Six Feet From Hell: Crisis (7 page)

CHAPTER 7

They spent the waning hours of daylight fortifying their current abode. The house in its heyday would have been magnificent. There were four luxurious bedrooms, three bathrooms, a two-car garage, and plenty of unused space. The spacious living room was sparsely populated with furniture, most of it still in useable condition. Upon first arrival, Jamie had assisted Balboa over to a bluish-gray loveseat, and had then cleared the house. There were no bodies, not much in the way of food, and the house had been more or less hermetically sealed until Jamie kicked the door in. In another life, it would be an excellent place to retire.

All the doors on the first floor were secure. The four men took up residence on the couches, exhausted and bruised. Joe peeled off his LBV (load bearing vest) and sat it in the floor. The other three men followed suit.

“Ah damn! Anything we can do to fix this?” Balboa said, holding his injured arm up.

“Well now that I got a good look at it, I don’t think it’s broken,” Joe said, gingerly holding the appendage.

Balboa frowned. “I'm no doctor, but I’d say it’s broken, dude.”

Joe held Balboa’s wrist, placing his other hand on his elbow. With a swift movement, the arm popped and crunched. The cartilage and tendons protested the movement. Balboa let out a sharp yelp, but then his face softened.

“Dammit! That hurt like shit!” He moved the affected arm, flexing and moving it to see if there were any other injuries. “But I think that should do it. Thanks, man.”

Joe sat back on the couch opposite Balboa. “You’re welcome, but it’s gonna be sore as shit in the morning.”

Rick dropped his LBV beside a coffee table in the living room. “That is assuming we are still here in the morning.”

“Kid’s got a point. Got any ideas yet there, Joe?” Jamie asked.

Joe shrugged his shoulders. It was the most noncommittal gesture he could muster. He didn't have a clue, and wasn’t about to come up with a half-brained scheme. The years since he led his people out of Virginia had given him clarity when it came to survival situations. He needed to survey the situation, plan an escape, and pray that they either had the resources they needed, or could get them somehow.

They looked to be a couple miles from the outpost in Lexington, praying that the undead that were beating down the walls there didn't decide to visit them.

“Let’s just get some sleep. We’ll look at the situation in the morning. I’ll take first watch. Rick, I’ll wake you up in about five hours and you can go from there.” Joe glanced down at his watch, surprisingly intact after their crash. “It’s only a little after five o’clock, so we should get some quality sleep while we don’t have any visitors.”

Balboa had left the living room and wandered over to the nearby kitchen. He came back with a clear glass bottle that was three-quarters full. He took a seat beside Joe. “I think this should do for pain relief. You know, seeing as how we don’t have shit else.”

Joe sat up, propping himself on the edge of the couch. “As a matter of fact, we do have a med kit in the chopper, assuming that it survived the crash.”

Balboa took a short sip followed by a longer one from the top shelf bottle of vodka. “Well, there is definitely some stuff in there that didn't survive the crash. I don’t know about you, Joe, but I don’t really wanna go back and look at it again.” Balboa raised the bottle, took another sip, and handed it to Joe. “To Chris and Ogre. Rest in peace, brothers.”

Joe took the bottle and stared at it longingly. It would be a long time, if ever, that he would be able to forget about his friends that had been lost. It was just a matter of time before he would lose another. The sting from Ronnie dying nearly a decade ago rose back up to the surface. He remembered holding Ronnie’s head against his, at least able to share a final moment with him. Chris had not received the same sendoff, dying sometime after the skin on his arms melted off. It was a horrible way to go, and Joe blamed himself. If they had not taken this mission then Chris would still be alive, as would Ogre.

“It’s been a long time since I've been able to have a drink. Fuck it. No guard duty for anybody tonight. I say that we rid ourselves of responsibilities for one night and enjoy what time we have left,” Joe said, and then took a long draught from the bottle of vodka. It burned on the way down. It had aged for the last nine years, increasing the potency quite a bit. “Damn that’s strong!”

Rick reached a hand to his father and motioned for the bottle. Joe chuckled, letting a wry smile out. He pulled the bottle back as Rick reached for the vodka. “You're not twenty-one, dude. I could get into a lot of trouble letting you have this.”

Rick grabbed the bottle from his father, brought the vodka to his lips, and took a swig, coughing almost immediately. “Holy shit that’s nasty!”

“You’ve just not had a taste of Grandpa’s old cough medicine before. You’ll get used to it.” Joe patted Rick on the back as he took another sip, this one much smaller than the last. “I never thought our first drink together would be like this. I kinda envisioned it being at a bar in Wytheville, to be honest,” Joe said.

“So did I, Dad.” Rick handed him the bottle back. “If you had to do it all over again, would you? I mean, leaving Virginia and all.”

The question caught Joe off guard. He’d never discussed the reasons for their exodus from Virginia in the first days of the end. They’d lost more people in that initial escape than in the last nine years combined, up until today. Joe thought long and hard about their first week in the apocalypse. “If I
coulda done it without sacrificing Ronnie, I still would have. I've thought about it quite a bit over the years. What I've come up with is that I don’t think it would have mattered. If we had stayed, we woulda ran out of food eventually. If we left, well, you see how well that went.”

Jamie chimed in. “For what it’s worth, I think we’ve done alright for ourselves. I don’t think we would have made it out of Tazewell to begin with if it hadn’t been for you, Joe.” Jamie grabbed the bottle and took a drink. He raised it in a toast. “To Andrew and Donnie.”

“And Ronnie and Lori,” Joe replied.

“And Chris and Ogre,” Rick added.

And let’s pray this is the last time we have to drink to someone’s memory,
Joe thought.

* * *

“I've checked every frequency on everything we’ve got. They just ain’t there.” Curtis had just downed his third cup of coffee in an hour; the caffeine jitters were starting to hit him. He had studied every screen, tweaked every radio, scanned every frequency, both UHF and VHF, to no avail. No one was answering him.

“Maybe they decided to land in Lexington. If they did, it would explain what’s takin’ ‘em so long,” Wagner replied.

“They would have radioed in or at least tried to. Lexington is about the far end of their fuel supply, so they wouldn’t have stayed long or they would be at bingo fuel after about ten minutes. Ogre wouldn’t risk running out of gas, he’s better than that.” Curtis was still fidgeting with the frequency dials as he tried desperately to hear something positive. He was beginning to suspect the worst.

“So what’s your contingency plan?” Mike spoke up from the corner of the room.

Curtis stopped for a moment and spun around. “Contingency plan?”

Mike stood up and walked over to Curtis. “Yeah, contingency plan. You gotta have some kinda backup plan, right?”

Curtis was fleetingly befuddled. He and the other men in the ZBRA units knew what to do when someone didn't come back from a mission. There was no sense losing three or four more men out looking for a couple of team members that were probably dead. Under no circumstances were they to go out looking for ZBRA members when they didn't come back.

“Yeah we do. The contingency plan is to move on to the next closest unit or outpost. If for some reason they did crash or they’re otherwise unavailable, they would do the same. We just have to figure out where the closest one is and start heading to it,” Curtis replied.

“So how long do we have to wait before we abandon ship?” Wagner asked, folding his arms and leaning back in his chair.

“Twenty-four hours. Retroactive to the time they left. So we got until noon tomorrow, after that we head out in the LMTVs, load em up with everything that ain’t nailed down, and head to the closest outpost,” Curtis said, leaning back and putting his hands on his head.

Mike’s brow furrowed. “Where is the closest outpost?”

“It used to be Beckley, but they are toast, no thanks to you and your ‘Captain’ asshole. We might have to have a look at the map. If there ain’t one, then we may have a hell of a trip on our hands because we had another backup plan.” Curtis smiled as he thought about their second contingency plan.

“And what might that be?” Mike asked.

Curtis snickered. “Joe said that the worst-case-scenario plan was to go back to Tazewell, Virginia. That’s where he started from.”

CHAPTER 8

The Captain sat atop his LAV-25, proud of himself. The light armored vehicle was his chariot, the single best vehicle that he had in his arsenal. It could lay down suppressive fire from the 25mm chain gun or the 7.62mm M240B light machine guns. It was a mean piece of equipment.

He had just finished a sat-phone call with Bill over in Kentucky. Everything was going to plan – so far. The higher powers’ grand scheme was bigger than just taking out the opposition. A few ZBRA units had been taken care of; most of them were working – whether they realized it or not – for the COG, or Continuity of Government. The COG was set up in the event of a cataclysmic collapse to keep order in the United States.

It had failed miserably.

The Captain and the people he represented were all in favor of a central government, they just wanted it to be the way
they
wanted it. The men who upheld the Constitution were the ones who didn't abandon their posts in time of crisis, and it was time they were rewarded. Word had spread throughout the outposts and colonies of people that the Peacemakers were in line to take over the country and restore order the way it was intended.

By force.

His superiors wanted to march straight down Pennsylvania Avenue and up to the White House, take it over, and make it their own. Not that it mattered; the White House had long been abandoned, its personnel moved to Cheyenne Mountain in Wyoming and Mount Weather in Virginia. The remains of the organized government would be at both those places. But he knew that taking back Washington D.C. was the best symbolic gesture they could come up with. They knew that a country that was going to come back from the brink needed a familiar symbol to look upon. They intended to be that symbol.

They’d already started the conscripting long before making a run into Virginia, but it was not working as well as they had anticipated. The Captain knew that there would be some resistance to it initially, but he had to hold firm in order to make it work. No longer would the liberal pansies dictate whether they needed to fight. Either they would fight, or they would die. It was that simple. There were no more conscientious objectors, no more bleeding-heart pussies, no more leaning on the government. The government would help you, but first you had to help it,
not the other way around. It would be the beginning of a stronger, better nation. However, they needed to pave the road to D.C. first, and it would be paved in blood.

The Captain slowly climbed down from the top of the LAV, using his good leg in the process. His right leg from below the knee was gone, amputated years ago after taking a rifle round just below the knee. After the first few days, the injury had set up with gangrene and he’d had no choice but to cut it off. He’d used his belt as a tourniquet, got drunk, and cut it off with his Ka-Bar. It had not been an easy task, but it had immediately made an impression upon the men that found him. They were amazed that he’d had the balls to do it himself. They were a bunch of weak-minded, easily impressionable ‘weekend warriors’ that needed a leader. He was that leader.

He had managed to find a medical prosthetics shop after he had amputated his leg. He then spent nearly a decade roaming the South, looking for anyone that would join their cause. They first started with the known ‘Patriot’ groups in the South. The liberal media had portrayed them as radical right-wing nutjobs, when in reality they were honest, hardworking people who were misunderstood. However, fewer joined than he’d anticipated, since most of them were well prepared to live off the grid, and the majority of them were
real
patriots. They’d refused to surrender to the Captain and his people, so he had them killed. There were many firefights with the Patriots, men lost, men gained, but the cause always continued on. After that came the conscripting. Any man over the age of sixteen that could hold a rifle was taken. If they refused, they were considered against the government and were killed for treason.

* * *

“Shit. Fuck ‘em. I don’t have all damn day to wait on ‘em. Head back to me at the Virginia/Tennessee line. We took over the Bristol Motor Speedway. Just land it in the middle of the track and don’t lose any more of my men. I’ll have your fucking head if you do!” the Captain angrily spat at the sat-phone.

A shaky voice stuttered and answered. “Uh … uh … yes sir. We’ll leave within the hour, and we should be there shortly after.”

“Good. Now get your shit together and double-time it down here. I ain’t got all fucking day.”

“Yessir. Peacemaker Seven out.”

The Captain thumbed the END button on the sat-phone. He rubbed his forehead and wondered why he’d left such a complete jackass in charge in Kentucky. It was an unfortunate result of the type of people that were left to work with. They would follow orders when given; otherwise they’d just sit there with their thumbs up their asses.

“Bad news, sir?” One of his lieutenants had been waiting for him to finish his call, and now stood beside him.

“Goddamn retards in Kentucky. They lost six out of nine men. Acceptable combat losses, unfortunately.”

“Well, you’ll be happy to know that we made contact with the mole in West Virginia. He said they are positive that the ZBRA unit out of there isn’t going to make it back. Their contingency plan is to go to some place near the Virginia/West Virginia border. Some town named Tazewell. They are taking three LMTVs and leaving at noon tomorrow. We could really use those vehicles, sir. In addition to the trucks, he says they will be loaded down with supplies. Guns, ammo, food, and water, the works.”

The Captain raised an eyebrow. “And where is this place from here?”

The lieutenant, named Edwards, lit up a little. “About sixty miles north of here. We could make the trip in two days. Just give me two Humvees and about ten men and I’ll get it done, sir.”

The Captain pondered the idea. The three LMTVs would make a nice addition to his arsenal, and they could hold twenty men, making it easier to send out more small groups. The one he had sent to Beckley, West Virginia had done well, taking out the ZBRA unit while they slept. The communique they had received from their mole had said that the ZBRA unit in Blacksburg was making a run to the Radford Army Ammunition Plant. They could use that ammo themselves, so he sent the Beckley raiders east towards Blacksburg. The Blacksburg ZBRA unit was the last one in the area that needed to be dealt with. After his team was done, they would resupply and take out the units in Charlottesville and Fredericksburg. Then their path to D.C. would be complete.

“What do you think, sir?” Edwards asked. The Captain mulled the idea over a moment longer, then gave him a nod.

“Do it. Make contact with the mole in West Virginia. Tell him to make sure that the vehicles make the trip undamaged or they won’t be worth shit when we get hold of ‘em. Tell him to play along and keep the other two saps alive – at least until they get to Tazewell. You know what to do when you get there.”

Edwards grinned devilishly. “Yes sir.”

“Wait until he’s in position in Tazewell. Once he calls back and gives us the go-ahead, we will make the trip.”

Edwards frowned slightly. “’We,’ sir?”

“Yeah, ‘we.’ I'm going to make the trip with you and oversee this personally.”