Crawlerz: Book 5: Off the Rails

by R. S. Merritt

  The gunfire ratcheted up to an insane amount of lead being thrown outside. A voice yelled for everyone to get out fast. Lisa perked up at the sound of that voice. She yelled that she needed help getting someone out. She also yelled her loudest for no one in the car to shoot the people coming in the truck to help them. Outside it sounded like someone had grabbed one of the big ass machine guns from the chinook to clear out the trolls under the bridge.

  A couple of seconds later a wide eyed Drew stuck his hands then his head into view. The expression on his face pretty clearly showing that he kind of expected to get shot but he was doing this anyway. None of the remaining men in the back took a shot at him when Lisa scrambled over the bodies in the truck bed to give him a kiss. A few squad members popped their heads in and immediately started yelling for everyone to keep their heads down. They were pulling out another machine gun to make sure the crawlerz were completely cleared out from under the bridge.

  “Where’s Yue?” One of the squad asked Lisa loudly. He was trying to be heard over the thunderous assault going on outside.

  “She was riding up front!” Lisa yelled back wondering how they didn’t know that already. The squad member nodded and yelled into the microphone hanging off his collar to relay that confirmation. They’d evidently already known that and were just confirming. That would explain why Jeff hadn’t popped his head in here yet. Lisa couldn’t imagine that he would’ve stayed in the rear with the gear knowing that Yue might be under the bridge and in danger.

  “Do you know where she is?” Lisa asked. It’d occurred to her they were probably asking if Yue was back here because they weren’t able to find her up front. The squad member shook his head and went to check on Lindsey. Two of the other squad guys were stripping the weapons off the ambushers still alive in the back of the truck. They were so happy to be alive that they had no problem giving up their weapons. There were only three of them alive and conscious enough to know what was going on anyway.

  “All clear! I’m calling up the medic to help with Lindsey. There’s a situation we need to help with. You mind guarding these scumbags?” The squad soldier asked. Lisa situated herself to cover the three men sitting quietly on the other side of the truck. One of them grinned realizing how the situation had reversed itself. The other soldiers were not as cheerful at the unexpected turn of events. They were all still euphoric that someone had showed up to save them from dying in the darkness under the bridge.

  Drew kissed Lisa on her swollen bloody lips and followed the squad soldier out the back of the truck. A medic slid in the back of the truck right as Drew left. Drew hopped down to the ground and followed the squad soldier past the front of the beat up military truck. He took a second to shine a light inside the truck and verify Yue wasn’t in there. A whistle from up ahead had him moving in that direction quickly. There were several shadowy figures moving around on the other side of the bridge out on the road.

  Sprinting out into the daylight he slowed down quickly to try and figure out what was going on. A dweeby looking guy in a black leather cape was revolving in a circle holding a gun up to Yue’s head. Jeff, Harley and a couple of squad soldiers had surrounded the revolving pair. All of them had their weapons drawn. Drew quickly joined the circle of men aiming weapons at the man they were all yelling at.

  “Get me a car or I’m going to kill her!” Schmidt shouted shoving the gun painfully into the side of Yue’s head.

  “Why don’t you just drop the gun and we’ll let you walk away. Nobody here gives a shit about you. All we want is to get Yue back. You can walk free man.” Harley said. The men on the perimeter all nodded and did their best to look like they meant it. No one was fooled though. Everyone knew as soon as the cape wearing creep stepped away away from Yue one of them was going to pop him.

  “We’ll let you walk man. None of us want to kill anybody else. I guarantee you whoever was still alive in that truck our guys rushed in and saved them. We’re not the bad guys here you know.” Harley continued speaking civilly and calmly to the man. Drew was honestly a little impressed despite himself. This was a different side to the big guy.

  “They mean it. They’ll let you go.” Yue croaked out. She looked seriously messed up. Blood was all over her bruised face. Her eyes had a faraway look to them.

  “I know you called those things. You’re a witch. That’s why they sent us to capture you.” Schmidt yelled turning faster. Spit flew out of his mouth as he yelled out the accusations. His eyes were getting a little crazy as he lost the vestiges of his cool guy act.

  Yue’s head dipped down. Schmidt grabbed her hair to yank her head back up to keep himself covered. Yue snapped her head back hard into his face and then threw herself forward. Schmidt stumbled back a step and fumbled to grab for Yue. He knew without his shield in front of him he was a dead man. Before he could even reach for her, he was shot four times in the head and twice in the chest. Schmidt was dead before his body even hit the ground.

  Jeff rushed forward and scooped Yue up off the ground into his arms. Drew and Harley were right there as well making sure she was ok. Lisa came out from under the bridge to join the party. She asked Yue if she’d been the one who called down the crawlerz under the bridge. When Yue nodded Lisa playfully gave her a high five.

  It wasn’t until they were all sitting back in the chinook getting ready to take off that Lisa felt the weight of all the people staring at her. Realizing that must be because of what her face looked like she dipped her head down. She felt awkward and ugly all of a sudden. She wanted a mirror to see how bad her face looked.

  “What’s the matter?” Drew asked her. He’d immediately noticed the change in her demeanor. The normally brazen Lisa suddenly found herself feeling insecure and shy. She didn’t like the feeling one bit.

  “How bad is my face?” She finally whispered. She’d been running her tongue over her chipped tooth before she asked. She was wondering if she’d ever feel like smiling again. She didn’t want anybody snapping a picture of her looking like some kind of crackhead.

  “You’re beautiful babe. Every guy in here is jealous as hell of me. All these bruises and scrapes just mean on top of being hot you’re also a total bad ass.” Drew answered without any hesitation whatsoever. At extreme risk to the bad ass status she’d just had conferred upon her by the best boyfriend ever Lisa put her head on his shoulder and started sobbing. It’d been a really rough day.

  Chapter 9: 99 Problems but a Witch ain’t One

  Captain Lindsey lay in her bed in the sick bay at Weathertop trying to come to terms with how many of her people had been lost in the last twenty-four hours. Her squad had been sent out on plenty of missions where the odds weren’t great, but they’d always managed to pull it off. Time and again they’d emerged out of buildings and subway tunnels dragging their objective along with them.

  All those missions had been waged to free people or supplies from the infected. Lindsey had never been sent on a mission since the advent of the apocalypse to strike out at other noninfected humans. There may have been some collateral damage along the way she wasn’t aware of. She could even see where some of their objectives might have resulted in taking supplies that other survivors could have used. None of that gave other Americans the right to do what’d been done to her squad mates.

  Whatever group Schmidt had been a part of had effectively declared war on what was left of the US government. They’d declared war at a time when everyone should be working together to clean the crawlerz out. Lindsey got it that the people who’d been left behind by their government were pissed. They had every right to be pissed. Pissed or not if they hit her people then she was going to hit back. The animals who’d cold bloodedly killed so many of her people in that cowardly sneak attack would come to know her wrath.

  Lindsey was stewing alone in the room when there was a knock at the door. Frustrated that she couldn’t even get out of bed to answer it she barked out a welcome to whoever it was and told them to come on in. Harley and Yue popp
ed in through the door. Harley was basically Yue’s shadow now. He felt like a bumbling idiot for having lost her during the ambush and was seriously overcompensating. Yue had actually had to tell him to get lost so she could have some private time with Jeff the prior evening. Even after all that she’d had to run him off from standing directly outside the door of the room that Jeff had brought wine and an assortment of summer sausage and cheese to. Someone had been looting themselves some Hickory Farms while Yue had been stuck out on the road.

  “How are you feeling?” Yue asked. She felt like she should have brought a bundle of balloons and some baked goods or something. Unfortunately the gift shop had been permanently closed.

  “Like my arm got ripped off and used as a pogo stick by a bunch of fat kids who didn’t know how to put it back on correctly. The drugs are nice though. Anytime I press this little button it puts me into outer space for a few minutes. I’m starting to understand that whole addicted to drugs thing a lot more.” Lindsey answered.

  “Yeah right. How many times have you actually pressed that button?” Yue asked suspiciously. Knowing the gung ho captain Yue doubted she’d do much of anything that would keep her from getting back to her post as soon as possible.

  Lindsey smiled guiltily. “I just pressed it the one time when they were showing me how to do it. They’d also just set my arm. It felt like someone tipped over a volcano full of lava inside my arm. I pressed the hell out of it that time. Since then not so much. I can deal with a little pain.”

  “You might as well press the button. They’re not letting you out of here anytime soon. Not unless they need you for a mission anyway.” Harley said smiling. He might as well not have even spoken. Neither Lindsey nor Yue were shocked that he was advocating for pressing the drug relief button.

  The whistle top train tour experiment had been temporarily put on hold while they figured out what to do about the rebellious refugees out there who’d decided to start attacking them. They’d brought back the prisoners they’d taken under the bridge. None of the squad were super interested in the whole Geneva convention or any other official stance on torture. There’d been plenty of volunteers to conduct the interrogation sessions. These were the same men who’d lost comrades when the trains were ambushed. No one had any doubt they’d be able to successfully interrogate the prisoners.

  The first round of results from the interrogation were due any time now. As a courtesy to Lindsey they were going to be meeting in the sick bay to hear what the interrogators had found out so far. LeBron and Jeff should be showing up any time now with the squad leader who’d be briefing them on what they’d found out. Until then Yue made do ensuring Lindsey was up to speed with what was going on with the rest of her troops out in the field. They were basically all being gathered together and redeployed to Fayetteville for now. The ones at Weathertop would remain at Weathertop until given other orders.

  Lindsey was happy there were still enough of her people left to consider them a fighting unit. She’d been worried that after the ambush they’d be broken up and assigned as reinforcements to other units that were short on personnel. She felt like that’d be a real waste since the suicide squad had been together for so long now that they operated together like a well-oiled machine. They may have gotten their asses handed to them this time but that was in large part because they weren’t expecting to have to fight other humans. It wouldn’t happen again now that they knew this was something else that they had to watch out for.

  Jeff and LeBron walked in a little bit later with a tired looking squad soldier. The man still had the grime from the field covering him. He snapped to attention and saluted as soon as he saw Lindsey in the room. He held the salute until she told him to drop it and stand at ease. She’d thought at first that he was joking with her since it was pretty obvious that she wasn’t going to be saluting anybody anytime soon. Her saluting arm and shoulder being in a giant cast and all. The man grinned guiltily once he realized what was going on. To be fair he hadn’t slept in a couple of days now, so everything was getting a little blurry.

  While pretty much everyone else who’d come in on the helicopter the previous night had been sleeping, the amateur torturer had been awake with two other squad soldiers making the scumbag prisoners answer questions. To make the question and answer session as productive as possible they’d started off by making the prisoners strip. Then they’d gone and gotten a pair of the loppers like they typically used to cut off locks to open doors and trucks up. When nude men are confronted by people holding giant scissors up to their junk all thoughts of resistance go right out the window.

  Under the implied threat of forceful genitalia removal the prisoners had eagerly answered every question to the best of their ability. Getting them to shut up had been the hard part. Over the evening the story had gradually come together that ended with the ambush on the train. They hadn’t even had to kill any of the poor slobs. It’d almost been revenge enough just seeing their eyes go wide at the site of the loppers.

  The men they’d taken prisoner were part of a refugee force that called itself the Real America. There was a leader circulating among the Real Americans reminding them that the government coming back now was the same government that’d abandoned them all to die. It always helps to have the truth behind you when starting a rebellion. He didn’t even have to convince people. The President himself at the beginning of all this had gotten on TV and told the country that the government was abandoning them. The President had even had the nerve to tell the people left to die what buildings they should stay away from. Being told to stay away from them so that when the government came back, they could more easily rebuild.

  The rebellion speeches pretty much wrote themselves. The man leading the Real Americans wouldn’t even have to stretch the truth to get everyone riled up. All he had to do was state the truth. He could hold up the leaflets that’d been printed out saying the government was back and instructing refugees where to go for aid. He could tune a radio to one of the stations telling them where to report so that the government that’d gone into voluntary exile could jump back into their lives and boss them around. Real Americans weren’t slaves or lackeys. Real Americans wouldn’t sit idly by while the people who’d deserted them tried to come back and reclaim what the Real Americans had been fighting for all along.

  “Got it.” Jeff said after the man who’d been in charge of torturing the prisoners got to like page ten of why the Real Americans hated everybody. “How many of these people are there out there?”

  The squad member flipped through a few pages of his notes to where he’d asked the logistical questions. He did some mental math before answering. “A few hundred sir. National Guard and reservists make up the backbone of the groups. Mostly military units who were abandoned and their families. Most of them live near the larger cities where the salvaging is good. They’ve lost contact with some of their groups, so the count isn’t guaranteed to be accurate.”

  “Why’d they attack us?” Lindsey asked her squad leader.

  “According to them we attacked first. I guess they’re talking about whoever shot back at the scavengers by the medical center the other day. They’ve been watching us for a long time but that was one of the first times they’d attacked us. They got some of their intel from refugees who went over to Fayetteville and pretended to be interested in joining us. Their names are in the report. I think that’s how they knew about Yue.” The squad leader answered.

  “What other times have they attacked us?” Jeff asked. He’d picked up on the nuance of that last answer.

  “Yes sir. We wrote down the other times our prisoners could remember. It sounded like they took out trucks full of supplies out on the road. They tried to do it so that we’d just write it off as another loss to the infected.” The tired looking man answered.

  “They give any indication of why they’ve only launched small attacks up until now?” LeBron asked. He was hoping to hear confirmation of what he was thinking. The exhausted sq
uad member who’d spent the night threatening three men’s man hoods paused a moment to put his thoughts together to answer that one.

  “They’re all either active or retired military that make up the leadership component of the Real American forces. That means they know the capabilities of the military coming back off the carriers and such. They know that we can crush them if we want to. A few hundred men with some tanks and RPGs aren’t going to fare well against a government with satellite oversight and stealth bombers. The hate us but they fear us. They’re also fighting that pesky infected problem same as we are.” The explanation was completed with a large involuntary yawn for which the squad member looked suitably embarrassed.

  “If nobody has any more questions for you sergeant, why don’t you go find a shower and a rack. Get someone to relieve those other two on prisoner detail as well.” Captain Lindsey ordered. The sergeant snapped off a quick salute and was gone after agreeing to get his notes in order. Lindsey had asked him to get those passed along to LeBron and Jeff as soon as he had taken some time to get some rest.