Zompoc Survivor: Exodus (14 page)

Inside was only one thing I needed. I’d put it off until last because it felt like I was saying goodbye to the house, but it was that time. I needed to be on my way. Maya was waiting for me. With a deep breath, I knelt down and grabbed my own combat boots, then headed for the kitchen table again. The boots I’d taken from the guards at MSU had almost fit, but they weren’t mine. Even ‘almost’ didn’t fit well enough to keep blisters from forming if you walked long enough. This pair was broken in and they fit right. As soon as I slipped them on, I felt the difference; my feet were still sore, but they weren’t being rubbed raw along the heel or the outside of my foot. I did a quick check of the other things we stored in the hall closet, but my other Ruger was gone, and so was my main bug out bag. Maya had stuck to the plan.

Leo followed me out to the garage, and sat on his favorite spot as I took my Schwinn down. As he perched on the cardboard box by the door, he followed my movements with half-closed eyes. The bike was still in good shape, but the air pressure in the front tire was low. That was easily enough remedied with the hand pump before I went to the bike trailer that I’d stored vertically against the wall. That was still in great shape, so I lugged it through the house and into the back yard, then went back and did the same with the bike. Leo followed me when I brought the bike out, then stopped on the porch and waited while I grabbed the bucket with his food and his inside bowls, and loaded the cache tube and the rest of my gear on the trailer. Finally, I grabbed my bolt cutters and crowbar out of the shed along with the bungee cords. Once I had everything lashed down under bungee cords, Leo hopped down off the porch, trotted over to the trailer, hopped up on top of it, then proceeded to turn around twice and plop down in a puddle of orange fur. I laughed at him like I did every time he did that.

“This isn’t just a trip to the grocery store, you know that, right?” I said as I pushed the bike across the yard. He raised his head long enough to regard me with cool disinterest, then returned to his lounging. With his tacit blessing, I pushed the bike out through the back gate before I latched it behind me, then got on the bike and started pedaling across the park and toward the road. Faint gray light was gracing the sky on my right as I coasted down Oak Grove, and for the first time in hours, I heard birds start to sing. Their chirping covered any sound I might have made as I pedaled up the slight incline near the intersection of Cherry Street. I turned east and followed Cherry, watching the sky light up ahead of me. As the side streets went by, I tried to grab quick looks, but I couldn’t see any movement in the dim light, even at the slower speeds I was going. Once I got past Belcrest, I was in more open ground, but it was still quiet. A couple of hundred feet before I got to the railroad tracks that crossed Cherry, I stopped at a small turn off that led to a dirt road.

Up until then, I hadn’t risked using the front light on my handlebars, but I decided I was safe enough to reassure myself. The headlamp came free of the clamp, and I flicked it on. Leo gave me a look of mild interest as I crouched at the edge of the red clay road and played the light over it. Sure enough, after a little looking, I found what I was looking for: bicycle tire tracks. Six people tracking down the same road was going to leave a trail even a lapsed country boy like me could read. I wasn’t going to be telling anyone how fast they were going or how heavily they were laden, but I figured they’d been this way. Another ounce of worry felt like it was lifted off my shoulders as I went back to the bicycle and put the headlamp back in its clamp. Maya had been okay at least up to here. No one else knew our bug out route, and only she would have known that you could only take that particular route on a bike.

Up ahead, I could see the first cars backed up from the overpass, and a few that had tried to go off road to get to 65 Highway. Most had gotten stuck in the softer ground. On the right side of the road, the remains of a Jeep smoldered in the dawn’s first rays as the sun started to clear the trees in front of me. I looked to the path that Maya had led the others down, and I wanted to follow it. But I still had a stop to make. With the traffic backed up, I didn’t want to risk running into any ghouls trapped in a car. For that matter, I had no idea if there were any survivors lurking around…or, more accurately, if there were any scavengers. I turned left, away from Maya’s trail, and headed down Cavalier, the street directly across the road from me. Cavalier ran almost due north through an industrial park. Businesses went by on either side as I pedaled, places with their closed signs now permanent. A body shop, a gymnastics center, a shipping company…all silent now.  The road curved left in front of an advertising company, but I kept going, letting the bike coast into their parking lot and turning right. The east end of the lot ended in a gravel drive about ten feet from a double gate. Black smoke rose in a thick column ahead of me, one of many that I could see now that the sun was up. I’d hoped it was further north, but from the looks of things, I was pretty sure it was coming from the same place I was going. My heart sank as I got off the bike and went to the trailer.

“Alright, you. Stay here,” I told Leo. He looked at me reproachfully and laid his head back down. He knew the drill. Once I was on the bike, he stayed put until I started unloading the trailer or took him off of it. The first few trips out to our bug out retreat had been in a carrier, then he’d been allowed to ride in the open. All it had taken was one incident of him running off for him to figure out to stay with the bike until we unloaded. I went to the gate and cut the lock, then slipped through. The back fence was a joke, mostly there to act as a property line. I clipped the connecting points at the corner of the fence and pushed the chain link section away to create my own opening. From there it was only thirty yards to cross the railroad track and approach the rear of the storage facility where I’d stashed the rest of my bug out gear. A few more judicious clips with the bolt cutters and I was pulling the chain link fencing away from the southwest corner of the lot. Carefully, I made my way in, crouching in the ten foot space between the end of one row of storage units and the fence.

The bolt cutters had done their job, so I stuck the handle through my belt before I unholstered the SOCOM and screwed the suppressor on. I could hear the sound of flames crackling toward the front of the lot, and the low rumble of a diesel engine. For a moment, I stood there and listened further, and caught a few brief snatches of conversation, but nothing I could make out clearly. Someone was here, but how many someones? And where the hell were they?

The sound of a storage door being rolled up answered the last question. It sounded like they were midway down one of the rows. My small storage unit was near the end closest to me, less than ten yards from where I stood. I took a few slow steps forward and peeked around the corner of the building. The row was clear, and I could see my storage unit just a few feet away. As tempting as it was to sprint to it and grab my stuff, I couldn’t do that. Each row was over a hundred yards long, and that was a lot of area with zero cover. If someone caught me coming out of my unit, I was in the deep end of screwed. So, I needed to catch the other guy out in the open. At least that way, I could decide if I could leave them alone or if the Texas defense of “he needed shooting” was justified. I double checked the safety, swallowed the tang of adrenaline in my throat and did a fast trot across the open section until I was behind the next row. A peek around the corner showed no one in sight, but I could hear people talking more clearly now. Another quick dash, and I was behind the third row.

This time, when I put my head around the corner, the row wasn’t empty. A bright red truck on oversized tires was backed into the row. Several of the units were open, and I could see two men watching the front of the lot. A man in mismatched hunting camo emerged from the left side carrying a cardboard box. Another emerged from the other side with what looked like a gun case. The second one wore brown coveralls and a baseball cap, with a revolver holstered on his hip.

“Whatcha got?” the camo’d man asked.

“Benelli twelve gauge,” the other one answered. “You?”

“Got some stuff for them girls we rescued. I think whoever had this place was a stripper or somethin’,” he said as he set the box down on the tailgate and pulled out something black and shiny.

“Shit, Mike! We’re not at the goddamned mall! Just look for stuff we can trade or use.”

“We can trade the girls. Dress ‘em up nice, maybe we can get more for ‘em. Besides, they’d look better in this stuff.” The man in brown seemed to think that over for a second.

“All right. Put it on the truck, but that’s all. Start looking for stuff we can
use!”
My eyes narrowed as I watched them go back into the storage units. I wondered if “rescued” meant “kidnapped” or if the girls even knew what these men had in mind for them. Either way, it wasn’t enough to start shooting. As I mulled the moral ambiguity in my head, I darted across the open space to the next row. Whether I ended up confronting these guys or not, I still needed to finish checking the area out before I did anything and I could still hear other voices from the other row. Rule seven applied here: Know your terrain. I holstered the SOCOM and unslung the assault rifle. At the ranges I was looking at, the pistol was useless.

When I took a glance around the corner of the third building, I was reminded of my twelfth rule of survival: Assume people suck after shit hits the fan, and that they’re after your stuff. Somehow, this group had managed to hijack a prisoner transport vehicle from the sheriff’s department, complete with two sheriff’s deputies, one male and one female. The female deputy was handcuffed to the back of the transport, and the other deputy was in the middle of four other guys. Three of the scumbags had baseball bats, and the fourth one had a wicked looking bowie knife. They had backed the transport in at an angle to block off the front gate, and also hide most of the drive between the storage units from view of the street that ran in front of the place. Beyond the front gate, the manager’s apartment was ablaze. Risking exposure, I brought the assault rifle up and peered through the four power optic and trained it on the deputy’s chest. Over his left breast pocket, I could see the badge was a cloth patch sewn on to his duty blouse. The woman’s badge was missing, which meant hers had to have been a metal one. Cloth badges were distinctive to corrections officers, while metal ones were given to patrol deputies. That told me which division they each worked for, and made my job a little easier. The four guys taunting the CO had made a mistake in letting him have his hands free. Corrections officers had to deal with physical confrontations with multiple inmates on a regular basis. This guy was in his element. His attackers weren’t. Since he’d kept his blouse on, I was betting on him still having his vest on, which in a jail environment, was designed to protect him more against getting stabbed than shot. The guy with the knife was the least of his worries.

The moral ambiguity of the situation was gone as I drew back from the corner and made my way back to the other side of the building. Shooting was likely to draw ghouls and zombies, but I didn’t really see any other choice. I waited until the two looters were back at the truck’s tailgate to bring the rifle up and fire at the guy standing guard on the opposite side of the row from me. As he dropped I corrected my aim and fired at the guy in brown, then moved my aim point toward his buddy as he darted for cover. I pulled the trigger as the other guard came into my site picture, then fired again as I got close to my original target again. Four rounds downrange, and two bad guys down. I heard cursing and yelling from the next row over as I brought my aim point back to the guard on the near side and pulled the trigger.
Five,
I counted to myself as he dropped. The guy in brown was crawling toward the truck’s right rear tire, so I sent a round at him, then ducked back behind the building. No gunfire came my way, so I popped back around the corner to see the camo’d guy scrambling for his buddy’s pistol. I stroked the trigger twice and sent him sprawling, then ducked back and headed for the other side of the building. The CO had one of the bat carriers in an arm bar and was using him as a shield against the only other guy left standing. One of the other bat carriers was laying on the ground with his hands stuck between his legs and the knife wielder had his own blade sticking out of his belly. The rifle went back on my back and I drew the SOCOM again as I came out from the side of the building. I advanced at a walk while the CO spun his human shield around.

“Drop the bat!” I called out as I got closer. The guy turned his head to face me, and the CO shoved his buddy into him. They went down in a tangle of limbs, and before they could get to their feet, the CO had clubbed both of them back down. He turned to face me with a grim look on his face.

“If you’re going to shoot me, then pull the trigger now,” he growled. I lowered the gun.

“If I was going to shoot you, I would’ve done it from back there. Go ahead and unlock your friend. I’m going to go check the other guys. I’ll be right back.” I trotted over to the other truck and knelt by the guy on the driver’s side. He had a pump shotgun with an extended tube and a sling, most likely a Remington 870 he’d taken from the deputies, and a Glock in a holster on his right hip. The other guy had an M-4, and the guy in brown wore a chromed revolver. I undid the gunbelts and took a look in the back of the truck. Tents, sleeping bags and camping gear shared space with a pair of plastic storage boxes and three gun cases. I popped the top on the storage boxes to find boxes of ammo in the first and coins in the second, smaller box. The gun cases held a pair of hunting rifles and a double barreled shotgun. Enough to help a pair of sheriff’s deputies and a few other people stay alive a little longer. I grabbed the four guns I’d taken from the dead guys and headed back to two deputies. The one had uncuffed his partner and they were checking on the four women in the back of the transport. They had the one that the woman had nut-kicked cuffed and on his face on the ground.