Survivors (18 page)

“Not good,” Allen said.

The pair of sentries raised their weapons and the survivors answered in kind. The man on the left let off a three-round burst from his rifle before he was cut down by Rico’s chattering MP-5, and Hal’s revolver boomed out once, taking the other sentry in the middle, the force of the blast folding him in half.

“Not good at all,” he said. “Come on, we have to move!”

Stone set out at a run, leaping for the door of the APC and yanking it open. Hal was close behind, into the cab of the five-ton wrecker and cranking the engine. The APC and wrecker roared to life as the survivors piled in and on the vehicles.

A red light began to flash on the roof of the museum proper, and Stone grimaced. “Someone’s tripped the alarm!” he yelled. “They’ll be coming!”

Harris whacked the roof of the APC cab and waved to Allen and Wendell, who rode the back of the wrecker. Their attention grabbed, he pointed at the light and then to the door, making a gun out of his hand. Wendell and Allen nodded and took firing positions as the vehicles began to move. Hillyard did the same from the back of the APC.

Men poured from the doors of the museum only to be pounded back by a hail of bullets from the
Ramage
sailors. Hal turned the wheel to swing the nose of the wrecker close to the building, knocking one man back and crushing another.

“Bye-bye fence,” he muttered as the front end of the wrecker met with the gate in a cacophony of rending metal and screaming men. Stone steered the APC out the same way, his eyes glued to the mass of infected in the Wal-Mart parking lot, the mass of infected drawn by the sudden noises, who now held their gummy, blank stares on the open gate of the compound. Ignoring the vehicles speeding away, they began to descend on the museum and the morsels waiting within.

Abraham, KS
29 June 2007
1327 hrs_

A
PAIR OF MEN
stood on a small rise overlooking the outskirts of a small town. One of them stood with his arms folded behind his back, a blank expression on his face. He wore black combat boots and similarly colored coveralls, a utility belt covered in ammunition pouches and a holstered pistol at his waist. A radio was clipped to an epaulette. A small neck knife on a chain nestled inside the thin body armor over his torso.

The other man was not nearly as well dressed. His clothes were scorched and torn, and the growth of several days of beard stubble covered his face. He shifted nervously from foot to foot, eyeing the man in front of him. He could feel the difference between them.

After a long moment, the man in black spoke.

“You said these people were just townsfolk with pitchforks and hunting rifles,” snarled Agent Sawyer. “You said you could keep them under control.”

“I could have,” said the ragged man. “But they had help. Soldiers. They killed my men—they killed my brother! My brother’s dead!” His voice took on a steely edge.

Sawyer turned and backhanded the man across the face.

Ordinarily, Herman Lutz would have killed a man who dared to show him such disrespect. He knew better than to try and fight it out with Agent Sawyer. The man would kill him without breaking a sweat, and he knew it. Instead, he reached up a hand and wiped the trickle of blood flowing from his lower lip away, spitting into the grass at his feet.

“Control yourself,” said Sawyer. “You want revenge?”

Herman Lutz nodded.

“You’ll get it. More than just setting fire to a building or two. Though I don’t know why I’m bothering. I supplied you with everything you needed to keep that area under control. Look around. Chaos everywhere. I got you machine guns. I got you Semtex. I sent you men and supplies. And here you are, alone, your job unfinished. There’s not much use in this new world for a scum-sucker such as yourself who can’t even keep a hick town from rebelling. I was counting on you to keep order, and you failed.”

“Like I said, they had help—”

Sawyer looked as though he was about to launch another attack, and Herman Lutz allowed his voice to trail off to silence.

“What was that?” growled Sawyer.

“Nothing,” mumbled Lutz.

“I said, ‘What was that?’”

“Nothing, Sawyer. Nothing. Just give me another chance to show you what I can do.”

Sawyer flashed Lutz a grim smile. “You’ll get that chance. Do you have any men left, besides yourself?”

Lutz shrugged. “Maybe half a dozen, a couple miles behind me. They’re the only other ones who got away.”

“Then we have the advantage of numbers, and surprise,” mused Sawyer. “They’ll be well dug in, but they’re expecting infected, not live opponents. We’ll take them fast. And then the cure will be ours.”

Lutz said nothing, simply stood behind his superior, staring at the ground, his teeth clenched. “And I’ll be able to avenge my brother. I can’t wait to kill these bastards.”

He saw a smile play across Sawyer’s hard-etched features. “Mason, Mason . . . I know you’re out there. And I’m coming for you.”

Apparently, he had a bone to pick, too.

Lutz followed Sawyer back to a clearing where his team was hastily erecting a command tent. Black-clad troops moved quickly and efficiently through the forest, bringing supplies from the trucks and HMVs that couldn’t make it past the trees that fenced the clearing. Aerial reconnaissance had picked out the area and the several trails through the woodlands that led close to it.

The raider looked at the activity in front of him and had to give at least that to the man in black: when he had asked for resources, whoever was behind him had pulled out all the stops.

“Go and get your men,” Sawyer said. “Bring them here and stand by until we’re settled in. We won’t move on Abraham until well past sunset, so that will give us plenty of time to plan our assault. You know things about the town, yes? Numbers, weapons, et cetera?”

Lutz nodded. Sawyer answered with a grim smile.

“Good. Now get your people. And Lutz?”

He stopped and looked back. He’d already turned away to do as he was told, as much as it galled him to be ordered around.

“Try to stay out of the way, all right?”

Biting back his reply, the pack leader went away to fetch his men. He knew Sawyer couldn’t have cared less. The raider felt inept under the government man’s stare. If Sawyer considered him to be good at things, he’d feel like an asset, but from the way Sawyer had talked to him. . .

Lutz squared his shoulders. He’d show Sawyer how he had misjudged his usefulness. Even without his brother, who’d been killed by a small army contingent passing through this area, Herman Lutz was more than just a bad-tempered man with some men and guns.

Agent Sawyer found his own team leader. “Huck! Sitrep.”

Lieutenant Finnegan, whose new nickname was “Huck,” now that he’d been placed under Agent Sawyer’s command, always grimaced when he heard it. This scant evidence of the agent’s sense of humor was perhaps the only scrap he ever showed, and the LT could do without it.

“Sir. Supplies are in place and the drivers are preparing to refuel the vehicles. The generator is set up and should be ready for you. Vasquez got a message from Command that the intel you requested has been sent, whenever you can retrieve it. Setting the watch and bunking the men down until the recon team returns.”

Sawyer dismissed the LT and turned to the command tent. Huck followed him. The briefcase was there, set up near a compact communications stack that would connect the camp to the outside world. A nearby cell transmission tower was serving as their broadcast antenna; the RSA satellites had taken control of most others in geosynchronous orbit and the skies belonged to them. There were a few exceptions, of course: remnants of the old government hiding out at installations around the continental forty-eight that didn’t know when they’d been beat; one or two persistent hackers in northern California.

Sawyer’s smile turned chilly, and Huck knew he was thinking about something violent. The LT turned on the laptop and saw the information he’d requested already in his inbox. He gestured to it, and as Sawyer paged through the files, the smile on his face grew wider and colder.

Lutz trudged along, thinking black thoughts about Sawyer and how to best handle things. A straight-up fight was out of the question; the agent was highly trained and merciless. He would, as the kids put it, eat Lutz’s lunch. At the thought of shooting the government man in the back, a savage kind of glee passed through him, but then he would have the RSA soldiers to contend with. No, it would have to be something subtle, and Herman Lutz knew he was not good at subtle.

He had, however, a man in his ranks who was. George Lutz had warned his brother to keep an eye on this man more than once, and it was only Herman’s ruthlessness when it came to keeping his men in check that held off any attempted coup. His name was Patton, and he was a thorn in Herman’s paw. In contrast to Herman’s own brash ways or George’s constant menace, Patton was pleasant. Funny. A really nice guy to hang around with. He had a way about him, though . . . Herman could only talk to him for so long before he got the feeling that Patton was making fun, but never in a way that Herman could identify and take righteous offense.

He had his uses, and this would be one of them. Patton probably already had his approach all thought out.

An hour’s walk after he left Agent Sawyer, Lutz was in sight of his camp. He whistled three notes to let them know he was coming, so none of his trigger-happy men would ventilate his head. He’d been shot at more than once in the preceding month, ever since they were burned out of their stronghold, and Herman suspected that these instances were not cases of mistaken identity. In fact, he suspected Jenkins was the one, but he had no proof, and if he wanted to stay in charge, he couldn’t just off one of his own without something concrete.

Still. He threw Jenkins a beating one night, just to make sure he knew that Lutz was still the man. Through bloody lips and cracked teeth, Jenkins had assured him that, yes, he understood his place now.

But Lutz whistled anyway.

Five men stood in the encampment, all eyeing Lutz with varying degrees of either servility or hostility. That was how he liked it, but things were harder to manage now that his brother was out of the picture. George had a way with people, and Herman missed that about him.

All of the men there were dressed more or less the same way: denim jeans under dark T-shirts. It was hot, especially now that they weren’t in an air-conditioned space anymore. Of all the things that Lutz had to hear about, that was the thing that popped up most often: the oppressive July heat.

The remains of the raiders had been mollified by the news of Sawyer’s imminent arrival and the promise of swift and angry revenge against the people of Abraham. And so they waited, grumbling. The five men there (Patton, Jenkins, Coke, Charlie, and Blue) were standing around the remains of a wild hog and carving off bits to eat. Herman walked up to the ring and smelled the gamey pork.

“Where’s Ritter?”

Coke pointed back over his shoulder with a white rib bone. “Out there, with a rifle. Dumb shit thinks he saw Bigfoot.”

Herman barked out a laugh and pulled a large hunting knife from his belt. He began to cut a large piece of pig for himself. “Well, one of you can fill him in when he gets back. We’re in business, boys. Sawyer and his RSA goons are setting up to torch the town. It’ll be tonight. Only, I don’t know how things are going to work out for us.”