The Rabid: Rise (3 page)

5

I step from cover. I stand beside Bethany. Knees still shaky. Eyes still wet. Gun raised. Ready to meet the reaper right along with her.

The reaper
isn't here for me.

It's here
for Dwyer and his squad.

He’s
a tall dark skinned man with a scraggly chin strap and hoop earrings. He carries a silenced machine gun. He wears a black tactical vest that carries two spare magazines across the right side of his belly. There is a pistol holstered diagonally across the left side with another magazine of ammunition in a Velcro pouch sitting directly on top of it.

The dark skinned man's partner i
s shorter in stature. She's got fiery eyes that shift from blue to green in the changing light. Her hair falls across her right shoulder in streaks of blonde and black, the left side of her head is shaved close. She wears a white tank top, now stained red with blood. It falls just short of her navel, exposing a dark black tattoo that winds in elegant curves up her tanned torso, partially concealed by the cropped shirt and low riding brown khakis tucked into high top black combat boots. She carries twin
katanas
dripping with crimson and entrails. She twirls them into their sheaths and smiles with full red lips as Dwyer’s head lies detached beside her left foot. The machine gun
pop
I'd heard when Bethany stepped into the hall had been Dwyer’s trigger finger locked in a death squeeze, like a chicken running around with its head cut off; he'd sprayed MP5 rounds in a rainbow arch before coming to rest on his back.

The
tall dark man steps across the pile of severed limbs and punctured torsos, his gun pointed down towards the floor. I can't tell if he is a threat. “I am Ruiz, this is my sister Katia. You're the one with the item?”

I take a step
forward, placing Bethany behind me, ready to raise my pistol sights on him.

“
We're not here to hurt you or your sister. We're here to help.”

A voice echoes up the stair
well behind them. “Hey, you two, okay up there?”

Katia
bounds over to the railing. She looks to be nineteen...twenty, max...not much older than me but a hell of a lot less scared. “Yeah, Loco, we're squared away. Give us a minute.” She turns around, gripping the railing. “Ruiz,
rapido,
we need to get moving before more show up.”

“
Listen...” Ruiz takes another step, extending a hand and waving us towards him.

“
Timmy. And this is Bethany.”

“
Well, Timmy, Bethany, we're not here to hurt you. We're the good guys and girls.” He smiles back at his sister. “We can explain everything in the truck, but we've gotta go. There's gonna be a search party scrambling for these fellas soon. We don't want to be in the area.”

Bethany gives me a little shove forward.
“Grab the go-bag,” I say softly. She runs into the open storage shed, scoops up our duffle, and secures it over her shoulder. I grab her hand and we move towards the stairs behind Ruiz and Katia, careful to step around and over the considerable pools of blood and severed flesh.

Outside there are two men pulling the headless body of the
.50 gunner from the top of the Humvee. Katia’s work, no doubt.

“
Loco, take that one,” Ruiz is addressing a heavy set man wearing a rifle strapped across one shoulder. His faded blue jeans sag low across the middle of his ass. “Draper, you drive theirs, it's parked around the back of the building.” Draper is a waifish man with a hawk’s beak for a nose. “Kid, throw me the keys.”

I tuck the pistol away and fumble around in my pockets, emerging a few seconds later with the Humvee key.
“Where are we riding?”

“
You two are in the truck with me and Katia. It'll give us time to talk.” He tosses Draper the key. “Here, give me that bag, I'll put it in the bed,” he says to Bethany.

The truck is a
ll black metal: a beast with 5 inches of lift and 35 inch tires. Two aluminum exhaust stacks extend upward off either side of the bed; they are growling, wound tight, waiting for the gears to drop, waiting for release. 

Ruiz steps up onto the passenger r
unning board and pops the door for us. He gives Bethany an initial boost. She pulls herself the rest of the way using the back of the headrest. Next, it's my turn. He offers me the same treatment.

“
Nah, I've got it,” I say, waving him off.

“
Go for it, bro.” He backs away, arms folded.

I claw my way up
, slinging one leg over the side like a kid trying to climb out of the deep end of a pool with no ladder. I grip the bottom of the passenger seat and slither, grunting and gritting my teeth. I pull myself up to my knees, panting. I can hear Katia and Bethany giggling at my effort. I feel my face flush and quickly plant myself in the backseat, head turned down.

“
I offered the kid a helping a hand,” Ruiz says, as he pulls himself into the passenger seat with two graceful moves.

Katia
looks to Ruiz, her
katanas
stacked across the center console. “We good?”

“
Yeah, let's head back.”

Katia drops it into reverse and torques her body back between the seats,
staring through the rear window. “Excuse me.”

There is a crash. We
jolt towards the ceiling, smashing our heads against the thinly coated metal. The truck is sitting at an angle, the front bumper pointed towards the pavement, the back tires resting atop a wrecked Volvo.

“
You two may want to buckle up,” Ruiz says, gripping the hand bar above his head.

“
Whooooo, baby!” Katia squeals with delight before cranking it into drive.

We come up out of our seats again as the tires drop back onto the pavement
.

“
We need to have Carlos put another inch or two on this lift, bro, we could pancake everything, no more dodge and weave shit, ya know?” Katia looks at Ruiz with a glimmer of hope in her eyes, the corners of her mouth curling with delight; a wild girl.

“
No way! We aren’t putting anymore resources into this. You got your truck, you got your lift, you're good, sis.”

She gives a
halfhearted pout before turning back to the road and slamming her foot into the accelerator. “Deadhead, straight away.” We barely feel the bump as she tramples across a Rabid with the two left tires. “His walking days are over,” Katia announces, checking the mirror for any signs of life.

Katia is a whiz behind
the wheel. She’s able to turn the hulking piece of metal around most of the objects in our path with little effort. When we can’t cut the gap, she takes it slow, popping the wheels up and dropping them down, ever so gently, rocking us in our seats like infants in a crib.

I find myself staring, more than once, at
the way the muscles work beneath the taut flesh of her shoulders and biceps as she turns the wheel, the curve of her torso, her legs...Katia is beautiful. The most beautiful girl I've ever seen.

“
So,” Ruiz jerks around suddenly, “Timmy, Bethany, how're you two holding up? Some crazy shit back there, ya'll feeling okay after seeing all that?”

Bethany nods.

“We’ve seen worse,” I say.

“
Yeah, I bet. World is crazy man, crazy,” he trails off.

“
Thanks for pulling us out of the fire.” I extend my hand.

Ruiz accepts it with a firm double grip.
“Hey, we've got you,
hermano
.”

I lift the cross from beneath my shirt, balancing it
on the back of my left hand like a jeweler enticing a customer. “The man that gave me this said
the answers
would find me. Are you two
the answers
?”

“
I suppose we are.” Ruiz grins.

“
The
answers
, eh,” Katia says. “I'm used to being called
that bitch with the swords and the haircut
.”

“
What are you going on about?” Ruiz asks.

“
That last arms shipment we hit over near McKinney. That one guy, soldier with the stars tattooed on the inside of his forearms.”

“
The guy who's head you cleaved?”

“
He called me a bitch,
hijo de puta,
had it coming.”

Ruiz shakes his head.
“Ignore her, she's a little crazy.”

“
I think we all are at this point.” I steal a glance at the mirror. She's smiling back at me. My heart skips a beat. I clear my throat to set it back on course.

“
You mind if I...” Ruiz is holding his hand out.

“
Oh, no, go ahead.” I remove the cross from my neck and drop it into his palm. “What is it?”

“
Watch closely.”

Bethany leans across my lap, digging her elbows into my thighs to get a better look.

He pulls down on either arm of the cross, using the thumb and index finger of his left hand, while pulling the top up with his right. There is a tiny click, barely discernible above the guttural roar of the diesel engine. Ruiz slides the bottom half of the cross away, unveiling a USB drive.

“
Whoa, cool.” Bethany smiles and reaches hesitantly to touch it, as if it may sprout teeth and chomp into her fingers.

“
I'll be damned, a USB drive. That's it? That's what we almost got ourselves killed over?”

“
It's not just a USB drive. We think this little piece of plastic has the answer to all this shit. The way they been chasing it, it's something big.”

“
Big like...they're behind it somehow?”

Ruiz shrugs, slipping the bottom half of the cross back in
to place. “Could be, if our guy was right, then they're not just behind it, they're the sole proprietors. We'll know soon enough.”

“
Your guy?”

“
Yeah, we’ve got some guys on the inside, I guess you could say.”

“Really? What’d you do before all this?”

“I was in the military, Special Forces.”

“Wow, must come in handy.”

“It has its perks.”

“
So, who’s the guy that gave me the damn thing?”

Ruiz shrugs. “Let’s just call him a...mutual friend.”

“Yeah, well, our mutual friend is dead.”

Ruiz nods. “Yeah, I know.”

“So, how the hell did you find us? Dead contact. No idea who he handed the drive off to. Seems to me you’d be screwed.”

“
We followed the guys that were tracking you, pretty simple really.”

“The guys that were tracking us?”

Katia nods. “Yep, those guys have been on you for about a week now. If they’d taken much longer to pin you down, you’d have been fucked, lemme tell ya. We were close to breaking off and heading back to base. Our food was gone. Water was low.”

“Well, I’m glad you stuck around.”

“So are we. Saved some asses and got this bad boy.”

“So I’m assuming those were the General’s men that tried to kill us?”

“Ah, so you've met the General?”

“
Yeah, I'm going to kill the General.”

Katia laughs.
“You got big dreams, Tim.”

“
No way you're getting near the General, especially just you two with your water pistols, no way.”

“
We almost killed him once,” Bethany says.

Ruiz
placates us with a half-smile. “No ma'am, he almost killed you once. You got away. Count yourselves lucky ducks.”

“
Whatever, he's got Momma, we're getting her back. Maybe we'll kill the bastard, maybe we won't. Can't hit if we don't swing.”

“
True, he does have her.” When Ruiz is sure he has our attention, he continues. “She's alive and well.”

The urge to pull the
Ruger and jam it against his temple to extract information surges through me. “You saw her? How long ago?”

“
Our scouts saw her. They were pulling up camp, loading her into one of their trucks.”

“
So are they gone? They left the city with her?” I want to strangle the details out of him. This one sentence at a time ticker tape feed bullshit way of conveying information is frying every last nerve in my body.

“
Left the city? Tim, these guys aren't leaving the city, not while the resistance still thrives.”

“
Resistance, how many of you are there?”