The Reckoning - 02 (48 page)

“Men should be either treated generously or destroyed,

because they take revenge
for slight injuries

- for heavy ones they cannot.
”

-
Niccolo Machiavelli

              Shades had only been gone about half an hour when we heard the explosion and saw the fireball roll skyward. The explosion was almost due south of us, from somewhere near Springfield Lake. I couldn’t figure what was out that way that they would want to take control of, but I hoped we had just done massive damage to it. With any luck, we got them all. Unfortunately, my luck doesn’t get that good.

             
I fixed the location in my head as best I could and headed down to the Hive. I wanted to look at the big map on the wall and try to figure out where that explosion had been. There weren’t all that many places out that direction that could easily be defended. When the secondary explosion went off, it shook the ground beneath my feet.

             
“What the hell was that?” I yelled at Spec-4.

             
“I don’t know,” she replied, shocked.

             
We ran back up the ramp to see a massive cloud of black smoke rolling into the sky. You could see the flames leaping into the air. It had to be at least three miles away, yet we could clearly see the flames. Whatever we hit, it must have been extremely volatile. Then realization began dawning on me.

             
“Oh, shit,” I muttered. “They were at the Fabretti Ammunition Plant.”

             
“The what?” asked Spec-4.

             
“Fabretti Ammo,” I said. “I completely forgot about that place. They have a plant outside of town where they make ammunition.”

“You must have hit the powder storage,” she said, shaking her head.

“Good,” I replied. “That should cost them dearly.”

“Let’s hope they get the message and leave us alone,” said Webber, standing beside the gate.

“I don’t see how they could mount much more of an offense,” I answered. “How many of them could there be?”

“Quite a few if they recruited all the inmates we released,” said Webber, looking back at me with a worried look on his face.

I hadn’t considered that. I knew that they had been watching us for some time, but I didn’t know for how long. Potentially, there were a few hundred possible recruits that we had just turned loose.

“That would explain how they knew we were in the jail,” said Spec-4, shaking her head.

The
Freemen
were the perfect group for a bunch of recently released criminals. They hated law enforcement, the government and anyone who got in their way. They took whatever they wanted and had no regard for anyone other than themselves. In fact, I would guess that every one of the
Freemen
probably had a rap-sheet somewhere. It would explain all the crappy tattoos and lack of discipline I’d observed.

“Let’s just hope that they don’t know where we are now,” I said, still watching the rising black cloud.

The fire had died down where all we could see was the glow, but the black smoke cloud was massive. I was thankful that the wind was blowing it away from us, not towards us. Even if we didn’t get all of them, I knew that we had dealt them two heavy blows in the last two days. We’d destroyed huge resources of food and weapons.  We’d also taken away two secure bases where they could rest and go to ground. All in all, we’d hurt them badly. The question was did we hurt them bad enough to keep them from coming back after us? I could only hope so. However, hope was not enough. We were going to have to assume that they would come after us again. To do anything else was to invite disaster.

We returned to the Hive and I located the Fabretti plant on the map. It was on the far side of
Springfield Lake in a remote location. It was surrounded by a high chain-link fence and you couldn’t see the place from the road. If they had avoided the attention of the zombies, they could have held up in there almost indefinitely. That explosion and fireball had rang the dinner bell for every zombie within ten miles.

I doubled the patrols that day and had Josh change the rotation. If Shades had managed to give away any info on us, I wanted it to be wrong. We would change our patrol schedule and double check all of our defenses. The last thing I wanted to find was sabotage.
That was one reason why I had insisted on Shades being assigned to internal security instead of exterior. There were fewer things he could do without being seen.

By mid-day, all of my patrols had checked in. There were no signs of tampering with or breaches in our defenses. Internal sweeps had found nothing, either. Hopefully, we had minimized the impact he could have on us by never letting him have access to sensitive areas. Josh had talked to all three of his security staff to make certain no one was working with Shades.

Lasagna was irate that Shades had “betrayed their uniform” by going to the
Freemen.
Weasel-face had found a girlfriend among the survivors we had brought in with us. He was now sharing a sleeping area with one of the women who had been inside the drugstore we liberated when we lost Alex Parker. He now had a vested interest in keeping this place safe.

Packer was livid that
Josh would even question her. She told him that she had heard about how the
Freemen
treated captive women. She wanted nothing to do with anyone who would do something like that. She calmed down when he explained that it was just precautionary to ask everyone who worked with him. She explained that she hadn’t ever trusted or liked Shades. I believed her.  I’d seen the look she gave the three stooges the day we met at the front gate.

The afternoon passed with me and the others going over the changes we were implementing in security procedures. We changed times, frequency, number and composition of the patrols. We even added a relief password
to the guard rotation to keep someone from assuming a post that they weren’t assigned to, just in case. It was almost dinner time when my radio crackled to life.

“Front gate to Grant,” said a voice I recognized as Corporal Winston.

“Go ahead,” I replied.

“You might want to get up here,” he said. “There’s something going on. We hear music up here.”

“10-9,” I said, surprised. “Say again, did you say music?”

“Confirmed,” he replied. “You’d have to hear it to believe me.”

“On my way,” I said. “Out.”

I grabbed my weapons and pack, and then ran out the door of the Hive. Bowman was just getting out of a Hemmitt when I cleared the steps. He was wearing his uniform, but not the body armor and weapons. He also had grease on his face and hands.

“Hey, Wylie,” he called. “Got a second?”

“Not really,” I replied, “unless you can tell me about it on the way to the front gate.”

“Climb in,” he said, grinning.

We both piled into the Hemmitt and he fired up the engine. As he was pulling it into gear, he turned to me with a big smile on his face.

“I’ve been tinkering,” he said, as he started driving for the ramp.

“With what?”

“I took one of the mini-guns we scavenged off of the crashed C-130 and mounted it on the back of this Hemmitt,” he said, proudly.

“That’s awesome,” I replied. “What made you think of that?”

“The fact that when we test fired the mini-gun, it scooted across the floor,” he said. “It had to be secured to something heavy or it couldn’t be used. Too much recoil.”

“Well, you just turned a Hemmitt into an APC,” I said. “Way to go.”

We rolled up to the gate and a small group was gathered behind the barrier. Webber was on top of the guard shack with a pair of binoculars, scanning the horizon. We rolled to a stop and I climbed out. As an afterthought, I leaned back inside the cab and motioned at Bowman.

“Hey,” I said, “back this thing up to the fence just in case we need that mini-gun.”

“Got it,” he replied.

I dropped to the ground and shut the door. Then I hustled over to the ladder that was against the side of the guard shack.
Bowman backed up to the fence and cut the engine. With the newfound silence, I heard the music that Webber was talking about. It sounded like children’s music. It was melodic and high pitched, like it was played on a gigantic music box.

“What the hell is that?” I asked, taking position beside Webber.

“It’s a goddamned Ice Cream Truck!” he exclaimed, pointing to the road southwest of us.

He handed me the binoculars and I quickly found what he was talking about. A garishly painted Ice Cream Truck with a huge speaker system on top was coming our way at about five miles per hour. It was blasting the ice cream song just as loud as the speakers would go. That wasn’t the problem. The real problem was that it was leading a massive horde of zombies right at us.

“It’s a fucking zombie Pied Piper!” I bellowed. “They’re bringing them right to our door!”

“Sound the alarm!” yelled
Gunny. “Get everyone with a gun up here on the fucking double!”

“That’s got to be a suicide mission,” said Webber. “How the hell were they planning on escaping if they led them right to us?”

“I don’t know, man,” I replied. “But I think we’re about to find out.”

Just as the truck turned into the driveway for the Underground, it accelerated hard, leaving the crowd of zombies in their wake. Even the
Sprinters
weren’t able to keep up. They braked to a halt about thirty yards from the gate and I saw the back door of the truck fly open. Then I heard someone trying to kick-start a motorcycle.

“The fuck you do,” I snapped. “Bowman, light ‘em up!”

I heard the electric motor that turned the barrels of the mini-gun begin to spool up to speed. Just as it reached a crescendo, the massive gun came to life belching fire, flame and death. It instantly shredded the Ice Cream Truck and destroyed both motor and sound system. The motorcycle leapt from the back of the truck and tried to head across the field. Bowman adjusted his aim and walked the fire right into the motorcycle, turning the bike into confetti and the rider into a cloud of red mist.

Then the lead
Sprinters
came charging down the road. There had to be over a thousand zombies coming for us. They stretched back beyond our driveway and out of sight. There could be tens of thousands of them. The worst part was, the more of them we killed, the more the noise would attract more. It was a no-win situation. Our position was compromised. The problem was, we had nowhere to run. The goddamned
Freemen
had hit us back, maybe even worse than we had hit them.

Bowman walked his fire right into the crowd and was cutting through row after row of the dead like a sharp scythe through wheat. I glanced over at him and saw that he had written H.B.D.C. on the side of the gun. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I intended to ask him. If we survived, that is. Right now, that was a mighty big uncertainty.

More and more people arrived and started taking up positions on the line. I was about to start directing the fire when a bad feeling fell over me. What if this was a distraction? What if they were keeping all of our attention on this entrance while they made a run on another?

“Gunny!” I bellowed.

“Yeah,” he called from a few feet away.

“Take a team and get to the other side of the Underground,” I called. “Check the other entrance and make sure this isn’t a distraction.”

“Ooh Rah!” he called back.

I saw him grab Webber, Winston, Ramirez and the Rangers and head off across the compound.
Then I keyed the mic on my radio.

“Josh,” I called, “do you copy?”

“Yeah,” he replied, “what do you need?”

“I need you in the Hive,” I instructed. “I want you on the cameras. I want to know if you see anyone or if any of the cameras go offline unexpectedly. Treat it like an attack.”

“On my way,” he replied. “I’ll advise when I’m in position.”

“Copy,” I replied. “Gunny, maintain radio contact with me or the Hive.”

“Roger,” he replied.

Another thought went through my head. Even if we won, it would take a humongous toll on our ammo supply. This was going to be a costly defense.

“Conserve your ammo!” I called out. “Make your shots count!”

Spec-4 and Southard started moving up and down the line relaying the order. The dead just kept coming. They were still stretched out farther than we could see around the bend in the road.
We would run out of ammo long before we ran out of the dead. We had to come up with a better plan.

“Gunny to Grant.”

“Go!” I replied.

“Looks like your gut was right again,” he said. “We caught a group with a cutting torch trying to cut their way into the rail entrance.”

“Did you discourage them?” I asked.

“Hell no,” he replied. “We fucking destroyed them. That guy McDonald is a hell of a shot. He hit the welding tanks and blew them up. It was fucking fantastic.”