Rolling Thunder - 03 (19 page)

Captain Lee Roach was terrified.  He had thought he was
going to die when Major Chase had put the knife to his throat, but for some
reason the big man hadn’t killed him.  Instead they’d stripped him and tied him
to a seat where he’d been interrogated by that jumped up Army Master Sergeant
like a common criminal. 

Roach didn’t see that he’d done anything wrong by taking the
General’s uniform when he escaped from Arnold.  That uniform had helped him
survive.  Had gotten him past road blocks on his way to Nashville, then into a
suite at the Hyatt where they had happily accommodated him.  That damn star was
like an all access pass, getting him the best room in the hotel even though
they weren’t open for business.

The uniform had also gotten him into several of the
nightclubs just down the street from the hotel.  Despite the damage done to the
country and the impending invasion by millions of infected, there were still
people that wanted to party.  Roach had enjoyed himself immensely, paying for
drinks courtesy of the General’s DOD issue American Express.  Amazingly, the
systems that processed credit card payments were still up and running.  He was
playing the big shot that he’d always believed he was.

And the women.  They were desperate.  Frightened.  Willing
to latch onto anyone they thought could or would protect them.  And three of
them wound up back in Roach’s suite, lured there with promises of military
protection and priority evacuation when the time came.  Roach satisfied his
carnal needs first, then satisfied his demons.  Two of the young women were
left in the bathtub in the second bath of the large suite, the third still lay
on the master bedroom’s king sized bed, blood from her slashed throat soaking
deep into the mattress.

Roach had walked out of the hotel when the evacuation notice
was issued, General’s uniform freshly laundered and pressed.  With head high
and shoulders back he had looked the part and had walked right through military
and police checkpoints, bypassing the long lines of civilians queued up to
board the trains.  He had even gotten an escort onto the train, one of the
first to board.  He didn’t encounter any other officers, enlisted and NCOs
only, and none of them even thought about questioning why he was there and evacuating
with the civilian population.

The train had loaded slowly, but Roach sat patiently in a comfortable
business class seat in a passenger car.  He watched the rain fall, soaking the
evacuees and soldiers that were trying to control the frightened crowd.  He had
worked hard to suppress laughter when skirmishes between the panicked civilians
and soldiers broke out, secretly delighting in seeing people shot as they
charged the military lines.

The car he was in filled quickly with people, but the seat next
to him stayed empty until the very last minute.  He looked over at the young
woman with an infant in her arms that sank into the seat and started fussing
with her baby to make it comfortable.  He had felt a tingle in his legs when he
saw the young mother.  She was exactly his type.  He turned back to the window,
trying to figure out how and where to get her alone, when he spotted the bitch
that had arrived at Arnold with that asshole Major. 

She was with a group of women and a man in a wheelchair and
the entire contingent was being escorted by a small squad of soldiers.  Turning
to watch he saw them approach and board a car only a few behind his.  He kept
nervously scanning the crowd for the Major, knowing his charade would fall
apart if the man saw him.  Checking every male face that was approaching or
boarding the train he was relieved when the train started moving and the Major
still hadn’t shown.  Had he not made it out of Arnold?  Regardless of the
reason, the bitch was alone.  Roach forgot all about the woman seated next to
him and focused on the warm feeling of revenge he would take on the bitch,
planning how he would make it happen.

The train picked up speed and Roach settled back, head
turned to watch the dark countryside slide by, plotting how to get his knife
into the woman’s body.  He didn’t know her name, thinking of her only as “the
bitch”, but he would learn it as he slid his blade into her belly and slowly
twisted, making her feel every bit of the agony for the humiliation she had
caused him.

It was sometime later and Roach was nearly asleep from the
monotonous rhythm of the train’s wheels on the rails when there was a roar of
wind as the back door to the car opened.  A short, black soldier with massive
shoulders and an equally powerful chest entered the car with his rifle up and
scanning.  After a moment he lowered the rifle, called out to the people that
he was checking for infected, and came forward in the cramped aisle, two
National Guard soldiers on his heels.

As soon as Roach saw the Special Forces soldier he knew how
he’d get to the bitch.  He stood and stepped past the woman with the baby into
the aisle and met the operator who straightened when he saw the uniform.

“Master Sergeant,” Roach said.  “I saw a woman board this
train before we pulled out of Nashville that is responsible for killing five
Air Force personnel at Arnold Air Force Base.  Maybe you’ve seen her.  Tall and
very pretty, long brown hair.  She’s dressed in an Air Force tactical uniform
and is four cars behind us.”   

“I have a good idea who you’re describing, Sir.”  Jackson
answered.  He didn’t let his face give anything away, but something just didn’t
seem right here.  Regardless, he was face to face with a General so he decided
to see where things went.  “What do you want me to do?”

Roach smiled, “Take me to her, Master Sergeant, and you’re
going to arrest and restrain her until we reach somewhere where I can have her
taken off the train.”

Roach was making it up as he went along, but the first step
was to get the bitch disarmed and tied up.  After that, well he’d either find a
way to get to her on the train or he’d maintain the pretense and slip away with
her when they got out of Tennessee.  Either way, he’d have his revenge.  He
felt his manhood rising with the thought and casually buttoned his jacket to
hide the erection.

“Yes, Sir, but we’ve had some infected breach the train and
I have several more cars to clear first.  She’s not going anywhere in the
meantime.”

Roach wasn’t a patient man, but knew if he insisted the man
abandon his sweep of the train to go arrest the bitch it would raise questions
that he couldn’t answer.  “Very well, carry on with what you were doing.  Come
find me as soon as you’re done with the sweep so we can go arrest her.  She’s
going to deny the accusation and I want to be there to confront her.”

“Yes, sir.”  Roach stepped out of Jackson’s way and after a
moment he and the other two soldiers squeezed past and moved into the next car
forward.

It wasn’t long before Jackson returned and Roach fell in
directly behind him as they worked their way back the length of the train.  The
transition from car to car was a little unnerving, stepping across open space
with the ground rushing by just a couple of feet below, but Roach steeled
himself and followed close on the Master Sergeant’s heels. 

They passed through one car that was a charnel house, blood
and gore splattered across the floor, walls, windows and even up onto the
ceiling.  Bodies lay sprawled across most of the seats.  Roach stepped
gingerly, making sure not to brush against anything that would get blood, or
worse, on his uniform.

Leaving the death car behind, they moved across another gap
and into the next car.  The Master Sergeant glanced over his shoulder at Roach
as they entered and started down the aisle.  Roach was scanning for the bitch,
checking each female face he saw, and was caught completely unprepared when the
big Army Major pushed the Master Sergeant out of the way and lunged at him,
knocking him onto his back and landing on top of him.  Roach could feel the tip
of a knife digging into the flesh under his jaw and when he looked into the
Major’s eyes he thought he was about to die.

Roach’s charade quickly fell apart, the Master Sergeant
believing the Major and the bitch when they accused him of deserting and
revealing who he really was.  In minutes he found himself stripped to his
underwear and being tied to a seat like a common criminal.  He stoically
endured the humiliation, grinding his teeth as he spun a story when the Master
Sergeant interrogated him. 

After the interrogation they left him alone, and Roach
started to get scared.  They didn’t know about the women at the hotel in
Nashville, did they?  How could they?  Were they only concerned with the
bullshit desertion charge?  That was bullshit because the base was going to
fall.  Everyone could see that.  It isn’t desertion if you’re only trying to
save your life, he told himself, and decided that would be his defense.

He knew the Globemaster with evacuees aboard had crashed on
takeoff and he would say that he knew it couldn’t successfully get away.  If he
had stayed with them and boarded that aircraft he would be dead too.  The Major
and the bitch hadn’t gotten on board.  They must have known something.  How
could he be guilty of desertion if they weren’t?  Roach kept playing out the
line of reasoning in his head, finally happy with the argument he would use
when the time came.

The Major was the real criminal here.  He’d doomed all of
those people by putting them on that plane.  A plane that had no chance.  That
never should have landed to begin with.  Roach had escaped safely in a Humvee,
just like the Major had.  Why hadn’t the Major just put the evacuees in a
vehicle and driven them to safety?  The Major had a lot to answer for.

Roach had sat planning his defense argument while most of
the other passengers slept, going over it in his head repeatedly until he was
snapped out of his thoughts when the train violently derailed and came to a
grinding stop.  After a few minutes one of the National Guard soldiers stepped
in front of him and cut him loose, telling him to get ready to run.  He soon
found himself pushing his way out of the car with the other evacuees into a
thick fog.  Unarmed and dressed only in underwear and shoes, Roach started
running in the middle of the group.  Infected screams were all around them as
was gunfire from vehicle mounted machine guns and the rifles of the soldiers
running with them.

A female had slipped past the defenses and charged the
group, adjusting course to head directly at Roach.  He saw her at the last
moment and changed direction as he pushed the man next to him directly into her
path.  She slammed into the man and they went down as she started tearing into
his throat.  Roach ran on with the larger group, continually looking around and
working to stay as close to the center as possible.

He had lost sight of the Major and the bitch, but he knew
they were somewhere around.  They seemed to have an amazing knack for
survival.  Just ahead he saw a woman trip and fall over a shredded body that
lay on the ground and Roach felt a thrill of exhilaration when he saw the
uniform and the rifle slung over the shoulders of the corpse.  Pausing, he
grabbed the rifle, worked the tactical vest off the body and shrugged into it. 
The vest was well stocked with spare magazines, a couple of fragmentation
grenades, a 9 mm pistol and a Ka-Bar fighting knife.

The Major and the bitch would be somewhere up ahead.  And
they’d be facing away from the evacuees, fighting the infected.  A quick bullet
to the back of his head then a knife blade across her throat to make her
cooperate and Roach would find a place where the two of them could have some
fun.

We kept running.  I never had the opportunity to look at my
watch, but we ran for what had to be another thirty minutes and I was guessing
we had covered two miles.  Hundreds, if not thousands, of evacuees had already
fallen to the infected, mostly those that were out of shape and slow but also
the unfortunate ones that had an infected come screaming out of the fog and
tear into them before they could defend themselves.  Thousands more infected
had been killed as well, but as far as I could tell we hadn’t even made a dent
in their numbers.

The train had been left behind and we now had two exposed
flanks to protect, and our air support had peeled off.  Visibility was too poor
for them to risk firing on ground targets.  That left us with the surviving
military personnel that were on foot, two Humvees and one Bradley.  The Bradley
prowled up and down our right flank, but we were stretched out close to a
quarter of a mile and it couldn’t effectively cover the entire area.  Despite
that limitation we were losing less people to the right flank than we were to
the left.  Even with two Humvees racing up and down the flank, thinning out the
infected with their machine guns, we were under constant attack and the screams
of dying evacuees were nearly a constant counterpoint to the screams of the
infected females.

Since the groups had merged into one long mass of fleeing
people, Jackson had joined Rachel, Dog and I on the left flank.  We were still
killing infected at a ferocious pace and were getting dangerously low on ammo. 
Jackson and I had switched back to pistols and knives, preserving our rifle
ammo for Rachel.  My hands ached and I was pretty sure I’d torn stitches again,
but there weren’t a lot of options.  Every few minutes one of the Humvees would
pass our area and we’d get a momentary respite from the battle as it knocked
down all the infected in the area, but before we knew it we were back under
attack.

The group was running, really running now that most of the
slower people had fallen, and the pace had picked up.  Less than three miles to
go.  We could send the Hummers ahead to clear any infected on the bridge while
the Bradley protected our back as we made our way across and into Arkansas.  At
least that was what I planned to happen.  That plan and five dollars would have
gotten me a coffee at Starbucks once upon a time.  Now the five bucks was
useless for anything other than tinder to start a fire. 

A group of females charged out of the fog, screaming as they
ran at us.  Rachel snapped off a shot, killing one of them before they got too
close, then Jackson and I had to wade in with pistols and blades.  I shot two
in the face before another one leapt directly at me.  Twisting to the side I
avoided the full force of her attack and was able to bring the knife up as she
flashed past, slicing her open from sternum to pelvis.  She tumbled to the
ground and tried to stand back up but slipped on her own entrails which were
spilling out of her abdomen.  She started to scream at me but fell over dead
before a sound left her mouth.  Jackson had preserved his pistol ammo and
killed four of them with his knife.  He was so strong he could punch the blade
directly through skulls or sternums, getting an instant kill with each thrust. 
One of the Humvees drove past at that moment and we took advantage of the lull
in attacks to run and cover some more ground with the group.

“How many do you think are left?”  I asked him as we ran. 
Rachel was close to my right shoulder and Dog trotted a few paces in front of
me.

“Us or infected?”

“Us.”

“If I had to guess I’d say we’ve already lost close to
half.”  Jackson said. 

I had been thinking the same thing, but was still dismayed
to hear his assessment.  Close to half was nearly 4,000 dead in less than an
hour, and we still had a good ways to go.  Ahead of us a female appeared out of
the fog, making a run for a young man and woman that each had a small child
riding on their shoulders as they ran.  Dog dashed forward and slammed into her
leg, tearing out her Achilles tendon.  Rachel was closest and shot the infected
in the head without breaking stride.

“We can’t keep losing people like this.  Any ideas how we
can get the flyboys into the battle?”  I asked, snapping off two shots as two
males shambled out of the fog directly in front of me.

Before Jackson could answer he was tackled by a female that
ran in behind him.  They tumbled to the ground and into my path, tripping me
and sending me sprawling on the wet gravel.  Another female was on me in a
flash and I struggled with her briefly before she lunged forward and tried to
bite down on my throat.  At the last instant I had seen what she was doing and
raised my shoulder and tucked my chin to protect myself, her mouth bouncing off
the side of my head and clamping onto my shoulder.  She bit down hard and
started trying to tear a chunk out of me.  Fuck that hurt!  I had dropped my
pistol when I hit the ground and was left with just my knife, rifle pinned
under me and useless.  Pushing with one hand to get some space I started
stabbing, hard and fast, into her body.  After what seemed like an eternity I
finally hit something vital and she released me and rolled away, a gout of
blood pouring out of her mouth as she died.

Looking around I saw Jackson climbing to his feet, the
female that had attacked him lying on the ground with an apparent broken neck. 
He grabbed my arm and yanked me upright, the same arm the female had just tried
to make a meal of, and I scooped up my pistol and started running again.  We’d
been slightly behind Rachel and Dog when the attack happened and there was so
much noise in the environment that neither of them had noticed.  As I ran I
tried to examine my shoulder for damage, but after almost tripping over a dead
infected while trying to look for injury I chose to ignore it for now and
concentrate on running.

We were running through a particularly heavy patch of fog,
even harder to see through because it was lit by the sun and looked like a
solid wall of white cotton candy.  It was so thick that Rachel who was only a
step in front of me was shrouded in mist.  Water ran down my forehead into my
eyes as the mist condensed on the hot skin of my shaved head.  Firearms were
basically useless as we couldn’t see the infected until they were literally
right in front of us.  Jackson and I moved in front of Rachel, using our
greater body weight and strength to bull aside any we encountered, slashing and
stabbing as we threw them out of our path.  We were covered in blood, some of
it our own, but more of it from the infected.  There were still screams of pain
and fear coming from up and down the group as evacuees continued to fall to the
infected, but there wasn’t anything more we could do to help.  We could barely
see five feet in front of us.

One of the Hummers rolled by, invisible in the fog, but
clearly audible as the machine gun spat out round after round.  They were
firing blind, but I had little doubt they were hitting targets.  There were too
many infected for them to not.  I hoped that was all they were hitting.  The
vehicles gave me an idea.

“Jackson, those Humvees should have emergency roadside kits
on board since they’re stateside.  Right?”  Military vehicles that are in the
US are generally equipped with a small kit for roadside emergencies in case
they breakdown while driving on civilian roads.

“They should.  What are you thinking?”

“Those kits have roadside flares?”

“Sure as shit should!  And those flares will burn hot enough
for the pilots to see even in this pea soup!”  He excitedly got on the radio
and called the drivers of the vehicles.  After a minute, “Yes, they both have
them.  What do you want to do?”

“Tell them to hand a flare out to someone on each flank of
the group, every twenty to thirty yards, and have them light up.  Once they’re
lit, tell our air to target everything outside the perimeter of those flares.” 
Jackson relayed my orders as I killed another female and two males.  I stumbled
over the second male’s legs as he went down and Rachel grabbed my vest to
steady me.  

“How much farther?”  She asked, panting as she ran.

“Should be less than two miles by now, but it’s about to get
a little easier.”  Ahead I could hear Dog take an infected down, but couldn’t
see him through the fog until I was almost right on top of him.  A female lay
on her back, screaming, leg torn open where Dog had disabled her.  When she saw
me she stopped screaming and looked me right in the eye as I was raising my
pistol.  My blood ran cold.  I was so unprepared for the sight of the woman
that I came to a stop, Rachel then Jackson running into my back and nearly
knocking me on top of the female.

“What?”  Rachel asked.  I didn’t answer, just stood there
like an idiot staring at the female.  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”  Rachel said,
pushed me aside and shot the infected in the head.  “You pick the strangest
damn times to let your soft spot come out.”

Jackson snorted with a suppressed laugh at my expense then
trotted on behind Rachel and Dog.  After a moment I followed.  I didn’t care
what they thought, but I hadn’t hesitated because the female was helpless.  She
had looked like my wife, Katie.  So much so in fact that for an instant the
thought had gone through my head that it was Katie, even though I knew that
wasn’t possible.