These Dead Lands: Immolation (7 page)

“We’ll need to check out that Ford,” he said. “And it looks like there’s a produce truck or something near the back of the lot. Might be a diesel, too.”

“Roger that, sir,” Hartman said.

The three vehicles slowly drove around the parking lot. A flock of crows sprang into the air when the first Humvee drew near; they had been feasting on the remains of a human rib cage. Hastings glanced back at the two young boys. Their mother had them wrapped up in her arms, and she met his eyes with an inscrutable gaze. Since she was taking the time to shield her boys from the sights beyond the windows, Hastings presumed she was finally coming out of her shock.

“All right, the area looks pretty secure for the moment. Let’s dismount and see what we can get. Stilley, take your Humvee back to the entrance and sit there. Tharinger, keep the fifty manned and ready. Ballantine, you might want to keep your truck close to one of the Humvees, so we can provide protective fires if required. Over.” He told Hartman, “Pull over next to that produce truck, okay?”

“You got it, sir.”

“Six, roger that. I’ll stick with you guys. Over,” Ballantine transmitted.

Hastings double-clicked his radio.
Pssht. Pssht.
Message acknowledged.

“Mrs. Ballantine, stay with the Humvee,” he said when Hartman brought the vehicle to a halt.

“My boys need to use the restroom,” she said. “And frankly, so do I.”

Hastings grunted. “Very well. Guerra, stand guard in the cupola. Hartman, you check out that truck, and I’ll back up Ballantine as he stands guard over his family. I’ll keep you in sight at all times.”

“Sounds good to me, sir.” Hartman shut off the engine. After checking out the window, he eased open the door and stepped out into the sweltering day.

Hastings followed as Guerra took position in the gunnery cupola. Once he confirmed the absence of nearby threats, he opened the rear door. “Let’s go, folks. Slow and easy, all right?” He didn’t look at them; instead, he scanned the area, his M4A3 at the ready. In his peripheral vision, he saw Ballantine climb down from his truck and hurry over, his assault rifle indexed and ready.

Ballantine hurried to his side but kept his eyes on his family. “What’s the procedure, sir?”

“Your family needs to use the latrine,” Hastings explained. “You’ll stand guard, and I’ll back up you and Hartman. Hooah?”

“Hooah.”

Kay Ballantine kept her boys close as she looked from her husband to Hastings then back again. “I’ll need some toilet paper,” she said.

“Me too,” the younger boy said. “I have to poo-poo.”

Hastings smiled, despite his grief over the fact that he would never again hear his own boy use that phrase. “I’ll get you some from my pack. Ballantine, make sure they bury their business, okay?”

“You know it, Captain.”

Hastings reached back into the Humvee for his loaded backpack and opened it. He removed one of the sealed packs of toilet paper and handed it to Kay then pulled his weapon back into a low-ready position. Hartman was already at the produce truck and opening the fuel cap.

“Where can we go?” she asked her husband.

Ballantine pointed toward the trees at the edge of the parking lot. “Follow me,” he said.

“Ballantine, stay in my line of sight,” Hastings said.

“Will do, sir.” Ballantine led his family away from the parking lot.

“Sir, the diner might be worth checking out,” Guerra called down from his position. “Only half of it seemed to go down. The other half actually seems pretty remarkably preserved.”

“If we have the time,” Hastings said. “Hartman, how’re we doing?”

“Looking pretty good here, sir,” Hartman said. “Definitely diesel, and it’s a good quarter-tank’s worth.”

“Outstanding.” Hastings spoke into his headset microphone. “Reader, this is Six. You checking out that pickup? Over.”

“Six, roger that. Thing’s got two tanks, and both are almost full. We might be able to almost fill both Humvees from this vehicle. Over.”

“Understood. Break. Tharinger, anything from the road? Over.”

“Negative, Six. We’re good on the road. No signs of movement or activity of any kind. Over.”

“Roger.” Hastings looked over at Ballantine, who was standing at the end of the parking lot.

Apparently, there was a ditch on the other side of where he stood, and he was able to keep watch over his family and the surrounding area from a slightly elevated vantage point.

The siphoning went off without any issues. Both Humvees were nearly completely filled with the fuel from the Ford pickup, which meant Hartman just had to top them off with what he could pull from the produce truck. And when they were done, they would still have a good twelve or thirteen gallons they could take with them.

The Ballantines finished their latrine mission and returned to the vehicle. Once they were secure inside, Ballantine and Reader set about securing more fuel for the pickup. Ballantine had two five-gallon gas cans in the bed, and he emptied them into his pickup’s fuel tank before refilling them from other vehicles in the parking lot. Hastings told Hartman to stand overwatch while he cased the diner.

“You sure it’s a good idea to go in there, sir?” Hartman asked, a worried frown darkening his features.

“I won’t be going far,” Hastings assured him. “I’ll stay in sight.”

“Okay, sir.” The skinny soldier didn’t sound very convinced. He obviously wasn’t comfortable being the only soldier on overwatch, despite Guerra and Tharinger manning the cupola weapons.

“You’ll be fine, Hartman,” Hastings said. “All right? Just keep scanning and watch your lane. Ballantine and Reader aren’t so involved in what they’re doing that they can’t go to guns on a threat in just a second. Okay?”

“Okay, sir,” Hartman repeated.

Hastings nodded and started toward the remains of the diner. As he crossed the parking lot, he buttoned up his facial armor and took a moment to crack his knuckles then flex his gloved fingers. His uniform stuck to his sweaty body, and not for the first time, he reflected on just how welcome a hot shower would be. As he drew nearer to the half-burned diner, he slowed and checked out the scene. He surveyed where he might step, where he might need a hand hold, and where he could simply step up into the building. He tested a pile of blackened debris and found it would hold his weight, and he scaled it until he came to the entryway.

The fire had ripped through more of the structure than could have been ascertained from the outside, and the floor creaked and groaned beneath his weight. Hastings halted just inside, realizing he was almost perfectly silhouetted against the bright day behind him. Should there be any ghouls inside the remnants, they would have a fantastic target to home in on. He waited a good thirty seconds, but nothing happened.

He moved deeper into the diner, stepping carefully, rifle at the ready. Tables had been overturned, and the plastic tablecloths had melted to become one with the floor. Along the rear of the room, a long bar stretched from the far wall to the opening that faced the parking lot. Behind that was a blackened doorway that probably led to the kitchen. In order to inspect it, he would have to leave Hartman’s field of view, and that would be unwise.

He slowly circumnavigated the dining area. He saw a human shape in one of the booths, and he snapped into a defensive posture immediately, his M4 trained on the mass sitting there in the semidark. It didn’t stir, so after a few seconds, Hastings crept closer.

Lying on the floor near the corpse were zombies—four of them—all with fatal wounds to their heads. A big caliber weapon had done them in, a .45 or something similar.

Crammed into one corner of the booth were the bodies of a woman and two children—a girl and a boy—all of whom had been shot in the head at close range. The skin on their faces was dappled and fried by powder burns. They all had straw-blond hair, a color that shimmered even in the wan light and despite the dark blood that matted it flat in places. The first corpse Hastings had spotted turned out to be that of a large man with dark hair and a beard, his head thrown back against the cushioned bench seat. His right arm was stretched across the bare table. A pistol was still clutched in his hand, the slide locked back, the weapon empty. He had taken down some of the zombies that had broken into the diner, but there must have been more. Hastings imagined the man had killed his family after he’d realized he would never be able to stop the horde alone. And he’d committed suicide after enduring the nightmare of shooting his family.

In a way, Hastings envied the man. He knew how his family had died, and even though their last moments must have been full of sheer terror, he had been there. He had acted, and he had acted honorably.

A puff of humid air wafted in through one of the shattered windows. Another zombie was stretched out on the floor amidst the glass, its mouth open and lips drawn back to expose bloody teeth. The body of an elderly woman lay next to it, the head a few inches away. The zombie had fed with such ferocity that it had torn the head right off the body.

The severed head’s mouth suddenly moved, and the rheumy eyes in the skull looked toward Hastings with silent hunger. He grunted. He had seen a few decapitated heads reanimate in New York. They called them rollers because that was the only way they could possibly pursue prey.

Hastings walked over, pulled his brain bar from his belt, and swung it like a golf club.

“Captain, we got something out here. Over.” Ballantine’s voice was somehow excited and sanguine at the same time.

“More reekers, Ballantine? Over.”

“Negative.”

A low grumble reached Hastings’s ears, like the sound a motorcycle made when the throttle was wide open. He ran outside and quickly picked his way down the debris. His men were clustered behind Stilley’s Humvee, weapons at the ready, leaving Guerra alone to guard the other side of the formation. Hastings sprinted toward them just as a blue Suzuki shot around a bend in the street and rocketed past the diner. As the bike zipped by, the helmeted rider looked in their direction. Hastings was out in the open so the biker must’ve seen him, but the sight of Tharinger sitting in the Humvee’s cupola behind the .50-caliber machine gun wasn’t very inviting. The biker just kept going.

Hastings had no doubt what the biker was speeding away from. “Okay, do we have enough fuel for the vehicles?” he asked Ballantine as he closed the distance to his men.

“Yes, sir. We have all the fuel we can carry right now,” Ballantine said. “Anything in the diner?”

“It’s a write-off. Let’s mount up. That bike’s noise is going to lead the reekers right to us.”

“Hooah.” Ballantine turned to the rest of the soldiers. “You heard the man. Let’s pull out of here!”

“Hey, that bike’s coming back,” Tharinger said, slewing the .50 around.

Hastings heard the nasal roar of the crotch rocket approaching. He stepped around the rear bumper of the second Humvee and nodded to the black soldier who knelt nearby, M4 at the ready. “Get behind the wheel, Stilley.” Over his shoulder, he said, “Hartman, get back to the other Humvee.”

The blue Suzuki came into view. He was going slower, so Hastings was able to get a better look at him. The rider was clad in black leather, and the face was invisible behind the smoked visor of the black helmet. There was a bulge inside the riding jacket just beneath the gentle swell of her chest, and a machete hung from her belt.

The Suzuki braked to a stop twenty feet away, and the rider dropped her feet to the ground. With the bike still rumbling, she pulled off the helmet. She was an Asian woman with severe features that indicated she didn’t spend a lot of time laughing. Or maybe the events of the past few months had just conspired to rob her of any humor she might have once had.

“You still the good guys?” she asked over the noisy engine.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Hastings responded.

“I’ll make it easy for you. Down that street”—she pointed in the direction she had come from on her first pass—“there are two pickups full of rednecks who set up a roadblock and trapped the family I was traveling with. They killed the father, and they’re in the process of raping the woman and the little boy. Are you going to do anything about it?”

Hastings asked, “How many men?”

“I didn’t have time to do a count, General. Five, six, maybe more.”

“How are they armed?” Ballantine asked.

“Guns. Shotguns. Nothing like that,” the woman said, inclining her head toward the .50-caliber machine gun Tharinger held on her.

“How far back are they?” Hastings motioned for Stilley to start the Humvee, and a moment later, its diesel engine clattered to life.

“A mile or so…” The woman glanced down the road, and her eyes widened. “Well, maybe a little less than that. Here come some of them.” She popped the helmet back on her head and spun the bike around.

“Hold on!” Hastings shouted.

The woman ignored him and started to ride away, but she must’ve thought better of it, because she stopped forty feet or so down the road. A late model black-over-tan Dodge dually pickup rounded the bend. Two men squatted in the bed, both with beards and wearing old woodland camouflage battle dress and grimy baseball caps worn backward. At least two more men sat inside the cab. They had all been hooting and yelling until they spotted Stilley’s Humvee. Tharinger spun the .50 around until he had it leveled on the big Dodge 3500.

“Captain, let me know what you want me to do!” Tharinger called.

“If they start shooting, you’re clear to fire,” Hastings said. “Ballantine, call Hartman and Guerra forward. Reader, back me up!”

Hastings hurried over to the side of the road, M4 at his shoulder, and motioned for the truck to stop. The driver didn’t seem inclined to comply, so Hastings fired a single round through the enormous chrome grille. The big truck stopped so abruptly that the two men in the back nearly catapulted over the cab. Over his radio, he heard Ballantine call the second Humvee forward, and from the corner of his eye.

Reader trotted toward the rear of the truck, covering the two men there with his assault rifle. “Do not fucking move!”

“What the fuck is this?” one of the men in the back hollered. His nose was bleeding, and he must have dropped his rifle. But he kept his hands up in the air. His companion still had his weapon, a mean-looking tactical shotgun, but he hadn’t pointed it anyone.
Yet.