“Looks like they were running back roads like we are, to avoid the cities,” Gunny said. “And that,” he tapped the cove below Monterey with his finger, “is where they were heading to.”
“Well, now we know the answer to what they’re doing with the rods,” Griz said. “Looks like they were going to be put on a boat, probably transported to something a little bigger out at sea. From there, who knows? Take them back to fire their own nuclear plants in Iran or wherever?”
“So now what?” Cobb asked. “We’re stuck with a truck full of rods that need constant supervision.”
“Maybe not,” Shakey said. He had gotten the locks popped on the briefcase and was sorting through the contents.
“I think I know a way…” he trailed off.
8
702 Miles to Go
Day 8
Shakey had been thinking about his time-stamped life a lot in the past few days. He didn’t have long to live without the insulin he needed to inject daily for his diabetes. He knew he could start eating better, exercising more, and everything else the doctors had been telling him for the past 20 years, but he also knew that even if he really tried, in the end he would die a miserable death. He was long since divorced, and had never had kids. He knew he hadn’t been the greatest guy in the world. Maybe even an asshole to a lot of people over the years. Facing certain death in the not too distant future had a way of making you introspective. His glory years hadn’t been high school, they had been the time he had served in the Army. He had been a supply sergeant. Not the most glorious job, but he was proud of his service, it was the one good and selfless thing he had done with his life. He hadn’t gone out and actually fought the bad guys in Iraq, but he had made sure his boys had everything they needed. He had been there in the early days of the war and many of the things they required were woefully hard to get. By hook or by crook, he got everything they asked for. He took care of them. He requisitioned body armor and absolutely would not take no for an answer. He bartered with other supply sergeants for things they couldn’t get through normal channels. He utilized the underground local economy to get things Uncle Sam couldn’t. Now maybe, just maybe, he could do one last good thing. Could save some lives. Could be remembered as a hero, not some loser who died a slow ignominious death by slipping into a coma. Or worse, crapping all over himself and dying screaming in pain.
“We’re waiting, Einstein,” Cobb said in his gruff voice.
Shakey looked up from the briefcase he was rifling through.
“You find something in there?” Griz asked.
They were all staring at him. “Uh, no. Maybe you can make sense of it,” he said, and pushed the case over to Cadillac Jack. “I was thinking, maybe I could run the truck out to the rendezvous point.”
“You crazy?” Scratch said. “It’s a suicide mission. You think the Hajji’s are just gonna let you drive away after you deliver the tanker?”
“Probably not,” Shakey replied. He was calm, not his usual fiery self, when confronted. “But it’s gotta be done, unless you want to just leave it here and turn this whole area into a radioactive wasteland.”
A number of voices jumped in protesting the idea, saying there must be a better way.
Gunny looked up from the briefcase Jack was going through. More crap he couldn’t read, for the most part. Before he could speak, to shoot the idea down, Stacey caught his eye from where she was standing and gave a single nod of her head. He shut his mouth and considered, thinking about what little he knew of Shakey’s condition, and how much more she must know to be telling him to let him go. He looked over at Cobb and Griz, raised his eyebrows a little in question. He wondered if they knew the little ‘secret’ Shakey had been trying to keep from everyone. Griz gave a nod also and Cobb grimaced, but raised his voice to override everyone else.
“Tommy, get busy fixing up an extra fuel tank on that rig. Somebody double check my math, figure out how much diesel he’s gonna need to get there. No fuel stops. Too dangerous by himself.”
It was settled.
Tommy motioned to his mechanics and they headed for the doors to get started, as Shakey really began to let it sink in what he had just volunteered to do. Everyone came to the table and said a few words to him, some told him it was a brave and noble thing. The vets asked him to consider options, maybe leave it on the road at the cove and let them find it. Maybe he could slip off in the dark and make his way back. This was a new feeling for him. He’d never had so many people look at him and talk to him with such respect.
Jack had dumped the last of the contents out of the briefcase and was tearing the lining out, looking for anything else that may have been hidden.
Sara followed the mechanics out, telling them if they were going to break out the welders and other tools, she had a few things that needed to be done to her bike.
Cobb doubled up the guard since they were going to be here a while making noise, and everyone else either hung out in the little store, or checked over their trucks, making sure everything was in good working order. In this new world, a breakdown meant you lost your truck, at the very least. Maybe even your life.
The new reality of things was still hard to get used to. Anything anyone wanted in the store was free for the taking. Money meant nothing. Lars and the boys had taken to lighting up their fifty cent cigars with twenty-dollar bills. Scratch had said he was saving up his hundreds so he could wipe his butt with them, just to say he had. Stacey had laughed and told him if he got paper cuts, or some oozing pus-filled infection from dirty money, don’t come to her for treatment. That put an end to that idea.
Gunny caged a paper and some tobacco from Cadillac Jack as they stood outside with the rest of the smokers. Stacey, living up to her SS Sisters name, had run them all out of the store.
He’d never developed a taste for store boughts, but still picked up a pouch of Drum and some papers every once in a while. He didn’t smoke much when he was driving, but if he went camping or had a few extra bucks to lose at the poker table, he would usually buy some. He liked the flavor of pure tobacco without the chemicals, and when you smoked a hand rolled, you actually had to stop what you were doing and enjoy it. It was almost a little ceremony with him, hearkening all the way back to his youth and working in the tobacco fields back home in Eastern Kentucky. You didn’t just shake one out of the pack, stick it in your mouth, light it and go on with what you were doing. You stopped. You took a break. Stepped back from what you were working on and relaxed for a few minutes.
“Something ain’t right,” Jack said, as he popped his Zippo for Gunny.
“Ya think?” Scratch said, blowing smoke rings with his cigarillo.
Jack ignored him. “The paperwork in the briefcase points to involvement with people here in the States. Government types. There are keycodes to get in the secure areas of the power plants.”
“A lot of Muslims in the government now,” Gunny said. “I wouldn’t doubt most of them were involved. Like Manchurian Candidates, just biding their time until they got word the mission was a go.”
“Yeah, you may be right. But there are some notes in there and some of the names definitely aren’t your typical Arabic names.”
“Hey, Jack,” Scratch said, now blowing rings inside of rings. “How come you still have that Bulldog on the hood of your truck?”
“What?” the old man asked. “Why wouldn’t I? It’s a Mack.”
“I heard there was a new law. They don’t want two assholes staring at each other anymore.”
As the boys cracked up and Scratch laughed at his own joke, Wire Bender came hurrying up to the small group.
“Talked to Cheyenne Mountain,” he said, without preamble. “They had a bunch of questions about the nuke truck. Now they’re worried about some of the other teams making the same mistake and getting themselves killed.”
“Definitely a concern,” Gunny said. “It would suck to have meltdowns all over the place because they were too damn dumb to get the job done.”
“Yeah. But they’ve figured out the main frequency they’re using to communicate. Open channel, off the shelf equipment, apparently.”
“You’d think they would have better security,” Packrat said.
“Why?” answered Jack. “They think everybody is dead. And radios they can pick up from any decent electronics shop are easier to get, and don’t raise eyebrows. More dependable, too, probably.”
“So what are they going to do? They going to radio them and tell them what the deal is with those things never giving up?” Gunny cut in, getting back to what was important.
“Nope. We are,” he said. “They’re afraid if they do it, it’ll sound fake. Their systems broadcast too strong and clear. I’m going to set my ham radio on their freq and crank the booster all the way up. Then you pretend to have a conversation telling me about how the zombies never give up and all that. They’ll hear it and let all their teams know that are already out in the field.”
“That’ll work,” Packrat said in his all-knowing way. “The old bait and switch. Only let them hear one side talking. They’ll think you’ve got a better radio than whoever you’re talking to, that’s why they don’t hear him. And you better make sure nobody else has their radio’s on if you're gonna max out the wattage. It’ll melt everybody’s circuit boards down.”
They ignored him as they headed for Jack’s old truck, idling in the parking lot.
“How will we know if they’ll even pick it up? Did Carson triangulate? Does he know where their Headquarters are?” Gunny asked.
“Yep, it’s in Lincoln, Nebraska,” Wire Bender said. “I gotta be careful when you transmit, so it doesn’t come in too clear. I’m gonna run you through a dirty filter. They’re only about 300 miles away. Gotta make it sound like they’re picking you up on a bounce.”
As they gathered around Jack’s twin stack Mack, they decided to play it straight, not put on a big production of acting like they were being overrun by followers and firing off some rounds to add to the authenticity. Gunny simply hailed him over the radio, and after waiting a few seconds for the imaginary answer, he told him about what he’d ‘just’ found out. They never stop following if there is a straight path. Even after ten or fifteen miles, they kept coming. When he had relayed the relevant information with breaks, acting like he was listening to a reply, he slowly brought the mic farther and farther away from his mouth. Wire Bender fiddled with the power rheostat, turning it up and down as Gunny talked about the swamps, and barely avoiding running over a big alligator. He was trying to make it sound like they were a great distance away, in Florida or Louisiana, and the signal was fading in and out for the benefit of the Muslims listening in. Hopefully they would think they just got lucky to overhear the transmission at all.
They waited a few minutes, not sure if it had been picked up, considering how they would do it again if they needed to. Cadillac Jack’s old truck had been completely taken over with all of Wire Bender’s equipment. He had mounted three different CBs, two Ham radios, power boosters and linears and power cables and antenna wires and all manner of electronics. The truck was never shut off for long, Jack was afraid the batteries would be drained dead if he did.
NORAD came over on the secure Ham that was set up on the bunk bed.
“Whiskey Bravo Seven.”
“Go for Whiskey Bravo Seven,” Cadillac Jack replied.
“John has a long mustache. I say again, John has a long mustache,” came the voice over the radio.
“Affirmative,” was all Jack said, and he had a big grin on his face.
“Well, you gonna tell us what John and his mustache mean?” asked Scratch.
Gunny and Griz couldn’t help it, they were cracking up, laughing too hard to answer.
“You gave them that code didn’t you, Wire Bender?” Griz finally asked.
“Don’t tell me. The chair would have been against the wall if the answer was ‘no’,” said Lars. “You reckon the General knows?”
“Knows what?” Scratch asked, miffed that he was the only one not in on the joke.
“It’s from that movie Red Dawn,” Lars said. “It’s a code they used. Pretty fitting, I’d say.”
“It’s from an old Michigan Militia shortwave radio show, too,” Griz said. “Militias were big right after Waco and Ruby Ridge. Mark from Michigan used to open his show up with that.”
“It’s really older than that,” Cadillac Jack added. “It’s from World War 2, and that actual code was sent out to the French Resistance to let them know about D-Day.”
“Whatever, old timers,” Scratch said. “But it means the Muzzies got the message, right?”
“Yep, they got it. I betcha they were burning up the other channels they use, letting their guys know,” Gunny said.
“And I’d bet money that NORAD’s scanners added a few more to their list of known enemy frequencies,” added Wire Bender.
It was already going on one o’clock and Cookie and Martha were grilling up some burgers and dogs. The reefer they had packed with all the perishables from the Three Flags was still nearly full, the few days on the road barely making a dent in it.
They had raided the little kitchen while they were waiting and formed a chain of men and women to add to one of the trailers. They took all the dry and canned goods, but it had been days since electricity was lost and one quick opening of the refrigerator doors had them quickly shutting them back. Tightly. They didn’t want the rotten meat smell to permeate the dining area where everyone was relaxing.
Julio was putting the finishing touches on Sara’s bike. She had wanted him to weld strips of steel along the exoskeleton they had already built. She had been busy with the grinder on one side, while he welded up the other, running it along the steel and thinning the edge down to a razor. When they were finished, anything a zombie could grab onto had a razor sharp edge to it. If she were going any speed at all, it would slice right through their fingers, hopefully chop them off completely.
Gunny walked up to talk to her while she was waiting for Julio to finish up one of his welds.
“You know you don’t have to do this, right?” he asked. “Traffic patterns are getting thicker now, and so are the undead.”
She looked at him for a long minute before she said anything, trying to decide on how to answer.
“Does it help you guys out to have me riding point?” she finally asked.
“You know it does,” he said. “But it’s getting more congested now. It’s not worth losing you, just for our convenience. Just so we don’t have to do any backtracking.”
She nodded. “I think I need to, Gunny. I’ve been studying the maps and me and Cobb have a pretty good route plotted out. There are a lot of long stretches of back roads. If we come to a bridge that’s impassable, or a little town that is barricaded, we need to know before all these trucks roll up to it. We haven’t run into any crazy warlords yet, but there’s always that chance. There is no more law. People will start just taking what they want, and killing whoever gets in their way. We can’t just roll up to an ambush because we didn’t know what we were getting into.”
Gunny knew she had valid points, and he could see she wasn’t going to change her mind, so he just nodded. It had only been a week. He couldn’t see any survivors already banding together into outlaw slavers, like most of the movies and books portrayed. Supplies were plentiful, hell, 99% of the people were dead. He thought any survivors they ran into would be glad to see people were alive and fighting back. He ran his thumb across one of the new blades welded to her bike. Sharp. It would help if she ran into a cluster of them and they got too close.
“Got a spot picked out to camp near Crow City?” he asked. “They’re about finished with Shakey’s new ride, so we should get out of here in the next hour or so.”
“It’s less than a hundred miles and there’s a big parking lot on the outskirts of town, at the grain elevator. We’ll make it before dark,” she said.
“It would be nice if the
town wasn’t affected,” Gunny said, a little wistfully. “If we rolled into a self-contained community where everybody survived.”
“We can always hope,” she said, but they both knew it wasn’t true.
9
Shakey
Day 8
Tommy and his mechanics had stripped a couple of the largest diesel tanks from the trucks that were parked at the little fuel stop. He had added two 120 gallon tanks stacked and strapped to a hurriedly welded up rack, built in a notch he cut out of the back wall of the sleeper. They put lots of duct tape and a triple layer of plastic over them, and hoped the smell of diesel would be kept out of the cab. He fed the lines directly into the main tanks and they would feed by gravity. It wasn’t real pretty, but it would go the 1500 miles needed, without having to stop for a refuel. They figured it was about a three-day drive, allowing for the extra time it would take to zig zag around any congested areas.
They all gathered around as Shakey said his goodbyes and climbed into the truck to leave. The kid had said he’d rather stay with this group, that he didn’t want to go, but they decided he couldn’t be trusted. He’d known of this plan. If he got his hands on a radio, he might be able to warn the mosques that there were groups of survivors who knew what had happened. They knew he couldn’t have stopped it, knew the police may have just ignored his story and called his parents to come get him if he tried. But they also knew he hadn’t made an attempt. Hadn’t made a phone call, hadn’t gotten out of the mosque and ran away to tell someone. The kid didn’t come right out and admit to anything, but had gotten cagey and evasive when they asked him direct questions. He was just another casualty of the war. Too timid to make a stand, too brainwashed to know it was pure evil what they were doing. He was Muslim first, American second, so they were sending him back to his people. But Shakey knew the score. Gunny doubted if the kid would live until they made it to California. He didn’t think Shakey would put a bullet in him, but he was pretty sure he’d arrive at the docks alone, the kid left behind somewhere along the way.
The Zombie Road Omnibus Page 40