by RW Krpoun
“You need certification for insurance purposes,” Chip shrugged. “He learned in Poland.” He flipped chops. “After supper me and Addison are going to work on the roof. I’ll shoot on a different color of paint, and then we’ll attach a dummy skylight. From the air it should look like…I don’t remember the brand, but it’s a completely different make. We can’t do much about ground-level, but a chopper looking for an Entegra Coach Aspire will have a helluva time recognizing us, dude.”
“Good work. So are you the self-appointed cook now, too?”
“I’m a good cook, and I like to stay busy,” the young man shrugged good-naturedly. “When you’re as big as I am, pulling your weight in a group takes a lot of effort.”
The data flowing in was not good; Doctor Davenport studied the figures and pursed his lips. District 13, the American southwest, was in turmoil as its command structure had completely collapsed, and there were reports of some cells in open conflict with other FASA assets. Simpletons.
District 12 was holding up in terms of command structure, but his assets were suffering greater attrition than predicted by even the least optimistic projections. Feeder cells, those groups tasked with the creation of infected subjects, had exceeded a ninety per cent loss rate, and he had just issued the order to disband the few that remained and re-assign the personnel. The breeder cells, those tasked with spreading truckloads of infected subjects, had taken crippling losses, and had been decimated further by desertion from amongst the ranks of the criminal hirelings.
He wished, not for the first time, that he had gotten the Northeast. The South, with its militant stubbornness, its gun culture, and its dispersed populations was proving a very tough nut to crack. He had warned General Nawaz that until the peasants had been disarmed, especially in the south and southwest where the dreary business of national patriotism was still widely practiced, the US would be a tough fight, but the General had not taken the message to heart.
Still, District 12 wasn’t finished yet-there were still assets alive and loyal to the Cause at his disposal, and he intended to expend them until nothing remained in his region of the social order or the herds of the mediocre.
A soft knock at the door was followed by the entrance of Sophia Travis, the staffer assigned to the Fastbox operation. “Ah, Ms. Travis. What news?”
“Very little, sir. The team has not crossed the Mississippi. We did intercept a call from one member to his family-we had a trace in place just an hour before the call. Unfortunately, they had a blocker unit on the line, but we were able to ascertain that the caller was using a landline phone from the state of Mississippi. The communication was guarded, but we established that they went to ground at around four this afternoon.”
“The soldier lost contact with his superiors and is hiding, waiting for instructions,” Cyrus nodded, pleased. “Typical-no initiative, no ability, just a brute suited only for violence and reproduction. He is nothing more than a virus upon a modern, enlightened society. Which one made the call?”
“Chip Wilson, sir. One of the two new recruits. I looked into getting a District 13 team to seize his family for leverage, but it is impracticable. They are ensconced in a rural home, a ranch I suppose it is called, and there aren’t any assets in the area.”
The Doctor looked over the file on Wilson. “A bloated game-playing slacker.” He waved a dismissive hand. “No leverage there-he is a pointless follower. He would never have the capacity to challenge the alpha male of the group.” He pulled up the map. “Keep aircraft searching for them, and an assault team on standby. The key is to locate where they have gone to ground before they receive further orders.”
“Yes, sir.” Sophia nodded thoughtfully, a short, chunky woman with her hair worn short and styled. “I’ll stay on it.”
She closed the door quietly behind her as Cyrus returned to the difficulties of ensuring the broadest possible application of the virus.
After a hearty meal of pork chops, home-made French fries, and canned fruit Chip and Addison added their disguise to the RV and Brick finished up his work, completing ten sets of hammer and shield. Marv stood guard while the rest cleaned the RV, and then the entire team adjourned for a movie on HBO before knocking off for the night.
Despite the short day he had had Marv found no difficulty in sleeping. In his dreams he was in Bragg attending the Advanced IED Course, and arguing with Deb over the phone. She was breaking her agreement about going climbing, and they were having words. It wasn’t just the climbing that was upsetting Marv, but also the fact that she and her climbing partner, Doug, always seemed a bit too chummy for Marv’s comfort zone. He had never mentioned it to her, but it always had bothered him. The dream was extremely vivid, complete with ‘Who else is listening’ in red stencil above the phone.
The dream was still on his mind when JD woke him for last watch. It had been very vivid, almost a memory, except that Deb hadn’t been alive when he attended that course in Bragg, and the red stencil was from the phone stations he had used in Afghanistan, not Stateside.
Sitting in the passenger seat, the privacy curtain behind him closing off the rest of the RV, Marv checked the view as he opened the road atlas. A couple of zombies had showed up during the night, drawn by the soft noises of the generator and air conditioner, and were wandering around the RV. Marv ignored them-they could deal with them in the morning before leaving.
Their shields were hanging on the wall of the shed-Chip had scanned a picture of Moogie and had printed up ten copies, laminating one to each shield’s front. They were hanging outside because the thick layer of clear-coat laminate was curing, and would stink up the RV’s interior.
The dream nagged at him, and he wondered about Deb and Doug, the rock-climbing partners. That was an uneasy question that had never been fully resolved: had there been anything there? He had no doubt that Doug was up for it, he could see it in the way Doug looked at Deb when he thought he was unobserved, and the look he got when Deb was hanging on Marv. But would Deb cheat? He had never seen anything to suggest it, and he had even gone so far as to befriend one of the guys on the climbing team so as to have a back-channel pair of eyes on the situation.
Doug hadn’t been with her on her fatal outing, at least. Marv had banned him from visitation and the funeral, and the slimy bastard had taken that hard, very hard indeed. Marv grinned sourly at the memory of Doug, red-faced and weeping, taking a swing at him, the clumsy, awkward swing of a guy who hadn’t been in a real fight in his life. Marv had blocked it easily and given him thee good jabs to the belly and a solid right to the kidney which he was sure had ole’ Doug pissing red for at least two days, before bystanders ended the altercation.
He sighed and pushed the memories away. Deb was long gone, and best not dwelled upon.
Chip made bacon, pancakes, and artificial scrambled eggs for breakfast. “You’re gonna make someone a damn fine wife,” JD advised the young man, who responded with a single digit.
“We need to drop the lookee-loos,” Marv gestured to the trio of zombies who were batting at the side of the RV and moaning. “Top off the generator, and roll. It will be dawn soon.”
“I hate getting up this early,” Bear moaned, pouring more coffee. “I ain’t no damn farmer.”
“It’s good for you, builds character,” Dyson advised the biker as he rolled up bacon inside a pancake, which he ate like a burrito.
“Once we’re across the river I plan to drive using night vision gear after dark,” Marv slapped Bear on the shoulder. “Arkansas is only about two-fifty, two-sixty by back roads, so I plan to try for a straight shot to our destination. You can get back to normal soon.” He sounded more confident than he was-there had been no answer to the sat phone this morning. But sitting here in the air conditioning, surrounded by good men and enveloped in the smells of bacon and coffee it was hard to feel too depressed.
Brick turned on the TV and found the weather station. “No rain today. Cloudy.”
“High is eight-one, not bad,
” Dyson observed, finishing his breakfast and standing. “I’ll go deal with the zeds.”
“I will,” Brick stood. “Show my weapons. Bang on that wall so I can get shield.”
With the zombies distracted Brick hopped out the door and grabbed a shield. Hammer ready, he rushed the three zombies coming around the front of the RV. The burly Pole used the shield to push the first infected subject’s arms aside and planted the hammer-spike into its skull, shutting it down instantly.
“Wow!” Chip blurted.
“Welcome to the Middle Ages,” JD observed as Brick used the shield to batter the next zombie’s arms apart and then drove the spike on top of the hammer into its forehead. Reversing the hammer, he slammed the nut into the third zed’s knee while blocking with the shield, sending it to the ground, where he split its skull with the spike.
“Many uses,” he beamed at the watching Gnomes.
“Quiet, too,” Marv noted. “Certainly gives us some options. How are we going to carry the shields?”
Brick held up his shield and pointed to a quick-attach buckle on the reverse side. “Strap from belt.”
“Perfect-everybody should take a set. I expect you’ll want to stick with your ice axe, Addison.”
“Let’s get some gas,” JD hopped down onto the gravel. “We’re got hero-stuff to do.”
Chapter Eight
Sophia Travis had always known she was special, even when she was growing up in a blighted Queens neighborhood. Too special to take part in the stupid interactions of others around her. She was eight when she set her first fire, just a dumpster filled with sacks of shredded wrapping paper, drying trees, and cardboard packing from Christmas presents, and the flames from the holiday her mother never celebrated warmed something in her. By twelve she had graduated to simple black powder bombs, and in High School she moved to toxins and sabotage.
When she met Doctor C (as she thought of him) at a protest she was looking into medical tampering, but he changed everything. Not his theories about improving society-she cared nothing for such things, but rather his opinion that it would take widespread destruction. Sophia adored the idea of random destruction and injury for its own sake, and the good doctor was in need of motivated help. With a degree in administration (to best destroy, one needed to know how things worked) and a solid background as a staffer it had not taken long for her to achieve a position of trust.
And now the entire world was a line of dumpsters filled with paper and FASA had the matches. Sophia had been working twenty hours a day since FASA went operational, exhilarated by the images of society crumbling, cities vanishing under nuclear fire, streets running red, the mounting death tolls.
At first she had been disappointed to be assigned to the Fastbox 2 project as securing something intact went firmly against her core desires, but that quickly passed when she realized that gaining a quantity of the pure virus would open up vast new vistas of glorious chaos. The last quantity of pure virus availabli.
But first she had to find them. Doctor C had placed his faith on the teams watching the bridges, but she was less sure-a river was not a wall, just an impediment to land travel. The early stop bothered her- so far the Gnomes had been stayed off the grid and moving, laying up only at night. She had seen the sergeant’s file, and she gave him more credit than Cyrus had. Doctor C placed great stock in intellect, but she understood how instinct can be just as useful.
Around midnight an idea occurred to her and by three in the morning she had the link information on mobile TV sat feeds from the region of the RV park the night of the attack. It had occurred to her that people smart enough to use a blocker on a land line might be smart enough to bootleg satellite TV. The list only had credit card payees, but of the forty-three accounts only three were corporate cards. Choosing the only company of the three that she did not recognize, she ran a credit check and was immediately bogged down in cut-out data.
Using a back door FASA had purchased from a disgruntled employee, she searched the provider for the times and locations from which that account had signed on in the last twenty-four hours. She came back with three roving hits and a stationary one in the afternoon and evening. The locations took a while to decipher, but by four she was on a satellite phone to the assets assigned to her operation.
Addison had worked out how to connect the laptop they had acquired from the office to the main area flat screen TV, and the Gnomes were looking at a Google Earth image.
“OK, its out of date by a few weeks, but that should work. Chatham is about seven hundred people, and the target location is about one block off the main drag. As you can see, its also only three blocks from the city limits, which is a quick drive but a long run with zombies dogging you. Right now my plan is to roll up as close as we can in the RV, and then five bail and do it the hard way thereafter.”
“What about guys on the roof?” Chip asked. “It supported me OK, and I’m the heaviest. We put a couple of the lighter guys up there, that could help.”
“Good idea,” Marv nodded. “Dyson and Addison would be the lightest choices. JD is our most experienced driver.”
“These are zombies,” JD said thoughtfully. “You’re thinking like a soldier, except we’re not soldiers, we’re…zombie fighters? Zombie hunters? Not sure what the term is, but anyway, the infected have to get to bite range. So the RV isn’t the best choice because we can’t shoot through the windows.”
“You thinking that we should switch vehicles?” Bear asked.
“I’m thinking get a vehicle for this mission, and since the town is over-run we should be able to find one. Use it, then abandon it when we’re done.”
“What kind of vehicle?” Marv asked, impressed.
“Something that is sort of zombie proof,” JD shrugged. “But that we can fight out of.”
“A dump truck,” Chip suggested. “Tall enough that they can’t get in easily, enough power to jump curbs and that sort of thing, tough, and those in the back can shoot out.”
“How do we get a woman and kids up into it fast?” Marv frowned at the RV’s door, seeing the same problem there.
“A ladder. There’s a gravel pit about two miles outside of town, on this rail spur. Get a truck with enough of a load that you can stand and see over the sides, and get a ladder from someplace.”
“Gravel pit,” Addison leaned forward.
“What?” Bear asked the dark Gnome.
“Explosives. They blast to make gravel.”
“Better still. OK, gravel truck it is. We’ll need one to stay with the RV, and one to drive the truck,” Marv said.
“I’ll drive the gravel truck,” Chip volunteered. “I’ve a lot of hours on that weight class and I spent a summer driving dump trucks for TxDoT.”
“I’ll drive the RV,” JD volunteered.
“OK, looks like we have a plan. First stop is the White Mound gravel pit.”
“This is too damn easy,” Dyson complained as Gnomehome rolled through the gates of the White Mound Material Company and down the driveway towards an empty parking lot and a dark office building.
“We’re two miles from town-odds are no zombie attacks took place here,” Chip pointed out. “Trouble in town, everyone heads home to help or evacuate.”
“Point,” the Georgian conceded.
“There’s the trucks,” Brick pointed past the office building to a row of dusty vehicles.
“First we clear the office, find vehicle records and the key box,” Marv said. “Hopefully we can figure out which is the newest dump truck. We’ll gas up the RV and make sure the truck is good, find any explosives, and roll out. Thirty minutes if we do this right.”
“Here’s an idea,” JD pointed. “We could park the RV in that wash rack, safe from overhead eyes.”
“Good idea,” Marv pulled out a state map he had found at the relay point’s office. “I’m going to mark specific locations with letters. That way we can refer to meeting places over the CB without telling everyone where we’re going. Ideall
y we’ll meet up here, checkpoint Alpha, but it’s always better to plan for trouble. Another thing, and I’m writing it here in the margin: if I say ‘skip red, that means up two channels higher on the CB. If I say ‘Skip blue’, that means three channels lower. ‘Dexter’ means go to channel five. That way if we think we’ve got eavesdroppers, we can make things harder. I’m Unit Six, you’re Unit Two. No names, no real locations. I’ll take one CB, Chip takes one, who gets the other two? Bear?”
“Yeah, no problem.”
“That gives each team one. Brick, you take the last one, since you and Chip are separated on this op. Grab a spare set of batteries with it. Everyone clear on the codes? OK, lets do this.”
It took longer than thirty minutes, but the Gnomes did not encounter any zombies. The office building yielded up keys, fire extinguishers, batteries, and a Glock Compact in .380 that JD took as a back-up. Once Gnomehome was topped off with diesel and hidden they took the best of the dump trucks and used the overhead drifter to load enough gravel to make shooting over the sides comfortable.
“This is mostly black powder,” Marv observed disgustedly as they stowed the company’s stock of explosives in the RV’s external storage. “Hardly seems worth adding to Gnomehome’s ability to self-destruct.”
“Industrial-grade black blasting powder,” Addison mumbled. “I can use it. Pipe bombs for concussion.”
“If you say so.”
They strapped the gravel company’s supply of two-inch PVC onto the RV’s roof, as there was no more storage left.
“OK, check your mags and loops to make sure you have all the ammo you can carry. At least two road flares apiece, but do not light them in the truck. Hammer or ice axe, shield, extra batteries if you have a CB, one bottle of water each. I’ve got a first aid kit, Dyson has a pair of binoculars, Addison has his burglary kit. Take whatever else you think you’ll need, but don’t over-load. Me and Addison on the left side, Bear and Dyson on the right, Brick covers the rear. Chip has the route marked, we’ll circle around and come in by the shortest route, which is from the north, and just keep heading south out of town, no fancy driving. On the CB don’t use names, Chip is One, JD is Two, Bear is Three, Brick is Four, I’m Six.”