by Ts Alan
Though J.D. believed the odds were against it being the same person, he still needed to know, but that would have to wait. There was another matter that needed more immediate attention, and that was of a staff member who was once again not present.
“Now,” he said, in an annoyed tone. “I see Doctor France is absent once again. Anyone know where the quack is? This is the third meeting he’s not attended.”
James spoke up. “Unavailable, so he told me earlier.”
J.D. addressed James as he aggressively tapped a talon on the conference table, “You know what? Cancel my subscription, cause I’m sick and tired of his issues. If he doesn’t show up next meeting,” J.D. informed his subordinate, “have him arrested and put in detention for a night. See how agreeable—No!” J.D. burst out in an angered tone, interrupting his sentence, as he slammed a fist to the table. His men were shocked by the outburst. “Strike that order,” he counter-commanded. “It’s about time I dealt with the pretentious son-of-a-bitch myself,” he announced, clearly agitated. As quickly as J.D.’s anger arose it vanished. No one at the table thought too much of their commander’s odd behavior. They all knew J.D. was under a lot of pressure as their leader and that the relationship he had with the doctor was for the most part adversarial.
“Peter,” J.D. addressed. “I have read the report you submitted yesterday in regard to heating oil, and I concur. Work with John on securing the fuel we need for the vehicles, generator and the boiler, and make sure you do a full recon before taking the tanker out. No civilians on the team and no mention of the destination. I don’t know if it was bad luck or if Stone has someone in our midst again feeding him information, but the skirmish last week nearly got two of us dead, and that is unacceptable. Understood?” John vocalized his acknowledgement as Peter nodded his understanding. “On a personal note for Peter. I think I have an hour free after dinner if you have time to put down some more ink.”
The small man shook his head yes. Peter was eager to continue his artistic endeavor upon his living canvas. In his twenty-plus years as a tattoo artist, he had done very few tattoos as large as the one he was inking upon J.D.’s chest. Performing his profession also gave him peace and tranquility, and helped ease his mind of thoughts of his stolen daughter.
“John. In regard to your request,” J.D. said.
“Yes, sir,” Sergeant First Class Lott answered.
“First, let me congratulate you on the fine job on acquiring the LAVs and buses. As for the request, I cannot authorize it at this time, since we do not have the fuel to spare. However, since you and Peter will be searching for said fuel, please use that opportunity to also recon for your steel plates. I’m sure you’ll come across some street excavation site that never got finished. Notate it and once the fuel has been acquired, I’ll authorize a salvage mission.” John wanted the plating to use as armor for the buses stored at their secret storage facility. “If that is all, then we are dismissed.” J.D. announced, glad to be done with one more painful meeting. It was time to seek out a songbird.
2
Piano Girl
It wasn’t going to be her. It couldn’t be, J.D. kept telling himself as he passed through the main hall and headed down the stairs to the basement where the public restrooms were located, first checking the woman’s before the men’s. He couldn’t see her face at first as he watched her diligently using a long handled scrub brush on the inside of one of the tall urinals that lined the wall, until she turned slightly toward him. The shapely figured brunette with the unkempt hair and facial perspiration caught the man with the sunglasses hovering under the entry’s archway out of the corner of her eye as soon as she had moved to the next urinal.
“If it’s urgent I can stop,” she informed him, as she squirted some liquid into the next porcelain trough, though she was almost certain he hadn’t come to use the bathroom. In the time she had been on toilet duty she had never seen an officer use the civilian facilities.
J.D. remained silent.
She turned and looked at him, hoping direct eye contact would evoke a response. It did not. “Suit yourself,” she said, and then started her cleaning again.
J.D. hadn’t responded because he was dumbfounded. It just wasn’t possible that the girl scrubbing the latrine could be the same girl that he had met at Rockwood Music Hall on the evening that he knocked out who he believed may have been her boyfriend for making a very rude remark about his singing. Though J.D. could have forgiven the slightly inebriated male for his asinine comment, J.D. could not forgive him for the slap on the back that accompanied the statement. J.D. had knocked the jackass to the floor unconscious, and then was banned by management from ever performing there again. Nevertheless, there she was, a little older, a bit ruffled and dirtied, holding a toilet scrubber, but unmistakably the songstress from the piano bar.
Christina turned back to him. She had enough of the man’s ogling from behind sunglasses. “Are you one of those sick dudes who gets off hanging out at the playground leering at underage children or just one of those creepy toilet fetish voyeurs?” she asked in an irritated tone without any sign of being intimidated. “Because if you don’t back your ass up out of here, I’m going to scream like a banshee.”
J.D. removed his sunglasses before he spoke. “Christina Custode? You are Christina Custode the singer from Buffalo, NY?”
“Niagara Falls,” she quickly corrected.
“So it is you.” He stepped closer to introduce himself. “My name is J.D. Nichols, I’m—”
Christina didn’t need him to tell her who he was, she was fully aware of who was standing opposite her, even before she saw the telltale signs of his talons and his creepy black eyes.
“I know who you are,” she told him, interrupting. “What is it I can do for you, Commander?”
“Do you remember doing a gig at the Rockwood Music Hall some years back, when the performer before you knocked out this drunk guy?”
“Is there a point to this conversation or have you just come to gloat?” she asked as she squirted cleansing solution into the last urinal that needed attention.
Christina’s response told J.D. that she was fully aware that he had been the person who had knocked out her friend, but he had not sought her out to reminisce about the old days, so he got to the point.
“I have a proposition for you.”
Christina laughed, and then said, “Well, I think we’ve reached the end of this conversation.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” J.D. came back. “This is strictly business.”
“Ha,” she scoffed as she scrubbed, “like I haven’t heard that before,” and then flushed the urinal.
J.D. was slightly irritated in her reply and it reflected in his terse response. “You must like being the latrine queen, cause you’re doing a great job at making sure you’re permanently assigned to shit duty. So, I’ll leave you to it.”
Christina bit her lip, immediately realizing she had been rash. Whatever his proposal was, was at least worth hearing for she didn’t enjoy her situation. She knew there were worse things than scrubbing toilets. She could be dead, or still suffering from the hardship of survival on the outside, or worse according to the stories she had heard from other armory survivors, a captive of the Stone survivor group. However, maybe what he had to offer was better than scrubbing shit in order to remain a part of the armory group, she told herself. She was just hoping it had nothing to do with prostituting herself.
“Wait,” she called, stopping J.D. before he had made it to the archway. “I’ll listen to your proposal.”
“Very well. My XO seems to think we need some live entertainment to soothe the fraying nerves of our fellow survivors before the tension escalates and we end up with more than a few cuts and bruises. Since I am unable to fulfill that obligation as I have done in that past, I’d like to offer it to you in exchange for a temporary reprieve from this little slice o
f heaven.”
J.D. wasn’t about to reveal that he wasn’t even considered for reprising his role as entertainer, even though he knew Ryan hadn’t considered him for the reasons that J.D. had said during the staff meeting. It still didn’t alleviate the slight he felt that Ryan had simply dismissed the idea of him performing again. At least he believed Ryan should have extended the courtesy of asking. He just hoped Ryan had chosen wisely for he hadn’t actually seen or heard Christina play or sing. He had been thrown out of the bar before her set had begun.
“I’ll play as many times a week as you want, but I want permanently off toilet duty and put on food prep detail, and I want you to teach me how to defend myself. Those are my terms,” she announced with conviction in her position.
“Unbelievable! The queen of the scrub brush wants to negotiate. How about you pass the audition first before you start making demands.” J.D. began to laugh as he turned, telling her to report to Sergeant Wiese when she finished her duty assignment.
“Hey, Commander,” Christina called out as J.D. passed through the exit. He turned back. “For the record,” she told him. “He was my boyfriend. And you were right, he was an asshole.”
J.D. chuckled again. What had been a serious matter at the time seemed trivial and now laughable. However, it would be the last time J.D. would laugh.
3
Know Your Enemy
Even before the plague, J.D. was a gifted combatant and fierce competitor. His strength and skills in martial arts was not derived from his mutant physiology, but enhanced by it. Skilled in weapons and hand-to-hand combat he was a masterful warrior, but he was not a trained military officer.
Stone had proven to be a cunning foe, one that was not reluctant to sacrifice his own men to gain what he desired, and what he craved was the armory. The armory had come under attack on several occasions. There had been a sniper, in an upper floor of a building across the street, who had killed one civilian late in November. J.D. and his men boarded up the entrances to the surrounding buildings as best they could, and set hand grenade booby traps. However, this did not deter his enemy. Two weeks later there was an explosion in an adjacent building. The remains of a man were found along with a mangled high-powered rifle equipped with a scope. The victim had tripped one of the booby traps set in a stairwell. Two nights later, apparently in retaliation, a group of Stone’s men in Humvees simultaneously drove past the north and south gates and fired automatic weapons at the building and lobbed hand grenades into the compound. There were no deaths or injuries that evening, but it was evident that these harassment tactics were meant to intimidate. That attack was followed the next morning with a guerilla-style assault, while J.D. and his men were walking the Lexington Avenue perimeter inspecting the fence line for damage. This time Stone’s men, lead by Barlow, crashed an NYFD ambulance through the south perimeter gate in an attempt to gain access. Though the attack was quickly thwarted—J.D. having had the foresight to double the roof sentries after the previous night’s drive-by attack—it left them shaken and with only one minor injury.
However, J.D.’s next encounter with Stone’s group would have tragic consequences. It was a confrontation that brought a devastating personal loss. It was the loss of his beloved mate, Luci. It was a tragedy for which he blamed himself and a heartbreak he could not forgive. Plunged into despair and seized by hate, revenge was all he desired.
***
February had been bitterly cold and snowy, and strained the armory’s heating system to the point the boilers were unable to warm the building above the low 60s. In order to raise the temperature in the main hall where the civilian population was located, parts of the armory were shut down. Heating ducts were covered and doors and windows sealed in order to direct as much heat to where it was needed. Even with some portable heaters that were found in storage, J.D. and his men could only maintain a 63-degree day temperature and a fluctuating 55 to 57-degree temperature after sundown.
March had been far from mild, and by the end of the month the fuel tanks for the boilers were nearly dry. As April began winter’s chill slowly started to fade, but by mid-month heavy rains fell, flooding the streets and overloading the sewage system causing backups in the armory. April had brought the worst torrential storms J.D. could recall since Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc in the fall of 2012.
J.D. and his team realized that the armory was becoming less sustainable and that it was time to make plans to evacuate and head to Mechanicville. But in order to relocate nearly sixty civilians that had now found refuge within the armory, an advance team would need to be sent ahead to prep the town for re-occupation. J.D. knew Mechanicville by now would have suffered some of the same infrastructure problems as New York was enduring.
The end of the snow had also brought the return of Stone’s harassment tactics. The time had come for a new strategy in dealing with him and the threat he posed to the safety and well being of the armory. J.D. needed to take the fight to him.
Captain James Alexander was an indispensable part of J.D.’s team when it came to planning recons and re-supply missions, but James was not a tactician. Even if he had been, James was too busy developing the evacuation and relocation plans to give assistance. J.D. had no qualms about his lack of experience as a military strategist, but there was one thing he knew, and that was the art of war, not in a grand military fashion, but on a smaller combatant scale.
Not only had J.D. studied Bruce Lee’s philosophies, embracing Lee’s influences of Taoism, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Buddhism, but he had also read all of Li’s books, incorporating them into his fighting and life styles. However, one influential book he had read had not been written by his idol, Lee, but penned by Sun Tzu—a great Chinese general during ancient China’s Spring and Autumn Period—was an ancient book on military strategy. That was the book Art of War.
J.D. knew that Edward Stone was a psychotic killer and child molester with a narcissistic personality. He also knew that Stone was not a man without intelligence. Stone had proven to be a calculating, manipulative, and cunning enemy. His intelligence was not to be dismissed or underestimated. Yes, Edward Stone was a crazed killer, but he was also a formidable enemy, and had proven so on many occasions, both during the zombie apocalypse and in its aftermath.
The current tactics that J.D. had employed in defending themselves against the gang of murderous scavengers was not effective. Being that J.D. was not a military strategist, and neither were any of his men, he realized that hiding away in the armory was not going to make Stone and his men go away. What was needed was an offensive tactic. He deferred to Sun Tzu.
There were certain passages that remained embedded in J.D.’s memory. Passages that he incorporated into his martial arts.
Security against defeat implies defensive tactics; ability to defeat the enemy means taking the offensive.
He knew how to do this.
All warfare is based on deception. Martial Arts also utilized deception.
Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected. He knew the city better than his enemy.
Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt. The night was his domain, thunderbolts his fists.
Hence the skillful fighter puts himself into a position, which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defeating the enemy. He would give no quarter, as he had done in martial arts competitions.
The quality of decision is like the well-timed swoop of a falcon which enables it to strike and destroy its victim. He was like a falcon—he was part transmute!
J.D. also knew that attitude and fighting skills were not enough to defeat the enemy. Sun Tzu also wrote that there are five besetting sins of a general, ruinous to the conduct of war.
(1) recklessness, which leads to destruction;
He was not reckless, so he believed.
(2) cowardice, which leads
to capture;
He was not a coward. Mahatma Gandhi had taught him cowards could never be moral, and he had also proved his courage at the Javits Center.
(3) a hasty temper, which can be provoked by insults;
He had learned that power comes from self-restraint and that a quick temper will make a fool of you. Insults merely rolled off him like raindrops from a leaf.
(4) a delicacy of honor which is sensitive to shame;
The writings of Hsün Tzu had taught him, “The coming of honor or disgrace must be a reflection of one’s inner power.”
(5) over solicitude for his men, which exposes him to worry and trouble.
He no longer allowed himself to get close to his men.
However, above all there was one thing that Sun Tzu had emphasized, know your enemy. He knew exactly how to accomplish that goal.
4
Good and Bad Cats
Caitlin quietly came into her father’s sleeping quarters, and stood by the ajar door of the bathroom as her father tried unsuccessfully to camouflage his face. J.D. was trying for a look, something menacing to add to his fierceness—a facial painting that complemented his new haircut. However, after two attempts—two attempts Caitlin observed silently from the doorway—he threw the camouflage makeup into the sink in frustration.
“Dawd,” a light, wistful call came from the other side of the door. “Dawd, what you do…? Why funny face?”
“Caitlin,” he sternly reminded her, “have you forgotten your manners? What have I taught you about entering someone else’s room?”
She apologized, “Sawee, dawd.” She knew she had disappointed her father. She knocked on the bathroom door, “May come in, pease, dawd.”
“Yes, Cat. Permission granted.”
She pushed the door open and stood next to her father, who was hunched over in front of the mirror with both hands placed on the edge of the sink. Caitlin saw his frustration and concern.