Even if it wasn’t all true, it was the way it had happened.
1
1357 Miles to Go
Day 6
Gunny didn’t have guard duty that night, but Deputy Collins did, and he was awakened a little before two a.m. as the soft knock came on the outside of the sleeper. She was quiet and competent, having laid her clothes out on the passenger seat the night before. She didn’t need to turn on any lights, and for that Gunny was grateful. It always annoyed him when he was in the Army when somebody getting up for guard duty was such an ass, they had to wake everyone else up as well. He still wasn’t sure how he felt about sharing such tight quarters with a woman. The first night, after riding with him all day, she had asked to borrow a blanket. She was going to sleep by the campfire. He had pointed out that it was not only uncomfortable, but dangerous if any undead made their way through the perimeter security. They would be drawn to the fire. He had a top bunk he could clean his stuff off of and she was more than welcome to sleep there. She wasn’t a big talker, and he didn’t learn a whole lot about her personal life, but she had good taste in music and they had whiled the day away with her DJing his iPod that had nearly twenty-five thousand songs.
When he awoke again, it was to a loud thumping on the sleeper, and he was surprised to see the faint glow of dawn peeking through the windshield. It was a little after six. Another day closer to home. “Rise and shine, sleepyheads,” he heard, as Packrat made the rounds, getting everyone up for breakfast. He hadn’t heard Collins come back in. She was either really stealthy, or had just stayed up. Then he heard her roll over above him and saw her clothes, folded on the passenger seat. He quickly pulled on his pants while laying down before he hopped up, grabbing a clean shirt and socks, then climbing out with boots in hand to finish dressing outside. He’d give her the privacy of the cab to wake up and dress at her leisure. By the time he had finished lacing up his boots, she was already climbing out, fully dressed in her deputy’s uniform and her hair pinned in a neat bun. She just nodded at his surprised look, and continued on to breakfast.
Griz was coming out of his rig, also, and gave him a little knowing smile. “How’s she look without that uniform on?” he asked, waggling his eyebrows.
“Dunno,” Gunny said, quickly changing the subject. “How about your passenger?”
Griz made a face, shook his head, and sighed. “She’s cute, but it ain’t worth it, man. She’s a regular little chatterbox, never shuts up. Goes on and on about bands I’ve never even heard of, about boyfriends that treated her bad, and about all her Facebook friends. I need to find someone else to ride with me before I strangle her.”
Gunny laughed quietly. “Tell Cobb you need one of the mechanics with you, he’ll put her back on the tour bus.”
“Yeah,” Griz said. “I’ll say I need Donnie to identify some noise the truck is making, or something. I don’t want to piss her off. She is cute, and the swinging dicks around here outnumber the ladies ten to one…” he trailed off, watching Deputy Collins as she disappeared around one of the rigs.
“Yep,” Gunny said. “Best to leave all options open.”
After a quick breakfast burrito buffet, Cobb gathered everyone together to go over their refuel procedure one last time. He and Griz had worked on perfecting it yesterday, and all the equipment was ready. Basically, they were going to pull up in a single file near where the fuel drops were, where the tankers would come in and refill the underground tanks. ZZ and Jellybean had Power Take-Off pumps on their trucks as a leftover from their oil field days, and with the end cut off of one of the hoses, it would slide right down inside the four-inch necks on the underground tanks. The outlet hose from the PTO could be used to fill the trucks as they pulled up. With that much pressure shooting through them, it was sure to fill them up fast, and make a big mess. All the guys not actually driving a truck drew straws to see who would be the unlucky ones to refuel everyone. It would go much faster, and there would be a lot fewer diesel smelling people, if the drivers stayed in their trucks and had a crew refuel while everyone else had guns at the ready. If they drew a big crowd of followers, Scratch would head back out with his Western Star and cut them down as much as possible. With nothing left to do but the doing, they mounted up and fired the big diesels. Jellybean slid in behind Gunny, with his PTO hoses already hooked up and strapped down. The two unfortunate refuelers, with their sunglasses and bandanna’s as safety equipment, were riding shotgun.
Sara pulled in ahead of them and radioed back that it was all clear. When they got to the truck stop, Gunny had to move a few cars from the intersection at the bottom of the ramp with his plow but it wasn’t too bad, and he swung wide to let Jellybean get his truck in near the fuel drops. Gunny had five guys and Deputy Collins in the cab with him and they all climbed out, guns at the ready, as soon as he came to a stop. They surrounded Jellybean as he and the refuelers got the hoses drug over to the drop, and the PTO fired up and pumping. Jimmy Winchell ran his end of the hose up to Gunny’s truck to refill it first, as Julio popped the diesel cap and dropped his end into the ground. Gunny could see through the tinted windows of the truck stop. The undead inside were pawing at them, trying to get out. He was glad there weren’t any doors on this side of the building. The glass was strong, it looked like it would hold. Jellybean hit the switch and within a few seconds, diesel was blasting out at near firehose speed. He quickly adjusted it down to where it was manageable, and the refilling began. They hoped they wouldn’t be there more than twenty minutes getting all the trucks topped off. Gunny stayed in his seat, but had his M4 aimed out of the window, looking for targets. He heard a few shots at the rear of the convoy, but no chatter on the radio about massive numbers heading their way. A few minutes later he heard Winchell shout up at him that he was full, so he pulled clear, circling back around to line up for rear defense. That’s where they figured most of the danger would come from, with the infected following them in. He heard a few shots being fired up front near Jellybean, now, and started to second guess himself. Maybe he should have stayed up there to help out. But he would probably be in the line of fire, best to stick to the plan, don’t start improvising just yet. Scratch was at the top of the ramp, facing back the way they came, waiting to see if a crowd would show up. After a few more minutes he took off, aiming for a number of runners heading their way. The next truck pulled up beside Gunny, and the line moved forward another seventy feet. There wasn’t much for the guards to shoot at. Out west, truck stops were generally on the outskirts of town, not near any residential areas, and this one was no exception. There were plenty of trucks in the parking lot, but this whole war started almost a week ago and it appeared that the zombies had wandered off. He scanned the rigs out there for any undead to come running out between them, but it was quiet. There was a brand new Peterbilt with an extended sleeper. “That would be nice to have,” he thought. “I bet it’s got a shower and a bathroom in it.” He kept scanning. Another truck pulled up, and the line went forward another seventy feet. Scratch came back and got turned around at the top of the ramp, fresh blood and body parts hanging from the front of his truck, ready to go again if he needed to.
Gunny scanned the roads for danger and let his mind wander back to the conversation he’d had with Carson the night before. The General had expressed his displeasure at Gunny taking such huge risks yesterday. Gunny asked him if he had found a replacement for him yet, so he wouldn’t have to be bothered with this nonsense. After that tense start, things got down to business, and he shared everything they had found out during the day’s fiasco of events. He told him again that their path would take them near Denver, they could come by to help if there was anything that could be done, but the General had assured him it would be futile. The blast doors were shut, and they were making headway, they hoped to have the area all the way to the mess hall cleared by tomorrow. He nixed the idea of peaceful island living. The Chinese had reported that the dead, being dead, didn’t breathe and didn’t have any buoyancy
in their bodies. They didn’t float, they walked on the bottom of the rivers and lakes until they walked right back out the other side. There would be a period where the undead were gaseous with decay and would float, but that would pass in a few weeks. So, an island would be worse than a tent on an open prairie. You would never see them coming, until they were walking up your shores. The only good news he had for them was it appeared that the Muslims, who had been holed up in the various mosques, were on the move. The refrigerated tankers were gone from the lots, and some of them had been photographed from the satellites, at nuclear facilities. They were going forward with their plans, and there was still massive celebrating in the streets of the victorious nations.
“Victorious?” Gunny had asked
“Yes, for a few more weeks,” General Carson had replied. “Then Russia and China will retaliate, and their victory dances will be over.”
Gunny wasn’t so sure of that plan. That many nukes going off would be worse than Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Couldn’t that cause a nuclear winter or something? He’d have to ask about that once they got settled.
The rest of the survivors they had been in touch with were holding their own. Some of the groups were in pretty good areas and if the Muslims were successful at decommissioning the power plants, they would stay and try to expand their spheres of influence, taking out as many undead as they could. Others were in mountainous regions of the country, with no hope of long-term survival without a supply chain to bring in food. Those groups were heading down to Oklahoma, as well. It had been decided that the town of Lakota would be the rebuild point. Away from the massive numbers of infected on the east side of the Mississippi, and in an area with good growing seasons, it was the best town with move-in ready housing for the long term. After a little zombie cleanup, of course. Carson said it was like something out of the ‘50s, with angled street parking and a population of about 2,000. Typical small Midwestern town.
“Isn’t that tornado alley?” Gunny had asked. He would have preferred something farther south.
The General went into a lengthy explanation about the inherently low risk-factor in this particular area due to the prevailing winds. That there was an abundance of water, a hydroelectric dam, a low population density, rivers between it and major urban areas, and a half dozen other reasons. Gunny just let him drone on, not wanting them to think he was ungrateful for the amount of work they had put into this project. It would do, he’d been through that part of the country plenty of times over the years. It was beautiful and bountiful land. It was Indian Territory, and they were a hardy lot, so he imagined they would find quite a few survivors in the area.
The General cleared up one other thing that had been bothering him.
“Sir,” he asked him, old military habits dying hard, “when you said I was the only guy you could find to do this job, why didn’t the dishonorable I have disqualify me. You said yourself that everything was redacted, you don’t know why they kicked me out. I might have been a drug dealer, or a section 8 mental case.”
When Carson came back on the line, Gunny heard the tail end of his chuckle. “If you had done anything like that, it would have been noted, not hidden,” he said. “You got booted right about the time there was that big upheaval in the service and all the good men, all the warriors who wanted to win the war, were being replaced with desk jockeys and yes men by the new administration. I figured you were one of the guys who wouldn’t play ball. Maybe you refused to bomb a wedding party, maybe you wouldn’t torture sheep herders. I don’t know, but I do know it was political. Anything else would have been boldly written in bright red ink.”
A few other drivers had been hanging around as he spoke on the Ham. Cobb, Griz, Cadillac Jack and some others. He hesitated. No one knew why the Army had kicked him out, but if they wanted him to lead them, they had a right to know the truth. They could replace him as soon as they got to Lakota, he'd be okay with that. Griz had probably guessed. He’d been in-country doing contract work when it happened, and he had doubtless put two and two together. Slaughter in a bathhouse one day, Meadows the sole survivor of an ambush that took out an entire Tier One team, the next. It didn’t have to be in the papers for guys in the know to know. He wasn’t the good guy they thought he was. It was time to come clean.
He keyed the mic again. “I’m not so honorable as all that, Sir,” Gunny said. “I killed some men that I wasn’t supposed to.”
The quiet talk around him ceased, they were all listening now.
After a pause, Carson came back and asked, “Did they need killing?”
“I think they did. The brass had different ideas.”
There was another long pause as the General considered his next words. He silently cursed him for being so forthright. He knew the whole story, no one else needed to. It might change people’s opinion of him and the country needed a gunfighter right now, not a politician. He had guilted him into taking on the role of President, he was aware that he hadn’t wanted the job. He was just glad he wasn’t forced to play his trump card. His ace in the hole. It might have backfired on him, if he had. He knew Meadows, knew he would always do the right thing, but what if he decided the right thing was something other than what Carson wanted? Carson wanted his country back. If he had to break a few eggs to get it, he would. He needed a figure the remaining people could rally around. Meadows was the guy, the only guy as far as he was concerned, that could pull this many people together, get them a thousand miles through hostile territory, and reestablish a country. The wrong man would let the power go to his head. The wrong man would fail at the nearly impossible task. The wrong man would give up and run away.
Meadows wouldn’t. If he decided to do a thing, it got done.
He had the experience, and the icy black heart to make the hard decisions, if it came down to that. He was a good man, but a stone-cold killer when he needed to be. Those kinds of men were rare. Most were one or the other, not both. Meadows didn’t know who Carson was, didn’t know they had worked together for years and, for now, he wanted to keep it that way. Carson played his cards close because this was a dangerous game, and it had already spiraled almost entirely out of control. They were on the razor's edge of the whole country becoming a wasteland, with no organized resistance, ripe for the plunder of the new victors. The players involved hadn’t planned it this way, he was sure of it. Mistakes had been made. They had panicked, and they couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle once it was released. It was either God’s grace, or pure dumb luck, that Meadows had survived, but he wasn’t going to let him go. Wasn’t going to let his country be reduced to a handful of survivalist outposts that could quickly be overrun. He needed someone all of the survivors could rally around, someone they believed had the full might of the still formidable Navy at his disposal. Someone who could order nuclear submarines to unleash their missiles. Someone who could give a little payback. He needed this group to make it to Lakota, and to keep increasing their numbers. All this ran through his head in a flash before he replied.
“Well, we sleep peaceably at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf,” he quoted, then closed the subject, he started telling him about the possibility of getting the electricity back on in Lakota. No one seemed to care about the big, dark, secret he’d been carrying around for years. Everyone knew about the Bacha Bazi boys, hell, they were even in that Kite Runner movie. The Americans were ordered to ignore tweenagers being used as sex slaves, but Gunny had walked in on something else. Some of them were only six or seven years old. Something in him snapped at the laughing bearded faces, high on opium, telling him to help himself, and inviting him to join them in the fun.
“Come, Sergeant,” they said. “Get your keer bloody, be a man!”
They even had a few little girls, if he wanted one of them, instead. Gunny thought he was saving them but in the eyes of their mothers, who had willingly sent them to the bathhouse, the American had shamed them. The very children he had saved came bearing gif
ts the next day as they left town. Normally his men never would have stopped the Hummers for a kid in the street. Everything about it screamed ambush. But there they were, shyly offering fruits and flowers, with their mothers smiling at the soldiers and urging them forward. He told his driver to stop. Fruits and flowers were definitely not all they offered...
Gunny quit ruminating over the conversation. They were nearing the end of the line and Cobb came over the radio, he told Scratch if he didn’t need to do another run at the followers, he needed to come on in and top off. He was the last truck. As the blood and gore splattered Western Star came down the ramp, Lars was hanging out the window, laughing and flipping them off with Scratch’s other mechanical arm. Gunny went up and got into position, and the line of trucks fell in behind as they started staging on the highway.
“What was that arm Lawrence had?” Collins asked. “It looked like something out of a Terminator movie.”
“Yeah, it is kind of cool,” Gunny said. “It’s a full function appendage, as Scratch calls it. He can articulate all the fingers, even pick things up with it. Cobb helped him buy it with money from the Vets’ box.”
“I wonder why he uses those hooks then, instead of it?” she asked. “If he wore a glove, you wouldn’t even know.”
“He said it’s a pain in the ass to operate. The VA gave him the hook arm, and I guess he’s comfortable with it.”
Something Gunny didn’t tell her was that Scratch didn’t want to hide the fact that he was missing his arm. He was young, brash, and a Marine. He wanted people to see the cost men like him paid for their right to go to Starbucks and not worry about being blown up. After 9/11, if men like him hadn’t volunteered in droves and taken the war overseas, it would have been fought here in America. One truck bomb at a time, with the bad guys killing random people whenever they wanted. He, and thousands of others, had paid a price. He remembered it every time he had to button his pants or cut a steak or even talk to a pretty girl. He didn’t want sympathy, he just wanted them to remember the men who made their comfortable way of life possible.
The Zombie Road Omnibus Page 33