INVASION USA (Book 2) - The Battle For New York (3 page)

A couple of blocks later, they saw the highway stretching above the streets in front of them, but they could not see the on-ramp. Captain Mallory turned right to go one more block north and then turned left onto Fleet Street, and saw the on-ramp right in front of him.

Suddenly a truck drove across their path and stopped 100 feet in front of them, blocking off the street ahead of them. Captain Mallory stopped and looked at the vehicle. It was an old white delivery truck—a freezer meat truck by the look of it—and it had several men lying on top with guns pointing at them. A man in the cab got out and used a bullhorn shouting at the five trucks in front of him.

“We are not afraid to shoot. All we want is your vehicles. Get out with your hands up and you can all go. We won’t shoot you. Leave the keys in your vehicles and get out now, or we will start shooting. You have ten seconds.”

“What do you think?” the captain asked the kid, who had his nose pressed up against the inner windshield.

“I’ve seen that guy before,” the kid replied. “He was leading the group who shot at us yesterday. The other kids called him ‘The Executioner.’ They saw him shoot people in the head, like you see on television.”

“I’m giving you one last chance,” the ‘Executioner’ ordered into the bullhorn. ”We will kill all of you one-by-one and rape any sluts you got with you. You now have five seconds.”

“I’m going to open the window and take him down,” Captain Mallory stated quietly to the group in the cab. The man who had been standing up had already sat down, his name was Jimmy. “Jimmy, hand me an M4. You take the one with the rifle grenade on it and after I shoot this noisy asshole, you stand up and aim to take out the men on the top of the truck with the grenade, and then you get out of the way and let Mike here stand up. Mike,” he ordered the man next to Jimmy. “You stand up and spray the back area of the truck once we have these suckers with their heads down. I’ll do the same, and young man, you pass us magazines when we need them.”

“Two!” the man with the bullhorn called out as Captain Mallory locked the M4 into three-round bursts, rolled down the window, opened the driver’s door, took aim through the window, and blew the man’s head off. Several shots immediately rang out from the truck in front of them, one dinging the side of the SWAT truck next to the captain’s head.

Jimmy fired the grenade at the truck and it landed and exploded two feet short of the truck’s cab, but sprayed it with shrapnel so hard that the truck literally jumped back an inch and nearly flipped over. The engine area immediately caught fire as bits and pieces of roadway and metal opened the fuel lines. Captain Mallory emptied his first magazine towards the roof of the vehicle as the truck, which must have been gas-powered, blew up with an almighty roar, dinging his SWAT truck with hundreds of pieces of flying debris.

The shock wave hit them as the captain jumped back into the driver’s seat and turned the truck around on the wide road, while Mike gave them covering fire from the turret. He headed back in the direction they had come, closely followed by the other four. The captain then slowly and carefully crossed the low concrete center median and drove back around the corner of the next building to get away from the burning vehicle. He turned left at the next road, a one-way street going the other way, and headed along the side of the highway above him.

“Turn right,” shouted the boy. “The closest entrance is to the right.” Mike looked behind him, saw the four vehicles in their convoy still following, and then knew where he was. The next entrance to the highway was an off-ramp opposite the main entrance into Newark Airport.

He had to turn sharply to get up the off-ramp as there were several vehicles parked at odd angles in his path. He aimed his truck to drive between them, hitting one out of the way so that the vehicles behind could follow. The top of the off-ramp was blocked with a small car on its side, and he slowly pushed it to the side as he went up the wrong way and got onto the northbound side of I-95, driving south.

“That was pretty close back there,” Captain Mallory stated to the others in the cab. “I don’t suppose we are going to have a moving traffic problem coming the opposite way.” He smiled as he saw the four vehicles still following them in his rear-view mirror but his smile quickly faded when he saw the dozens of crashed vehicles blocking their way in front of them on northbound I-95.

It was hard work driving; the convoy could do no more than a few miles a hour, continually having to veer around blackened and crashed vehicles everywhere. The road was icy and slippery and the snow was a foot thick in some places. Some parts of the asphalt or concrete could be seen through the white covering and had only a light dusting as the snow had blown into drifts on the sides of the highway.

For the first mile, they traveled slowly until they had to stop. A tractor trailer had turned over and was on its side with boxes of what looked like frozen chicken products everywhere. Most of the boxes were already just mounds under the snow. The truck had flipped over onto two cars and had crushed them nearly flat. There were dead human and chicken bodies everywhere as the truck had ploughed down the highway for quite a ways, piling up cars in front of it.

There was no easy way to get through, so the captain asked the fire engine to pull up close to the rear of the truck. After pulling a couple of frozen bodies out of the way, the fire engine slowly touched the back of the truck, its bigger bulk helping as it pushed the rear of the truck slowly and opened up a space for them to drive through.

“John, get some help and collect those ropes hanging loosely on the side of the trailer, they look strong and we might need them later on,” Captain Mallory shouted to his co-pilot as he drove up next to him. “We should pick up several cases of frozen chicken as well. Throw some in your vehicle. We can have a BBQ for dinner. I was thinking of siphoning off some fuel from the truck, but it’s diesel, so it is of no use to us. No worry, though. Hey! A light bulb just went off in my head; we have plenty of fuel in all these abandoned vehicles on the highway. We can siphon it out of car tanks, whenever we need it.”

They drove on for another hour without having to stop. The smoke was slowly clearing the further they drove away from the city, and the number of stationary vehicles was getting fewer and fewer. At one point the vehicles managed 100 yards of highway without passing a single vehicle and they felt a bit relieved, until they got over the crest of a hill and observed several cars and two trucks in a heap in front of them. For the second time they had to come to a complete stop.

For the first time that day, and two hours into their trip they saw clear sunlight for the first time. The smoke was gone and there was a slight wind from the south. Everybody was beginning to feel a little more relaxed. The leaders took this time to let everyone out for a quick stretch and to bask in the sunlight—something, it seemed, no one had seen for days.

This crash looked worse than the last one. Again, a tractor-trailer had turned over. The cab had completely ripped off from its trailer and had wedged a smaller truck and a small bus up against the outside crash barrier. The three vehicles were totally black from the fire that must have been out for hours now, and blackened bodies could still be seen sitting in what must have been seats in the bus, the tops of the bodies covered with a dusting of frozen ice from the heat. It was not a pretty site.

On the other side of the trailer was a yellow moving truck—a small Penske Chevy—pinned against three cars, which in turn, were pinned to the rear of the trailer. This area of the accident had not been part of the fire.

“Shall I see what’s in the trailer?” asked John, and the captain nodded. He watched John climb up over a broken car and suddenly stop. He crouched and slowly backed down and ran back to Captain Mallory. “You are not going to believe this, but I just saw a lion and a lioness eating the remains of a human body back there. They are about 100 yards away.”

“What?” asked Captain Mallory, not believing what he was hearing. “Bloody lions, for Christ’s sake!” replied John. They were quiet for a couple of seconds.

“Must have escaped from a zoo or something,” Captain Mallory replied. “Get everybody back in the vehicles. I’ll shoot a few rounds and see if I can scare them off.”

He waited until everybody was loaded back in, and he then climbed up the side of the overturned car, looked past the trailer, and there they were—pulling meat off a bloody body in the middle lane of northbound I-95, as if they were in the middle of Africa. He shouted at them and they immediately looked up, spotting him. He shot three rounds close to where they stood, and they bounded away from him, headed south. He watched them go a couple hundred yards before he looked down and straight into the dead and frozen eyes of the driver of the car he was standing on. He jumped with shock and landed in the snow in front of the car, just managing to stay on his feet.

He pulled the door to the trailer open and it was full of garden supplies; fertilizer and topsoil for some hardware store. He checked to see if the lions were returning, couldn’t see anything, and returned to the SWAT truck. He instructed John and the guys in his truck to get a hose and some of the empty gas containers they had tied to the back of the fire engine’s ladder.

The Chevy’s cab was empty and the back of the truck was filled with somebody’s now broken furniture, but the large fuel tank positioned under the door to the cab was not dripping, and Captain Mallory opened it. It was close to full and they siphoned 30 gallons out of it. This filled the tanks of the fire engine, the Studebaker, and the ambulance. The SWAT trucks were still half full, so they emptied the 44-gallon drum, filled the two remaining tanks up, and threw the large drum out, keeping all the attachments.

When they were done, the fire engine pushed the car with the dead, frozen driver out of the way. It was the lightest vehicle in their way, and the fire engine made quick work of it. They all passed through the gap, all looking out of the windows for lions. It wasn’t every day that one could see lions on I-95!

They caught up with the big cats half an hour later. The lions were faster than the vehicles, which were now traveling at a good five to ten miles an hour. They were spooked by the sound of the vehicles, and hid behind a car under a bridge as the convoy passed by.

Forty minutes later, and still crawling around hundreds of vehicles on the highway, they reached the 295 bypass and decided to stay on it going south. By this time, they were past Trenton, New Jersey and a large gas station came up on their left with a clear feeder road off the highway. Captain Mallory was not comfortable getting off the highway just yet. There could be trouble in the more populated areas and he felt that they needed to wait for a more rural area to find a gas station that was safer.

Two hours later, they were bypassing Philly and the dead vehicles in the more densely populated area slowed them down to a snail’s pace for quite a while. They drove past the exit to Philadelphia International Airport and were finally able to speed up to nearly 20 miles an hour once they had passed the airport. They saw no signs of life and no obvious aircraft accidents, but large fires were still burning in and around the cities they passed, and they didn’t know if they were the only ones alive. They had not seen any other moving traffic on their trip since the gang they had dealt with that morning. The snow was clearing on the asphalt as the sun was melting it. Ice might be a factor in the mornings and Captain Mallory wanted to get as far south as possible before dark.

It was time for a break, however, when they came upon their fifth accident that required moving something. It was just south of Wilmington, Delaware on the Delaware Turnpike when they came across three trucks in one big pile and several cars flattened around and under them. One was a Wal-Mart tractor trailer and the other two were UPS trucks. They must have been all together when they crashed out of control.

The crew helped the passengers disembark the vehicles for a personal and stretch break. With the armed flight attendants as escorts, the ladies and children disappeared into some road brush for a few minutes to relieve themselves, with the men heading off in the opposite direction.

There was just enough room on one side to get the five vehicles through, and the crew drove them slowly past the accident. On the other side of the broken rigs, the captain, while relieving himself behind a crushed Porsche, saw a second Penske truck—a little smaller than the last one. It was next to a big SUV, as well as a second white truck that also looked like it used gas that was just sitting there undamaged several yards further down the road. All three vehicles were empty of people and in perfect shape. The owners had just left them there, and it looked like a good amount of fuel might be available. They had ten of the 5-gallon containers with them and they were able to fill all the vehicle tanks and still had enough to fill all the containers.

It took an hour to siphon all the gas, while the others enjoyed the warming sun, trying not to look at the odd frozen body in a vehicle here and there.

One hundred gallons of gas later, the captain suggested that they aim for a place he knew—Harford County Airport— just off the highway, about 15 miles away, and hopefully a good place to stay for the night.

They exited the highway for the first time and headed north on US 462. The captain had flown in and out of this little airport as a recreational flyer, and had spent the night in the area a couple of times. It was situated just north of Baltimore.

The area here, although it was still cold and the roads were still icy, was far less inhabited than where they had come from. Deer jumped across the road in front of them, and only a couple of dead motor vehicles were stranded in the road. Again, they didn’t see anybody outside, but now they could see people peeking at them from behind curtained windows, and wood smoke wafted in the air. Captain Mallory felt safer around here than in the city, and he wondered if the people they had left behind were still alive, and waiting for Uncle Sam to rescue them.