Crawlerz: Book 5: Off the Rails

by R. S. Merritt

“Who’ve we sent to help them?” Jeff asked.

  “They had their supply guys on the way already. They’re going to be trying to flank whoever it is who’s attacking them. I have one of the chinooks being fueled up and a team standing by to go assist. I expect them to be in the air in the next ten minutes. It’s a pretty short flight at full speed.” SECDEF had barely finished answering the question before Jeff rushed by him to sprint down the corridor in the direction of the exit.

  “I guess he’s going to.” SECDEF said admiringly. “Do you want me to have him stopped sir?”

  “No. He’d just figure out some other way to try and get himself killed. Just relay the order to whoever’s in charge of the QRF to make sure Jeff stays in the rear. He’s too valuable to have him get his head shot off by a bunch of pissed off refugees. Tell them to wait until he gets there before taking off. Otherwise he’ll just think we told them to leave early. Let me know as soon as we have word on what the status is for Captain Lindsey’s team.” Shaun rattled off the orders in one long breath.

  “Aye aye sir.” SECDEF said before executing a sharp salute and marching out of the office. The horribly hung over commander in chief put his head on his desk in misery. He really needed to get the drinking under control. Either that or have them start planning emergencies to only happen in the afternoons. He wished for the hundredth time that his uncle hadn’t saddled him with all of this responsibility. All he really wanted to do was escape to the cave like mountain resort compound he had access to and spend the rest of his life eating his way through the almost infinite piles of supplies squirreled away up there.

  Jeff pounded down the hallway towards the exit. He was leaving one of the most secure sections of the base, so he didn’t have to stop and swipe his card at every door. He did come close to bowling over a few people trying to come in as he barreled through the doors. As a sign of the times those people weren’t pissed at him. They immediately started running in his wake. It’s a good rule of thumb in a zombie apocalypse that if you see someone hauling ass you should consider it a challenge to a foot race. Jeff ended his lung emptying sprint in the main warehouse by the helicopters with a handful of men who’d run right along with him. He started walking briskly towards the area he knew the helicopters were in.

  “Hey sir, what were we running from?” One of the younger men who’d joined the Jeff parade called out. Everyone else was busy wheezing and trying not to puke. When you were running for your life, you didn’t hold anything back.

  “Just a drill. Return to base.” Jeff tossed out in between his own efforts to regain his breathing. He smiled thinking of what Yue would say if she saw the train of men who’d sprinted along behind him. Thinking of her wiped the smile right back off his face. He rushed past the suspicious guard at the exit to make his way towards where the helicopter should be waiting if it hadn’t lifted off already.

  Running up the cracked concrete road leading out of the base he could hear what sounded like a helicopter getting spun up. The chinooks are huge, so hearing what sounded like garbage trucks mating was a good thing. If he’d missed them for some reason, he’d have grabbed the closest pickup truck and taken off. He was relieved when he got to the top of the massive entryway and was able to see the super-sized helicopter sitting there waiting to take off. Now he was freaked out he might have gotten this close only to miss it. He poured every last bit of his energy reserves into sprinting for the big bird.

  He was close to blacking out when he finally made it into the helicopter. A big guy in full on battle rattle reached down to help him up. The man had his shirt sleeves rolled up enough that Jeff could see the sleeve tattoos on each arm. At first glance it looked like decks of cards going around his wrists and up his forearms to disappear into his shirt sleeves. Closer inspection showed that it was all jokers, each holding a different weapon or woman. That clarified which unit the men on this plane had been detailed from. He wondered if the guy had a jokers grin tattooed underneath the big bushy beard that he was sporting.

  “Welcome aboard sir. We were told once you got here to hurry up and get in the air. If you can sit down here, I’ll help you get strapped in. We’re going to be going in fast and hard sir.” The burly soldier helped Jeff get settled in while the door was shut. Before Jeff or the man helping him had gotten a single strap strapped the chinook took off like a bat out of hell. Jeff was ok since he was already sitting down. The tattooed soldier who’d been trying to help him was tossed to the ground.

  Jeff tried to lean forward to get him, but the helicopter pilot was in no mood to fool around. Most everyone was pinned to their seats. Jeff’s helpful host was being tossed around on the hard metal floor of the big flying beast. The woman sitting beside him helped Jeff finish getting strapped in. Feeling like a toddler getting put in a baby seat Jeff made sure to thank the fierce looking warrior. Evidently, she liked to express her individuality via piercings rather than tattoos. She admitted during the flight that she had zero patience for sitting still while somebody tried poking her with a needle to draw a picture.

  She regretted the unfortunate choice of words the rest of the short flight to Charlottesville. She’d been yelling so that Jeff could hear her over the engine noise. Through some quirk of aerodynamics she yelled out the most awkward part of the conversation right as there was a lull in the general noisiness on board the aircraft. The result being that pretty much everyone heard her saying she didn’t have the patience to sit around while somebody tried to poke her. Jeff wisely refrained from joining in on the graphic responses that started getting tossed at his red faced companion. She wasn’t yelling back but Jeff was confident that she was mentally tallying which idiots opened their mouths for payback later.

  The red faced warrior woman looked relieved when the pilot came across the comms system to tell everyone to prepare to land in a hot LZ. The helicopter swooped around a few times then dove towards the ground. They landed with a thud. Everyone immediately hit the doors to get boots on the ground as fast as possible. Jeff hadn’t realized until sitting on the helicopter that he only had the weapons he normally carried with him around the base. He’d been heading to get some coffee and chat with the POTUS. You didn’t necessarily throw on body armor and grab a rifle to do those things.

  Because he was basically naked as far as weapons and body armor went, he was asked by the squad leader to stay on board until the area was secured. The way it was asked didn’t leave a lot of wiggle room for him to hop off anyway. The second everyone except for Jeff and the pilots were out the door the helicopter went back up. Both rotors pulling it up so quickly it felt like they were on one of those slingshot rides. He’d been expecting the rapid ascent though. Helicopter pilots didn’t like sitting on the ground being big fat targets in hot zones for any longer than they absolutely had to.

  Once the helicopter was in the air Jeff was invited up front to the cockpit. He took the copilots seat and put on the headsets so he could talk to the pilot and hear the ground chatter. Looking down he saw the train cars were spread out along the tracks for some reason. The car in the rear and the engine were both smoking where they’d been hit with some sort of explosives. There were corpses all over the place. Ninety nine percent of those should be the corpses of the infected that Lindsey’s team would’ve taken out the night before.

  Jeff listened as the team on the ground met with the survivors on the train cars. The story started coming together and it didn’t sound good. About an hour after sunrise they’d let out their men from the train cars to start clearing the tracks and checking for any danger like crawlerz lurking under the cars. They were also working on determining how quickly they could put the cars back together again. There’d been no warning before rockets started slamming into the engine and rear car. Machine gun fire had raked the men out on the tracks and then stated beating away on the train cars.

  Everyone was ducking and trying to take cover when smoke bombs started going off followed by cannisters of tear gas. The lead car was
spared a lot of the initial onslaught. The men in that section were able to get some people returning fire before they were mowed down as well. The captain had also had the presence of mind to get off the call for help. The firefight had lasted maybe twenty minutes before the attackers had withdrawn. When they left, they’d sent another barrage of machine gun fire into the trailers and surroundings. They hadn’t tried to take any supplies. Their objective appeared to have included taking a few prisoners from the lead car on top of hitting the trains hard.

  Yue was one of the people missing as was the captain herself and a few others. No one knew if they were alive or dead. The network equipment had taken a hit so the webcams hadn’t been very useful when they tried to review those to see if they could figure out what happened. There were wounded who were being triaged based on the severity of their injuries. There were a lot more dead than wounded to deal with. A few men were sitting around with blank stares. Finally pushed over the edge by the sneak attack. It felt like a betrayal to them that non-infected humans weren’t joining in on their side to fight.

  The bulk of the survivors were pissed. They wanted payback and they wanted it now. Jeff was beside himself. He had no way of knowing if Yue were dead or not. They had no way of knowing where the hell they’d been taken. In a flash of inspiration Jeff asked the pilot to patch him into the communications room back at Weathertop. All they needed was a little bit of luck and they may have the information they needed after all. Fingers crossed he waited after making his request to see what they’d come back with.

  Chapter 5: Won’t Back Down

  A loud explosion rocked Lisa out of bed. She’d been sleeping with one arm draped over Drew. They each had their own beds, but she liked to crawl in with him once the lights went out. Otherwise it was a little weird lying there together surrounded by people going up and down the aisle. Especially since it wasn’t like any of the other people in the car were snuggle buddies. Things like loud explosions made Lisa happy she’d opted for not caring what others thought about where she chose to sleep.

  “Wake up!” She yelled at Drew. She couldn’t believe that he was actually trying to fall back asleep after the explosion that’d just rocked the whole car.

  “Who the what?” Drew sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He stood up and started walking while still about ninety percent asleep.

  “Everybody out of the car! We’re sitting ducks in here! Grab your weapons and get out! It’s light outside! Go! Go! Go!” Captain Lindsey was standing beside the open door yelling the orders out at the top of her lungs. Another gigantic explosion rocked the car. The heavy door Lindsey was holding open slammed shut slinging her screaming in pain to the ground.

  “Other door! Out the other door!” Harley yelled jumping into the fray. He’d thought at first that all the noise was a side effect of the new drug combination he’d been experimenting with the night before. He made his way through the crowd leaving out the other door like an enormous trench coat wearing salmon swimming upstream. Someone was already helping Lindsey up, so he turned his attention to Yue.

  Yue was working with Lisa to get Drew headed towards the front door. There was a crowd of soldiers outside running down the tracks. They watched in shock when most of the men who’d gone out got mowed down in a long burst of machine gun fire. Lindsey came up behind them yelling for everyone to get low in the car. A second later another burst of machine gun fire pelted the car they were in. Extra armor had been added to the vehicle to the vehicle, but it’d been intended to keep crawlerz out not .50 caliber rounds.

  Pieces of metal ricocheted around the room as their attackers punched a long line of holes into the wall of the car. The rounds started striking one particular section of the wall the gunman must be focusing on. The steady stream of bullets sending sparks and metal shards zinging around the inside of the car like pissed off metallic hornets. A big enough hole formed in the wall that the attackers were able to lob in cannisters of tear gas.

  “They’re coming! If they get past us, you should surrender and do whatever they say. The calvary should be on the way. Hopefully Richardson got the message out before the engine got blown to shit.” Lindsey said while cradling her left arm. The arm looked like someone had ripped it off and then stapled it back to her shoulder after bending it a few different ways. That’s what happens when you try to hold a door open when an exploding rocket decides it wants that door closed.

  “They’re not getting in captain!” Harley yelled ferociously. Tears and snot coated the lower half of his face. The tear gas was working its way throughout the cab. They hadn’t brought the weapons and armament they’d have normally brought into a battle. No one had suspected they might be fighting regular people. Hence the complete lack of gas masks. Lindsey was kicking herself for that. She’d taken a box of gas masks off the supply car and handed it to one of her men to put back in the warehouse.

  “If they don’t get in then they’ll shoot this car to hell. Our main objective now is to keep Yue alive.” Lindsey was talking through a bandana she’d pulled up and around her face. Only her red rimmed tear oozing eyes were visible. Someone tossed in another cannister of the gas through the open doorway. Harley stood up to blast away at whoever had thrown in the gas and took a shot right to the chest. He fell over backwards. Lindsey tried to catch him with her broken arm and started cussing like crazy.

  Drew started to stand up and Lisa and Yue both pulled him right back down to the ground. There was a little less tear gas at this level, but they were all still in bad shape. The other suicide squad members in the car desperately fought to keep the attackers from boarding the train. Between their captain ordering them not to do anything and the tear gas incapacitating them they weren’t very effective. They were quickly overpowered, disarmed, and flung out the open back door to the ground below.

  A man reached down and grabbed Lisa by the hair to drag her off the car. Everyone was screaming for them to keep their hands away from their weapons. Drew lost it seeing Lisa treated that way and put a knife in the attacker’s stomach. Ripping the blade back out he turned to stick the next enemy he could find. Yue whacked Drew hard in the head with a baseball bat. She almost got shot in the face herself for the effort. Instead she was unceremoniously bull rushed out the back door and flung to the ground below.

  Before Yue had even finished rolling on the ground two men had grabbed her and put her in the back of a covered truck. In the truck another two men put her face down on the ground and zip tied her wrists and ankles. She was thrown on top of a wriggling pile of imprisoned humanity. Lindsey screamed out in pain the second she was unceremoniously added to the pile. The woman’s arm was never going to be the same again. Better a ruined arm than lying cold and lifeless on the tracks behind them as they drove away though.

  Machine gun fire erupted all around them. Yue assumed that was to encourage any would be rescuers or pursuers to keep their heads buried in the sand for a few more minutes. That should be long enough for the attackers to make their getaway. As bad as the situation was if they all just kept their cool, they still might be able to get out of it. She thought it was a pretty good sign that they’d been taken prisoner instead of just executed. Yue had been especially happy to see that a few men had been taken prisoner as well. She’d been worried Lisa, Lindsey and herself might have been considered loot.

  The truck skidded to a stop and another group of men hopped in the back. They came in with a ton of gear including machine guns and mortars. With the additional equipment and men the back of the truck was getting pretty cramped. None of the people who’d taken them prisoner cared about the injuries any of their prisoners may have. They didn’t care if they accidentally stomped on their hands or anything. One of them seemed amused by the way Lindsey would scream every time he used his foot to nudge the bone sticking out of her arm. A man with a heavy southern accent told the bone nudger to cut it out.

  “Oh wow you assholes can speak English. I kind of assumed you were a bunch
of Russians or something.” Lisa called out from her sideways place towards the middle of the pile of humanity.

  “Why would we be Russians?” One of the men asked curiously.

  “Why else would you attack the American military? Why else would you attack the people trying to help everyone get back to a normal life? The people risking their lives to help ungrateful idiots like you.” Lisa responded. So much for keeping their cool and not pissing off the hostage takers.

  “Well you have a big part of that wrong. You see we’re the American military. We’re the ones who didn’t leave when the country fell apart. We’re the ones who weren’t invited to the secret bases or asked to cruise around on the ships. We weren’t sent orders that included our families getting a nice safe place to live for the next decade or whatever. If by American military, you mean the ones that stayed behind to protect the citizens instead of abandoning them then that’s us. Not you.” The man said.

  “I never left the country. Neither did she. My brothers and I have been right in the middle of this crap the whole time. We’ve never stopped fighting. What you just did was wrong but there’s still time to make up for it. Stop the trucks and turn around. There’s no reason we can’t work together.” Yue spoke up. She’d intended on staying quiet until she knew who the players were and what to say to be the most impactful. Once Lisa started talking though she knew she needed to jump in immediately. Lisa and Drew were really made for each other. Either one of them could take a bad situation and make it ten times worse with just a few blunt sentences.