That incident seemed to inspire the rest of the men. They all began reciting the pledge with great gusto. None of them wanted to be on the receiving end of a beat down like that. The last words of the pledge echoed across the expansive highway. Once that noise had died down Jeff spoke up again.
“We’re letting you live for now. We don’t really want to after what you did but we need people to rebuild this country. Do what you’re told, and you’ll be fine. Cross us and we’ll make an example out of you. Is that understood?” Jeff asked.
“I will start shooting if you idiots don’t grow some brains and answer the questions.” Billy announced. On the other side of the crowd a squad member had taken it upon himself to start walking up and down whacking men in the face. He was swinging a heavy asp when they didn’t respond quickly enough. Jeff loved how this was all coming together. He hadn’t coordinated any of it with any of them. He was flying by the seat of his pants, but it was all working out a million times better than he’d thought it would. Winging it for the win!
“Do you understand?” Jeff asked again. This time he asked it much louder. There was a resounding chorus of ‘yes sir’. Tommy was barking out the answers right along with the rest of his men. Tommy was smart enough to know he’d managed to make himself the number one choice to be shot in the head by sending his men out to bomb Weathertop. Those same men had taken it on their own initiative to waste the survivors when they showed up at the train yard. That bit of initiative was going to end up costing Tommy plenty.
“Where’s the pilot?” Billy asked. He’d squatted down to place himself face to face with Tommy.
“Have one of your guys bring her over here. Once we’ve got her, we’ll be leaving. We’ll send a man later with more instructions. For now keep doing like you’ve been doing. Focus on killing as many of crawlerz as you can every night. We’ll send you intel and gear that’ll hopefully make that easier.” Jeff turned and walked back towards his Humvee. Leaving Billy and Drew to guard the men still kneeling on the ground. When one of them started to stand up he caught a face full of asp.
Billy yelled out over the low murmuring of the crowd. He ordered them all to stay on their knees until Lynn showed up. The only person Billy let stand up was the man Tommy sent to go retrieve Lynn. When the men started to whine about having to remain kneeling the asp flashed some more. The suicide squad didn’t care if the men on the ground were uncomfortable. Billy personally would love to take a step back and just start mowing them down with his machine gun. They’d killed his captain after all. Now it looked like they were going to get away with it.
A black Hyundai rolled up about ten minutes later with Lynn driving it. She got out of it with her escort. Billy and Drew walked over to collect her and tell her she was going home. As they got closer, they noticed that she had a black eye. She didn’t look scared though. She looked pissed.
“Are you ok?” Billy asked when she walked up to him.
“I’m good.” Lynn responded.
“Who hit you?” Drew asked.
“The greasy douche over in the car. He tried to do a lot more than punch me. I wouldn’t let him have the pleasure of anything beyond using me like a punching bag though.” Lynn turned and spat at the leather clad biker who was leaning against the Hyundai. He smiled and waved at her arrogantly.
Drew clicked transmit on his communications unit and whispered a quick command. A few seconds later the Hyundai was hit by two explosive devices shot out of the turret of the launcher attached to one of the Humvees. Red hot pieces of the car spun out from the explosion. A jagged hunk of metal pierced one of the biker leaders in the thigh. Several of the men still kneeling in the road fell over as they were struck by random bits of red hot Korean engineering. Tommy jumped up angrily coming at Billy.
The newly sworn governor of Pennsylvania found himself on his back. The squad members hadn’t liked the way he’d jumped up and gone for Billy. None of them had been huge fans of Drew ordering the Hyundai to be blown up so close to them but that didn’t excuse Tommy’s reaction. Drew walked over to where Tommy was angrily staring up at the sky. He pulled his blade out and went down to one knee next to the leader of the pack.
“We won’t forget what you did. You may be excused for now but there will be a reckoning. Until then you best watch yourself and your men. If anything happens to any of ours because you or yours screwed up, you will pay.” Drew put his blade on top of Tommy’s pinky finger. He looked up at Billy who nodded. Drew leaned forward putting all of his weight on the blade. It was only a matter of seconds before Tommy’s finger was no longer connected to his hand.
“Have a nice day.” Billy said as he and Drew turned to walk back towards their ride. They left Tommy trying to staunch the blood pouring out of his severed finger. It wasn’t much but they felt like Lindsey would have approved of the gesture. She may have even considered it romantic.
Chapter 31: Getting Down to Business
“You think they’ll do what they’re told?” Drew wondered aloud. They were sitting in the deluxe crawler resistant trailer that Harley had procured for them from Fayetteville. It had all the latest technology on board to make for convenience in the age of the infected. There were even solar cells intended to be placed on top of the trailer every morning. The solar collectors could be easily snapped in then taken out before night fell. If left on top overnight the attacking monsters typically smashed at least a few of them to pieces.
At night they were able to live off the energy collected and stored in the battery packs during the day. They also had the option of leaving the truck running to provide for their electrical needs, but diesel was a finite resource. At some point they were going to need to figure out how to refine it once it all went bad. They were currently just using mixers to keep it from fizzling out on them. When all the conveniences you needed were a couple of monitors and enough juice to power some webcams the solar option was decent. In the summer air conditioning was going to be a requirement if they were expected to overnight in the trailers.
“They’ll do what they think best serves their interests. Tommy is going to like being the legit governor and having us there to back up his legitimacy. The bikers will respect us more after that show we just put on. That’s the negotiating language they’re used to.” Jeff answered.
“I think you guys took the right tact. Those guys respect power. If you came in weak then they’d have just blown you off.” Lynn chipped in. Everyone listened respectfully to her. She hadn’t talked any more about her experience there since she’d given Drew the intel leading to blowing up the guy leaning against the Hyundai.
“I’ll be glad when we find another base with really thick walls. I hate the way they get in my head.” Drew said. Everyone there absolutely agreed with that sentiment. The crawlerz currently beating themselves to pieces trying to force their way into the steel encased trailer were frustrated and hungry. The visions that drove them forward were horrifying. The people in the trailer were catching snapshots of those visions like some kind of Instagram feed from a psychotic cannibal party.
As bad as the visions were when awake the idea of falling asleep was even less appealing. No matter how exhausted they were at the end of the day none of them would wake up refreshed. A restless night tortured by the nightmares triggered by the groupthink of the demons attacking the trailer would see to that. Drew kept thinking he’d eventually get used to it and be able to sleep right through it. While he’d eventually mastered sleeping straight through most of the night his mind was racing so much it was rarely really restful sleep.
“I wonder how many of the soldiers we’ll lose when they come off the boats. Even if the crawlerz can’t touch them this psychic crap will take a big toll.” Jeff said. It was an issue he’d been mulling over. If they tried to just bring a bunch of men off the boats to fight the infected, it could end up being a complete disaster. They’d all seen enough suicides to know exactly what Jeff was getting at.
“You need to han
d them Pez dispensers packed with vitamin Valium.” Harley responded. No one was shocked when Harley immediately offered up drugs as the solution. In this case it probably was the best solution. The Valium would take the edge off the nightly attacks giving the men fresh off the boat time to acclimatize a bit. They could gradually lower the dosage until they were spending every night as miserable as everyone else. Miserable was better than dead. That might as well be the survivor’s slogan.
The conversation turned to other practical matters. Drew wondering how long they’d be in Fayetteville and Jeff knowingly answering it wouldn’t be long. The little group all looked up at Jeff to see if he was going to elaborate. When they saw he was not they each wandered off to their own bunks to try and sleep. Plenty of them popping sleeping pills and Valium themselves to get through the night terrors. It wasn’t just the newbies who had issues with that satanic slasher film run through their heads on a nightly basis. It wasn’t like any of them were too worried about the long term effects of getting addicted to using the drugs to fall asleep.
The medical professionals were more concerned with people overdosing than people trying to get a good night’s sleep. It wasn’t uncommon to wake up to a team dragging the body of a dead soldier out of the trailer because he’d overdosed. The deaths were always discussed like they were accidental, but Drew wasn’t so sure. Lying in the dark with a bottle of pills and a massive amount of depression wasn’t a good combination. Your family was dead and there was no real bright future to look forward to. Why not take a few extra?
Drew himself was a Nyquil guy when he could get it. LeBron had taken a picture of Harley sitting next to Drew one night before bed. Harley had a prescription bottle full of pills next to a bottle of tequila in front of him. Drew was carefully measuring out a nighttime dose of NyQuil. LeBron had amused himself for days making up memes based off that picture. If the internet ever became a thing again then those memes would probably end up on the front page of it.
Aided by various pharmaceuticals the night went by in the blink of an eye. Drew woke up in a medicine induced haze and briefly panicked before belatedly remembering where he was. Briefly panicking was pretty much how he woke up every morning. Especially mornings when he wasn’t sleeping in an air conditioned room someplace like Weathertop. That first jolt of fear induced adrenaline was his new coffee. Not that he didn’t still like to supplement with regular old fashioned coffee when he could get it. He especially liked waking up to the smell without having to get up and make it himself.
Yawning he walked towards the percolating pot at the end of the aisle. The trailer had been setup such that rows of bunk beds ran from the floor to the ceiling for most of the length of the trailer. Storage cubbies were provided underneath and above the bunks. The walls had been turned into additional storage. That being done on the theory that the further you were sleeping from the crawlerz the weaker the psychic flashes would be when they hit you. It was a really nice theory but in practice a few feet of solar panels and extra blankets didn’t help a whole lot.
Positioned to be very noticeable by the coffee pot was what Jeff had seriously referred to as the greatest weapon they had against the infected. It was a spiral notebook under a hand lettered sign saying to record your ideas and suggestions for winning the war in the book. Drew liked to leaf through it while having a cup of coffee and see what people had come up with. Some of the ideas were a little out there. Other ideas were ones that Drew could see making a real difference if they were put into practice.
Jeff championed the suggestion books as a way to feed ideas from the field back to the smart people in the rear who were working on solutions and strategy. If you’re a welder then there’s a really good chance you weren’t going to be leaving the base. That skill was way too valuable to risk out in the field. Which was why feedback from the guys in the field trying to shoot through a steel cage was important. Same for the logistics guys. They needed to know what kind of ammunition worked the best out in the field. That way they could get more of it into the hands of the men who were responsible for killing as many of the infected as possible. Jeff called it a direct feedback loop. The notebooks had helped a lot in reducing the time from good idea to reality. Even more importantly it worked well to crush the stupid ideas that came out of the think tanks before they could get too many people killed.
“You have a suggestion?” Jeff asked. He’d caught Drew glancing at the book. Drew shook his head and started looking for a mug. He wasn’t at all surprised that he’d found the caffeine addicted Jeff standing right beside the pot.
“I suggest once we mop up the infected that we circle back around and kill anybody with a wallet attached to their pants by a chain in Pennsylvania.” Drew said. The only sweetener packets available were the blue ones. He hated the blue ones, but he supposed he’d make do. It was the middle of a zombie apocalypse after all.
“That’s pretty much the plan as far as I’m concerned. Unfortunately men like Tommy are going to be necessary for the next few years. Once we’ve wasted the infected, we can send men around to drop a little something special in his Lynchburg Lemonade.” Jeff’s joke fell flat. Drew was struggling to understand why Jeff had chosen Lynchburg Lemonade out of all the drink options out there. Harley walked up catching the last bit of the exchange.
“Do you think they drink the ones that Bartles and James makes or that they’re more like White Claw guys?” Harley asked. He had his normal morning hangover. Searching for some coffee to add to his heaping mug of room temperature bourbon he’d perked up at the Lynchburg Lemonade comment. He called the concoction in his mug the breakfast of champions and steadfastly refused any offers of any sort of food before noon. When challenged on that he stood his ground and said he was practicing intermittent fasting. It was like they were all getting weirder the longer this fight dragged on. Other than being leery of letting him drive it didn’t really impede his performance very much, so everyone let it slide. Not that Harley would’ve changed to please any of them anyway.
Harley woke up every morning wondering why the hell he wasn’t dead yet. Good men and women a thousand times stronger than him had fallen beside him left and right. He’d lost a woman he’d fallen in love with and left her kids behind to fend for themselves. He knew he wasn’t a good man. The drink and the drugs were to smooth over the moments of despair that threated to wipe him out. He kept going because he didn’t know how to quit. He lived to protect his friends and avenge the ones he hadn’t been able to protect. He didn’t know what he was going to do when they ran out of things for him to kill.
“I’m wondering if they’re worried about running out of those little umbrellas.” Drew added to Harley’s teasing. They both respected Jeff’s leadership. They’d seen him in action against human and infected alike. The man was fearless and ferocious when the bullets were flying. There was no doubt if you handed him a machete and threw him in a hole with a score of the infected that he’d make every attempt to hack his way out. No one who knew him would bet against him making it out either. At his core he was still a socially inept nerd though. That nerdiness peeked out at times providing lots of fodder for Drew and Harley to tease him about.
“I’ll try harder to pick a more appropriate alcoholic beverage next time.” Jeff joked back. It was all in good fun. Anything that anyone could do to blow off steam without guns or drugs involved was a good thing in Jeff’s book.
“That’s really all anyone can ask for.” Billy said with a slightly confused grin on his face as he walked by. Having only been privy to that last sentence he was having to construct the rest of the conversation in his own mind.
Unlike the rest of the coffee drinking loafers Billy was actually working. He was holding the front of one of the long solar panels they needed to snap on the roof of the trailer before they got moving for the day. Otherwise they wouldn’t have electricity in the trailer that night without running the engine. Not that it should matter since they’d be rolling into Fayetteville in a c
ouple of hours anyway. Once there they were hoping to find nicer accommodations for the evening. In the event that didn’t happen they wanted to be prepared. The boy scout motto had never rung truer.
Once the solar panels had been snapped on everyone dispersed to the vehicles they’d be riding in for the day. At a softly spoken order from Jeff the convoy launched into motion. They’d already called ahead to let Fayetteville know they’d be coming. After the sneak rocket attack that’d taken out hundreds of the people from Weathertop security had been increased exponentially. No longer faced with just defending against the infected they were monitoring for any movement of forces towards any of the bases. The infected weren’t the only things out there trying to kill them. It was now a war that needed to be fought on multiple fronts.
Those fronts would probably increase as they moved across the country. Not everyone seemed willing to recognize Shaun as the legitimate President. Even Shaun recognized his promotion stunk of nepotism and feudalism. No real American liked the idea of a royal family. No matter that families like the Bushes and the Kennedys had long enjoyed powerful dynasties in the United States. Those dynasties were carefully orchestrated and maintained by unscrupulous media moguls. Shaun didn’t have a PAC to pave the way for him. What Shaun had was his uncle appointing him to a cabinet position that happened to fall in the line of succession. Shaun had ended up President through a completely unexpected series of events sparked by an ill-fated picnic.
Crawlerz: Book 5: Off the Rails Page 27