Payload

by RW Krpoun

  She felt another pang of concern, but fought it down. “Of course.” She hitched at the purse’s strap. “How do you want to do this?”

  “I see the stones, and then we scoot and you get the payload down.”

  “You see the stones, we get the payload, and then we all go our separate ways,” Sophia countered. “That way there’s no accidental alerting of the zombies.”

  Bear considered that. “OK.”

  She tossed him the bag, suddenly glad she had the revolver.

  The Gnome pulled the multi-chambered case out of the purse and flipped open two compartments at random. “Pretty.”

  “Fair enough?”

  He weighed the box on one hand. “Sure. Get yours.”

  She nodded to Dennis, who moved up slope to just below the crest, and cautiously bobbed up to check. Nodding, he moved to place a tree trunk between himself and the Gnomes before motioning Trek onward. From her angle she could see that Mabry had hung a tablet that displayed the drone feed on a handy projection on the tree.

  Turning back to Bear, hand casually resting on the hard rubber grips of the revolver stuffed in her waistline, she smiled at Bear. “This is all terribly exciting.”

  Chip hadn’t been sure of what to expect in a top FASA agent-he had thought she might look like the Italian villainess in Resident Evil 5, all elegant clothes and a major rack, or maybe something like Amy Winehouse after a hard night of partying, all deranged hair and punked-out clothes. But she had turned out to be just a regular woman, early thirties, pale and going a little chunky, not pretty but not ugly, sort of like the Clinton daughter: unremarkable. She had blond hair in a short haircut, sort of a perky college girl cut that was too young for her. She was wearing little gold studs in her ears, a sort of southwestern theme top, and a pair of boot-cut levis over high-dollar walking shoes. She had a stainless-steel revolver with black rubber grips stuffed into her jeans, and she had her hand on it now, but Chip could see she was even less weapon-savvy than he was-it was a prop to her, something she brought because that was what you did in this sort of thing.

  He wished he could hear what she and Bear were talking about, but the earplugs blocked out everything.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Portal checked that the drone was in a tight orbit over the target building and moved around to the rear of the SUV, figuring that if trouble came, it would come from the direction of town, which the vehicle was facing. He didn’t like this operation but nobody had asked his opinion. He didn’t like wasting last night and today watching a crossroads instead of hitting the farms and ranches around here, bringing blood and fire to the unbelievers, but his opinion on that subject hadn’t swung any weight, either.

  He wasn’t sure he really believed all this Door business, but it had gotten him a pretty cool time before the outbreak, and since then they had been home invading like a mofo, like SWAT teams. Lots of strait-laced squarejob pussy screaming him into the hot shot, lots of death-penalty-loving squares getting put on their knees for a bullet in the head after watching their old ladies or daughters getting the Portal Express.

  It rocked, but this recent inactivity was itching at him-not that he couldn’t wait, twelve years in the box had taught him patience down to the bone, but he suspected that if they didn’t pound the government down fast, then it would be a risky business being a parolee and registered sexual offender with a huge stack of felonies on his hands. They had heard that the military was hanging people in Texas for less than what his team had done, in fact were stringing up anyone with gang or prison ink on spec. It was just rumor, but he wouldn’t put it past those rednecks.

  The reaction team was moving, closing up fast-they had gotten the word a minute ago from Dennis, he had heard the tone over the high-tech radios they were carrying, and if he knew his guys they would have already been easing forward anyway. Whack these wannabes and get back to business.

  He heard the movement in the ditch to the south and took a knee, bringing up his H&K G36K. It was too irregular for zombies, and too noisy for anyone who knew what they were doing. A flashing of white amongst the tall weeds quickly resolved into a white rag being waved by someone, and a moment later a tall blonde girl lunched up onto the shoulder of the gravel road, red-faced and gasping for air, her large breasts bouncing under her blue Dallas Cowboys jersey top. Behind her a shorter Hispanic girl thrashed her way through the weeds, slipping just short of the road and sliding a couple feet back into the ditch before scrambling up onto the road.

  “Are you with the Army?” the blonde gasped, mopping her face with the white towel she had been waving. “Thank God! The town is covered in those…things. We were in my truck, it hit one of them, we rolled…where are your troops? We need to get out of here.”

  Portal lowered his weapon as neither girl was armed, and admired the way the blonde’s breasts moved as she came towards him. The other one was hot, too, but she was nervous, maybe sensing that Portal wasn’t any sort of hero. Being shy wouldn’t save her ass, but he figured Blondie was gonna get the first ride on the Portal Express.

  “Keep your voice down,” he raised a cautionary hand. “We don’t want to attract attention. Come over here, both of you, take cover. Are there any more with you?”

  The world exploded before the girl could answer.

  “Damn,” Dyson stuffed his sap into a pocket before dragging the G-36K free, rolling the man onto his back in the process. “I think I hit him too hard. Is he dead?”

  “Let’s see,” Bambi kicked Portal square in the groin. The man gasped and curled into a fetal position. “Nope, still alive.”

  “OK,” the Georgian said slowly, eyeing the stripper warily. “Get his gear off and tie him up.” He dropped a packet of broad wire-ties they had gotten from Sid Rich’s people onto Portal’s chest. “I’m going to check the drone.” He tossed the CB to Sylvia. “Say it like you mean it, babe.”

  Marv’s position was in a long stack of square bales the size of Gnomehome a hundred yards south of the creek; they had dragged the bales around until he had a position in the row just below the top that overlooked the exchange point, his hollow fronted by a bale so the drone could not spot him. Through the narrow spaces between the bales he could see the drone circling over the white building, and through the binoculars he could make out that its camera was aimed down, watching for trouble.

  The CB clipped to his vest crackled, and he heard Sylvia asking if anyone was on the channel, if they had their ears on, her accent making her voice unmistakable. That meant the rear guard was out of action and the drone’s controls were in friendly hands; FASA would have other feeds but that wasn’t too important. Bracing his shoulder against the front bale, he carefully moved it forward until it dropped out to thump onto the ground twenty feet below.

  Slipping on a pair of ear muff hearing protectors, Marv laid out a sheet of plastic and set the rifle out on it, a Remington Model 700 in 7.62mm NATO with a heavy, glass-bedded bull barrel and a Leopold 4x-12x scope, the main payment from the Sharpsburg raid. He had already sighted the weapon in, although he wasn’t facing that challenging of a shot. Stretching out behind the rifle, he settled it into his shoulder and worked the weapon to settle the bipod’s legs firmly.

  Working without a spotter was a pain but he got the scope onto the general area, working off four-power for the slightly larger viewing area. He couldn’t see the exchange area, but he saw a short person in woodland BDUs carrying a G-36K like they knew how to use it easing around to the front of the building. He was surprised to see the THOR backpack unit the figure wore-that was a pretty high-end piece of equipment.

  Moving in careful increments he eased his point of vision to the rear of the building; his position afforded him a clear view of the electric boxes. The north-most electrical box, which from his angle was squarely in the center of a gap between the trees, bore a set of initials in green spray paint.

  Slowly increasing the scope’s magnification to twelve power, which filled his viewing cir
cle with nothing but the center of the box, Marv released the safety, steadied his breathing, pushed the trigger forward to set it and reduce the trigger pull to next to nothing, and squeezed.

  The 7.62mm match full metal jacket bullet penetrated the thin metal of the electrical box cover and struck the box’s payload-a pound of compressed ammonium nitrate fertilizer soaked in diesel. The explosion shredded the electrical box, but some of the blast travelled through the hole Addison had knocked through the wall, where it ignited the main charge: ten fifty-pound sacks of ammonium nitrate fertilizer from the Cross Plains Feed Store, soaked in diesel.

  The explosion sent the building’s metal roof sailing off like a giant Frisbee and blasted the old cinderblocks into gravel. Trek, crouching near the front doors as she prepared to dart to the flagpole was largely liquefied by the force of the blast.

  She was watching the Gnomes watching her and trying to look cool, calm, and relaxed while nagging doubts kept prickling the hair on the back of her neck. Standing on the sun-warmed concrete with the tree branches whispering overhead, she heard a distant gunshot and even as the sound registered the world tilted and she was lying on her side being pelted by leaves and small rocks raining down. It was hard to breathe-the air seemed full of dust, and she couldn’t hear anything but distant, slow church bells ringing. The concrete around her was covered with twigs, thousands of leaves, and as she lifted her head she saw Dennis lying halfway down the slope, his head pulped.

  She swallowed hard, tasting dirt, and her ears popped-she realized that there weren’t any bells, that she was deafened and the ringing was just in her head. She blinked hard and struggled to get her leaden limbs under control and moving. She managed to get to her hands and knees, spotting her revolver on the concrete nearby, before her brain managed to close synapses and get back on line: Mabry was dead, and there had been a great explosion.

  The implication of that was sinking in just as a boot slammed into her side.

  The tree sheltered Addison from the worst of the blast, and the earplugs preserved his hearing. Rolling to his feet he saw that the bodyguard was dead, having been sitting too high on the slope: his head and shoulders had been in the blast window. Addison had chosen his spot on the assumption that the guard would want to be higher on the slope than any Gnome.

  Discarding the ear plugs, he rushed down the slope; the other Gnomes were rousing themselves, better-prepared for the blast than the enemy had been but still stunned.

  Sophia was on her hands and knees looking dazed and pawing through the littler of leaves and branches for her sidearm as he booted her solidly in the short ribs. Pouncing on her, he bound her wrists with two heavy wire ties, grabbed the revolver, and heaved her onto his shoulder with a labored grunt. As he turned west JD was helping a dazed Bear to his feet and supporting him down the creek bed, Doc’s green camp chair dangling from the biker’s hand.

  “You got her?” Chip asked as the dark Gnome stepped over the log.

  “Yeah, cover us-the zombies will be coming.”

  “Go check body,” Brick jerked his chin towards to dead bodyguard as he calmly unfolded his AK’s stock.

  “Ok.”

  The explosion rocked the SUV on its springs; Dyson and Sylvia had just heaved a securely bound Portal into the cargo area while Bambi put her bra back on.

  “Damn!” Dyson grinned. “That was something-it knocked the drone out of the sky!”

  “Two to Four, move it,” Chip’s voice was a bit shaky over the CB. “Five by five.”

  “Roger, baby,” Sylvia grinned. “Everybody’s OK!”

  “And we got Sophia,” Dyson nodded. “Bambi, you drive.”

  “Where? Our vehicles are on the other side.”

  “Straight through town-it will distract the zeds, give our guys some help-they were close to ground zero. And I bet there’s more where sentry-boy came from.”

  “I hope you dropped him on his head,” the stripper said as she climbed behind the wheel. “That guy is a rapist if I ever saw one.”

  “He is a sick-looking bastard,” Sylvia agreed. “You want in the front, Dyson?”

  “No, I’ll get in the back seat-I want to be able to shoot out of either side.”

  The blast and the pillar of dust drew every zed within a half-mile, Chip bet-it looked like a free concert opening. The captured SUV plowed through several knots of zombies as it roared through town, but it didn’t warrant a second glance, not that zombies really glance.

  The plan had the rear guard focusing the zed response on the blast site to reduce the risk that zeds might wander into the creek bed while the Gnomes were trying to extract their captive and themselves. Like so many of their plans it sounded a lot better in the air conditioned confines of Gnomehome than it felt in the field.

  Bracing his carbine against a splintered tree trunk, Chip methodically squeezed off his shots, dropping the faster-moving older infected first, Brick pounding away to his left. The sight of two humans motivated the already-interested herd, and the moaning wail was a solid wave, kind of like a crowd at a concert when the main attraction walks out onto the stage.

  The bolt locked back, and Chip reloaded, dropping the empty mag into his pocket and resuming fire, part of his mind grinning at the thought of the anti-gun politician’s interview who based her (failed) bill on the idea that magazines were disposable. Sixty rounds and fall back was the rule, then take a position for ten shots and displace further back, just enough to hold the zeds interest on the rear guard.

  It was easier this time: Chip found he didn’t really think of them as anything but targets anymore. Whatever they had become, they weren’t Human anymore. Still, given a choice he preferred facing older ones who looked even less alive.

  The bolt locked back. “Ready,” he called to Brick, who nodded and started scrambling down the slope. Reloading as he picked his way carefully, unsure if even Brick’s beef could haul his bulk if he tore up an ankle, the husky Gnome headed down. He wondered if he broke an ankle would he have the balls to tell Brick to go, and cash in like a man?

  The old Chip certainly wouldn’t, but this new Chip, the one feeling a little slack in his waistband and whose hands were actually fairly steady, he might. The new Chip might just fire until they over-ran him and bust the M-1’s stock over the skull of first one to reach him.

  He liked that thought.

  Marv had the Remington packed inside its hard case and was climbing down from the bales when he heard the engine approaching. Kneeling at the corner of the stack, he peered carefully around the wall of straw. He had figured Sophia would have some way of tracking the stones, and would call for her best team within an hour’s drive. He also figured that after a big explosion had gone off in town the reaction team would approach cross-country rather than risk another IED. He was also betting that the reaction team would be made up of city boys-that was a bit of a long shot, but so far their contacts with FASA assets were drawn from urban types, and it hadn’t seemed like too much of a stretch. More reliably, he figured they would be hyper-aggressive types flush with one-sided ambushes of badly distracted police and first responders, and lots of soft targets.

  South of the creek bed was all hay fields, recently cut and baled, nice and flat. They were fenced, but had cattle grids instead of gates, each a depression covered by a transverse grid of metal bars whose gaps were wide enough for animals' legs to fall through, but too narrow to impede a wheeled vehicle. From an approaching vehicle the fact that the bars covered a hollow wasn’t obvious, and most people from a city environment wouldn’t be aware of that fact.

  A wise sergeant would stop and cut barbed wire, but the SUV was ripping across the fields whose furrows would make for a rough ride but otherwise wouldn’t really slow them down. Fifty yards from Marv’s position was a cattle grid and the SUV was headed for it like cruise missile on final approach. As fast as they were moving they would easily catch the withdrawing Gnomes long before they got to their vehicles.

  They missed
the thin rod with the front axle, or maybe Addison had the delay wrong; in any case the SUV was almost clear when a hundred pounds of industrial black powder and fifty pounds of diesel-soaked ammonium nitrate fertilizer detonated, shredding the rear tires and ripping off the back bumper, cargo hatch, and rear body panels.

  It’s rear flung into the air, the SUV skidded forward on its nose for twenty feet, stripping away the grill and front fenders before friction caught hold and it went over onto its roof, sliding another ten feet before coming to a stop.

  Marv went prone and shouldered his M-4 as the dust settled. The vehicle sat rocking gently on its roof for several long seconds, and then a wail started, a high-pitched pain-wracked keening that was without gender or inflection, just a primal expression of pure agony.

  He could hear voices and see confused struggles, and finally a figure in woodland BDUs wriggled out a side window and with great difficulty, aided by someone kicking, got a side door open. Armed with a fire extinguisher he busied himself with spraying white powder into the engine compartment and the fuel tank. The second man out scrambled up onto the undercarriage and crawled into the engine compartment, cursing the motor’s heat and the steam from the ruptured radiator, emerging with a grease-coated knife in hand to report the battery connections had been cut.

  The next two out started working bodies and gear out of the vehicle. Of the six in the vehicle, two were too badly injured to move on their own, and one of the four who were upright was hopping on one leg whenever she had to move more than a step or two.

  Marv was impressed with their energy and organization-these guys were pretty squared away. He would have been more impressed if they had put out security, but he was willing to spot them on that issue.

  He let them get their equipment out and start tending their injured before settling the M-4’s stock into his shoulder. He shot Fire Extinguisher twice and then moved to Greasy Knife for a quick double tap before that worthy could rise from the first aid kit he was setting out.