Transformation: Zombie Crusade VI (30 page)

Luke gave him a sharp look before donning his sunglasses. “How many is a few?”

Wyatt shrugged. “All but a couple of their fighters are armed with black powder long guns and revolvers, just like my men, so they don’t have much cartridge ammo left. What they do have, they arm their guards with. Point is, they have assault weapons and you’re a stranger; let me get out first.”

The guards quickly recognized Officer Sanders, and one of them climbed down the ladder and headed over to the gate. “How’s our favorite Texas Ranger doin’ today?”

“I’m doin’ just fine, Rodriguez. Brought along a friend I want Sergeant Logan to meet.”

The guard replied in a low voice, “Okay, but Sergeant Logan’s still pissed off about the situation with Madden.”

“Well,” Wyatt declared, “that’s part of the reason I’m here. I think I’ve got a plan that your first sergeant might be interested in hearin’.”

“Sounds good.” The guard smiled. “We already contacted him by radio and he told us to send you on over.”

“Thanks, Rodriguez.” Wyatt returned the smile. “Keep warm up there in that tower of yours.”

“Will do, Officer Sanders. Have a good one.” The guard respectfully nodded once to Luke before briskly walking over to the blocking vehicle and pulling it clear of the road.

Luke was pleasantly surprised to see that a second kill-zone had been constructed beyond the first wall. Two hundred meters away loomed the main defenses of Preston, a fifteen-foot-high wooden palisade with what appeared to be large doors cut out of the barrier at roughly ten-meter intervals. The closer they got, the more Luke could see that the openings were even closer than he first estimated. For a moment he thought that the doors might be some type of sally-ports, but then he saw what appeared to be large pipes jutting out of the shadows. Finally, he realized that the openings were gun apertures; these defenses were built around weapons Luke had yet to see in this war: modern artillery.

He turned to look at Wyatt, who was grinning from ear-to-ear as he shrugged with a “what can I tell you?” expression in his eyes.

“So they brought a bunch of toys from Fort Sill along with them,” Luke whispered admiringly.

“Oh yeah,” Wyatt chuckled, “and these boys know how to use their toys really well.”

“Have you seen them in action?”

“I led a hundred troopers up here last summer, after Logan sent word that they were under attack. The only thing we found by the time we got here was a bunch of shredded hunters lyin’ in the mud.”

“Damn,” Luke muttered.

“Yeah, ‘damn’ was all we could say when we saw what these guns can do.”

Luke frowned in confusion as they slowly drove toward the second wall. “They get those things from a museum or something?” 

The guns had modern barrels, but they weren’t of any design Luke was familiar with. The extent of modification the artillery pieces had undergone was obviously massive. As a pre-outbreak military buff, Luke knew what modern field guns looked like; long, slender tubes with muzzle brakes that usually came in 155 or 105 millimeter. Some of the modern US Army’s weapons were towed, but many more had been self-propelled, usually mounted to a tank-chassis. Luke didn’t know how to measure in millimeters, but every barrel he could see appeared to be at least six inches wide at the mouth, with no brakes to be seen. As close as the barrels were to one another, Luke realized that none of the guns could still be attached to their original bases. “They’re some sort of hybrids?”

“They are,” Wyatt confirmed, “but I’ll let First Sergeant Logan explain the nuts and bolts to you.”

He pointed to a huge gate swinging open over the road. “There’s the old warhorse now.”

The soldier in charge of the Preston defenses was a forty-something rock of a man with what appeared to be a perpetual scowl etched across his sun-creased face. He stood in the path of the Jeep, clearly confident that the vehicle would stop rather than run him over.

Wyatt motioned for Luke to get out as he shouted to the local commander, “This is the guy I messaged you about; meet my friend, Captain Luke Smith.”

First Sergeant Logan held out his hand. “Captain, huh?” He looked Luke over with a practiced eye as Luke briefly wondered if his own, pre-bite hand would have been crushed in the veteran soldier’s vice-like grip. “Captain of an Eagle-Scout troop or something?”

Luke didn’t wait for the Ranger to explain. “I was given battlefield promotion to the rank of captain by the commander of the Allied Resistance Army.”

“Never heard of it,” Logan declared.

Luke continued. “I was part of a group of survivors, about five-hundred strong, in northern Indiana. We eventually established communications with what appears to be the largest, and by far the best organized, political unit remaining in North America: the state of Utah. Since then, we’ve established alliances with settlements from the Great Lakes to Monroe, Louisiana. We’re still fighting the war. If you have an hour or two, I can fill you in on what’s been happening around the country since the outbreak.”

As with Ranger Sanders a few days earlier, First Sergeant Logan was skeptical but intrigued; reliable news from beyond the region was virtually non-existent. “Hell kid, one thing I got plenty of these days is time. I’ve got other stuff, too, of course. That’s probably why Sanders brought you here, so let’s go have that conversation.”

CHAPTER 25

Jack and Carter had withdrawn from the scheduled trip to the Red River Depot, trusting that project to Captain Harden and his troops. Once John and Tina had shared the intel about the Norco Refinery, gleaned from the soldiers captured at the Castle, the possibility of interfering with Barnes’ flow of fuel for his fleet of helicopters was simply too tempting for Jack to pass up. They’d discreetly informed Harden and the settlement’s leadership of their need for information regarding refining in the New Orleans area, and the biofuel facility in particular. Part of Jack wanted to loudly advertise for anyone who knew anything about the Norco area or renewable jet fuel to come forward, but he didn’t want to tip his hand in the unlikely event that Barnes had managed to insert spies in Vicksburg, as he had in Fort Wayne. While they waited for Harden to uncover people with the right background or connections, Jack, Carter, Tina, and John did their homework with the resources they had available.

Three days after their private meeting with Vicksburg leadership, T.C. tracked Jack and Carter down at his grandmother’s cabin. The teen had been running, which offered a clue as to the value of the message he carried. “Captain Harden ordered me to inform you that he’d found several people with information related to a mission you were considering.”

If T.C. had hoped to elicit any hints as to the nature of the mission, he was immediately disappointed when Carter spoke. “Thanks, son, now run on back and tell yer boss that we’ll be along directly.”

T.C. looked from Carter to Jack to the kittens wrestling in the corner. “I’ll tell him that you guys are too busy playing with little kitties to be bothered right now unless you tell me what the mission is, Uncle Carter.”

Carter laughed as he strolled over to the door. “I may have promised yer sister that I’d cat-sit ‘til she and the little girls get back from yer momma’s place, and it ain’t no insult to my manhood . . .” T.C. slowly backed up as Carter approached him, but he wasn’t fast enough to duck out of reach when Carter made his move. In a flash, Carter had his nephew pinned to the wall. “Now it’s yer manhood that might be in question—ever hear of an atomic wedgie?”

T.C. peered around Carter at Jack. “A little help here, please?”

Jack leaned back in his chair, stretched his legs out in front of him, and folded his arms behind his neck. “I don’t think Carter needs any help with an atomic wedgie—he’s only sent a couple guys to the hospital that I know of . . .”

Carter flipped T.C. around and tossed him out the door. “Go tell Harden we’ll be there directly, and next time ya get mouthy with me I ain’t gonna be so generous.”

Jack smiled and shook his head as Carter closed the door. “Charlotte’s got her hands full with that one. I bet you were a lot like that when you were his age.”

“I understand that he’s itchin’ fer action and adventure. Hell, his daddy died a hero, fightin’ off the infected. It’s normal that he wants payback. Now I ain’t sayin’ he’s a man grown, but he’s proved himself a good fighter, and with Curtis gone I figure it’s my job to teach the boy everythin’ I know about fightin’ and survival.”

Jack thought of his son, and even though Luke didn’t seem to need much of his father’s guidance when it came to fighting and survival skills, Jack understood exactly what Carter was feeling. “I know you’ve been spending a lot of time with him lately, and Harden’s really taken him under his wing as well. I know Charlotte really appreciates it. What she won’t appreciate is us taking him in the field, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I ain’t sure exactly what I’m thinkin’ ‘bout that yet. I know that boy is more’n ready to get the hell out of Vicksburg.” He looked at Jack with a twinkle in his eye. “And I’m just itchin’ to blow somethin’ up.”

“Yeah,” Jack said with wistful enthusiasm, “can you imagine what all that fuel will do when we blow the lines?”

“Damn right I can, buddy. Now toss on that Eskimo-coat of yers and let’s git over to the meetin’ house. I didn’t promise to be no cat-sitter; I just like watchin’ the little buggers play like the killin’ machines they is.”

After months of travelling west and engaging several dozen groups of survivors along the way, Luke’s explanation of how the former United States had fared since the collapse triggered by the outbreak was both succinct and comprehensive. The tale was also quite convincing. Luke figured that the months of cold, hungry boredom following the elimination of local infected only increased people’s desire for news. Those same factors also led to stir-craziness among the bold and adventurous living behind fortifications that seemed more like prison-walls as time passed. The first words out of Sergeant Logan’s mouth after Luke finished speaking were very similar to what the young war-leader heard every time he explained the state of the country to newly encountered survivors.

“Y’all looking for any more recruits?”

Luke managed to keep a smile from his face as he nodded. “We do have strict guidelines on who we accept, mostly concerning age, physical condition, and family-related issues. I’d also be interested in some of your artillery.” The sergeant returned the nod but didn’t say anything; Luke continued the conversation by asking, “So what’s your story here?”

“Well,” Logan began, “I might as well start from the beginning so you’ll know how this unit came to be what it is.” He took a swig from a metal flask that had been tucked away in one of his pockets. “I’m an artilleryman by M.O.S., but at the time of the outbreak I was serving as a drill instructor at Fort Sill. As the regular and reserve Army units were wiped out trying to contain the virus in the cities, Washington ordered trainees and everyone else in rear-echelon positions to be equipped with any available weapons and sent out to fight the infected. As you can imagine, they were slaughtered even faster than the regular combat forces were. By the end, the poor bastards were being sent into battle with little more than homemade spears and sledgehammers.” The first sergeant chuckled bitterly. “The irony of that was obvious when some of the soldiers using those types of weapons actually survived long enough to straggle back to Sill. That’s how I made it back to base myself.”

Logan paused long enough to take and release a deep breath as he pushed back uncomfortable memories. “Me and some of the other sergeants, and a few officers, organized the survivors; there were about five hundred of them at that point. We hid out underground while the base was overrun, living off MRE’s and anything else we could scrape up. Before all coms ceased, we learned that the whole country was infected; that’s when some of our people started to head out on their own. I don’t blame ‘em, not really; they all had family they wanted to save. None of ‘em ever came back, though, not a single damn one.”

Wyatt nodded in sympathy. “Can’t say I wouldn’t have done the same thing—if I’d been a young man stationed somewhere far from my family. It even took some time for folks livin’ in the same place to figure out they had to stick together, work together, if they wanted to survive.”

Logan grimaced. “Eventually we were down to two hundred or so, but they were soldiers with nowhere to go, and nothing to lose. Plus, they all wanted payback against the flesh-eaters. Problem was, we didn’t have much to fight with until one of the guys suggested using big guns. Fort Sill is where the Army trained its artillery personnel, and they stored a lot of weapons on that base. Of course, there was hardly a shell to be found anywhere on post, and as far as we knew, nobody was making or shipping any more ammo.”

“Finally, a supply-sergeant, of all people, told us that he knew how to make black powder. Still didn’t make any sense, you can’t use an ancient propellant with modern shells; just can’t get the power you need. But, turns out you can turn modern gun barrels into giant shotguns if you just use a little imagination and a lot of skilled machining.”

He shared a satisfied smile with Luke and Wyatt. “Within a month, we had fifty M198 howitzer tubes mounted on trailers. Now, normally, the recoil on those tubes would destroy the trailer the first time they were fired; probably kill anyone standing nearby, too. But we modified ‘em and just turned ‘em into black powder shotguns.”

The mention of shotguns gave Luke goosebumps. “Can you explain that to me a little more?”

“Sure. A rifled shell requires a lot more explosive power to propel it through the gun tube, and that’s a problem to be solved even before you address how far you want that shell to fly. Bottom line is that a modern artillery round has one hell of a lot more power behind it than, say, a shell fired by a Civil War era smoothbore.” Logan took another swig from his flask.

“I’m following you so far . . .” Luke encouraged, anxious for the sergeant to continue.

“Anyway, flinging canister with black powder through these tubes doesn’t exactly stress the barrels much. Once everything settled down, a few months after the outbreak, we were able to come out of hiding and work on the guns; Fort Sill has plenty of shops and tools to make the kind of modifications we were interested in. We cut off the muzzle brakes and machined out breech blocks, then we just had to experiment with loads and charges.”

Luke was impressed with the soldiers’ ingenuity and determination. “This canister-ammo you mentioned, is that what I think it is?”

“If you’re thinking that it’s a bag full of shrapnel, yeah, it’s what you think it is.”

Luke whistled appreciatively. “I haven’t seen anything like that in all my travels; don’t you have trouble keeping enough powder and shot on hand?”

“Naw, we haven’t had much to do since we built the fortifications and cleared the killing zones; we have over three thousand rounds stored up.”

Luke quickly calculated the numbers in his head, almost immediately determining that the soldiers from Fort Sill had at least sixty rounds available for each gun. Obviously, more could be made if those weren’t enough. He asked a final question. “Did you guys come this way on purpose?”

“Yep. One of my squad leaders grew up here in Preston, and he didn’t have to work hard to convince us that we needed to find a peninsula of some type to fortify and defend. Things have worked out well here, but most of us are bored as hell; winter’s been a real drag.”

Luke completely agreed about the frigid season. “Utah still has a functioning weather service office; we knew that a bad winter was coming last fall. According to their scientists, all the fires around the world during the outbreak sent enough ash into the atmosphere to drop global temperatures for a year or two.”

“Or two?” Logan scowled.

“Nobody has much experience with this sort of thing. A guy from Utah told me they’re using data from past volcanic eruptions to try to predict the impact of a very different type of ash floating up into the air. Hopefully the weather will normalize before next winter, but we should be prepared for another cold one just in case.”

“Makes sense, I suppose, but keeping an oversized company of soldiers cooped up in a tiny space like this is difficult enough without a long winter to deal with.”    

Luke offered a knowing grin. “I’ve got a solution for you.”

Jack and Carter found Captain Harden sitting near a roaring stove with two men they’d never met. One of the strangers looked to be somewhere in his fifties, while the other might have been half that age. Both men were greedily slurping from mugs of steaming hot coffee that was becoming more difficult to locate near Vicksburg. That Harden was sharing java from his private stock was the only clue Jack and Carter needed to tell them that these two guys had important information to share.

Harden stood up and met his fellow fighters in the middle of the room, where he quietly explained. “I’ve vetted these men as best I can under the circumstances. Both of ‘em are relatively new additions to the community—came in since the battle here. The older guy’s been workin’ with long-distance salvage crews, and his boss says he’s a good worker. The young one’s been runnin’ the river lookin’ for lost family in the New Orleans area; he hasn’t found his people, but he’s brought back a lot of refugees. Between you and me, that says a lot about his character.”

Jack nodded in approval as he eyed the two strangers. “So the kid’s seen some things down around Norco?”

“Yep,” Harden whispered.

“What’s the older guy got?” Carter pressed.

Harden shrugged with one shoulder. “He claims that he worked in a refinery near Norco for over twenty years; he knows the place.”

Jack was impatient. “Let’s get on with it.”

Captain Harden led them to the chairs arranged near the stove and introduced the men. “General Smith, Colonel Jones, meet Orvil Brandes and J.J. Brett.”

The new guys stood up and shook hands with the legendary fighters before them; there was more than a little awe on J.J.’s face. Jack started the conversation. “Nice to meet you both, and unless you’re working in a military capacity, call me Jack.”

“Yes, sir,” they chorused.

“So, J.J., let’s start with you. What have you seen, related to the refinery, on your trips to New Orleans?”

“There’s a pretty big complex there that has electric power; place is lit up like a Christmas tree at night.”

“What ‘bout river traffic around there?” Carter asked.