrate, and do some trapping, as that area will afford more protection than this open country here. We shouldn’t run into any of those creatures way out here in the sticks, and it’d be safer than venturing into one of the towns until we can recon the situation and see how things look.”