Assuming Room Temperature (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 3) (30 page)

“I find it strange—since you and I assume whoever is with you tied my men up outside your walls, where the creatures could easily get to them—that you would wait out here, unprotected.” Hess glanced over her shoulder at the wall, taking in the gap where Oliver had moved the dump truck away and the watchtower where Jake and Kat looked on.

“Who says I’m unprotected?” she asked, and pointed at an empty coffee can resting on the northern, hip-level wall of the sidewalk.

The can was knocked suddenly from its resting place. It flew over the wall, displaying a large bullet hole before dropping out of sight into the lake beyond, and Carson smirked weakly when Big Boy glared at the watchtower. Though she couldn’t hear it from her position, Penny was sure Jake had just loaded another round into the chamber of his Long-Arm, and let out a large breath in relief. While he was a decent shot, he’d been more than a little nervous about hitting the targeted can. He hadn’t had much experience with the sniper rifle, but Cho was even more clueless with the weapon, so it had fallen to him to make the shot.

Hess seemed unperturbed. “I see. What’s your plan, deputy, after defying the will of the armed forces, I mean. Try to strike a deal, or some such? Offer to occupy part of the town and proved the rest to our forces in exchange for autoimmunity? You must realize that won’t happen. We’re working on pulling out of a tailspin here. Trying to put our country back together. We don’t have time—or the inclination—to humor people who want to go their own way.”

“No. Any promises you made would be worthless once you move into Langley, and we don’t feel like being your forced labor.” Penny’s gaze firmed. “Or your whores.”

“I see.” Hess glanced at Kirk and his squad. “I notice your team is one short, lieutenant. Did Deputy Carson or one of her people kill him?”

Kirk’s face showed disgust. “No sir. He defected. He went AWOL while I was discussing our move from Fort Leonard Wood with the town’s leader. Turns out he knew one of this bitch’s people from before the zombies, and when he blabbed everything to her, some of their people who seem to know what they’re doing took us by surprise.”

“Ah. That explains your hand then.” Hess nodded. “Is there any chance they can be convinced to accept our authority in the interim, so we can use this locale as a jumping-off point? Toe the line, so to speak?”

“Not much at all, sir,” Kirk told him, giving Penny a venomous glare.

Hess nodded. Turning away, he began striding back towards the monster MATTOC. “Captain? Would you be so kind as to free the lieutenant and his men?”

“Hey, we’re not done here.” Penny stiffly moved closer to Kirk, her muscles protesting each step. It felt like someone was dragging hot branding irons up her legs.

That seemed to amuse him. “Yes, deputy?”

“You know as well as I do that you’re not gonna just roll right in. You want these chumps? Fine. Take your bully-boy,” Carson gestured at the brute-sized soldier who’d approached with Hess, “then turn you convoy around there, Rubber Duck. I’ll send them off to you in one of those MOGs, once I see your taillights heading for the horizon.”

Looking over his shoulder, Hess asked, “Do you really think I’m in the practice of taking orders from a dead woman?”

“Hey, I’d never try to tell you how to suck eggs, but—”

“Please, dispense with the ridiculous delay tactics, Miss Carson. It doesn’t fool me.” Hess waved one hand at her in dismissal. “You’re obviously infected.”

“So?”

“So. You were either sent out here, or volunteered to come out on your own,
because
you’re expendable,” Hess informed her calmly. “That shows an impressive amount of courage on your part, but it was a pointless gesture. No matter what defenses you and your people may have been able to cobble together to hold off the dead, they have no chance of withstanding and assault by our
forces.”

“Maybe, maybe not.” Penny grinned. “You’d be surprised what normal people are capable of when pushed.”

That caused the general’s head to tilt thoughtfully.

Penny gave a ragged cough. “Turn around, general. You don’t have the first clue what kind of mess you’re about to step in.”

“Duly noted,” Hess replied.

That was when No-Neck shot Penny.

O’Connor had been watching Hess through the scope, but saw it happen. The large man moved with a speed belying his muscular frame, dropped into a crouch, brought his odd rifle up and put two pairs of rounds into Carson’s chest. It happened so fast that Jake didn’t have a chance to target the man. As he stared through the Long-Arm’s optics, it didn’t seem as if Penny felt the bullets impact into her chest.

She took a step backwards and put one hand to her breast. When she raised it again, covered in her own blood, the raven-haired woman looked rather surprised. She stared at her bloody palm as the strength went out of her legs and she dropped to her knees. Hess’s pet assassin rose from his crouch to stand over her and Penny smiled up at him blearily.

“My friends are going to give you
such
an ass kicking...”

Then she dropped lifeless in the middle of the street.

“Oh. Oh, you bastard.” Cho was wide-eyed as she knelt beside Jake in the watchtower.

“He killed her,” he said, numb from shock. “He just killed her like she was nothing.”

“You need to shoot that son-of-a-bitch,” Kat pointed at No-Neck. “Right now!”

Taking a firm grip on the Long-Arm, Jake began sending rounds downrange, peppering the asphalt at the big man’s feet but missing as Penny’s murderer ducked behind the MATTOC’s lead wheel.

“Fuck! The bastard is hiding behind the transport! I can’t get him.” Jake fumed, changing out magazines and emptying the fresh one at the ground around the tire. He hit nothing but air. Then he had to stop firing and duck behind the reinforced ledge below the bus-tower’s top door.

Because the zombies had arrived.

It hadn’t been hard to attract large numbers of the dead. The hard part had been getting the timing right. First: Mooney’s people had to remain quiet and unobserved. They managed this by sheltering in the pair of modified tour buses just off the main road. With their engines off, the zombies didn’t associate their vehicles with possible prey, for which the survivors were thankful.

Second: Before pumping audio-based 70s rock into the atmosphere as bait, George had Oliver move the dump trucks integrated into both of Langley’s barriers aside. This provided access from one side of the town to the other.

Third: George and Bee would stick with the Mimi since they were the best at driving the big, pink leviathan—with Gwen and her friend Ryan—along with Rae, who would use the command and control capabilities of their transport to manipulate a few surprises they’d set up for General Hess and his forces.

Fourth: Elle and Leo would shelter in the Humvee Rae had provided them (way back at her now destroyed junkyard cache) unseen and—once the main body of the zombie pod had filtered through the Langley’s eastern gate—retrieve Jake and Kat from their watch atop the upended bus/tower. The ex-writer had wanted to provide Penny with cover once she managed to convince Hess to withdraw in exchange for his men. He’d hoped the idea would work, even after learning Kirk’s superior didn’t care about casualties.

But, as usual, their luck had turned pear-shaped.

As the dead began staggering through the gap, Hess’s bodyguard scurried aboard their MATTOC through the aft hatch. Jake swore under his breath because he couldn’t unleash any more rounds in their friend’s killer because, while the Long-Arm rifle was nearly silent, he might be seen by some of the creatures below if he continued shooting. So as the convoy began to pull back he and Kat looked on, murder burning like the fury of a hundred thousand blazing suns within their chests.

“Signal little Miss Big-Chested Blabbermouth,” Cho whispered as they watched bodies stagger in awkward pursuit of the convoy. “I’m not sure how far away she wanted them to get.”

Jake peered over the edge at the far line of barrels. “I’m pretty sure she’s watching.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Rae
was,
in fact, watching.

The images sent back to her at the Mimi’s communications console by a trio of wireless video cameras she’d bolted to the top of the town’s eastern wall weren’t half bad. She could almost pick out the drivers in their deuce-and-a-half’s behind the aggressor’s MATTOC, sixty yards distant. More than enough resolution needed for her to activate the remote targeting systems on her half of their surprise.

Rachael Norris—Rae for short—was in a class all her own. With multiple degrees in Mechanical and Chemical Engineering, not “
Metal-fab and Chemistry
” as George had once mistakenly informed Kat, she could’ve written her own ticket as either an automotive designer or bio-chemist. Instead, she chose to serve her country and—instead of making the big bucks in the private sector—jumped through all the hoops to join the FBI. As it turned out, her decision was a poor one. She was stuck in a lab full time (no ‘field-worthy skills’ they told her), her boss had been a 350 pound, self-important, back-biting twat, and no damn male agent she encountered seemed to possess the ability to have an adult conversation. Or even look anywhere but at her chest while attempting to do so.

So when the CIA came knocking, she’d taken the crap posting at a junkyard weapons/supply cache. The job hadn’t been perfect, but it had afforded her quite a bit of freedom. She’d kept her own hours, refurbished a Humvee (and added some very substantial upgrades), written a research paper on how to cheaply produce fuel from sea water (which had been
immediately
classified Top Secret and buried by the higher-ups). There’d even been time for her to build herself a working, bug-free X-M8 assault rifle—complete with under-barrel grenade launcher—from scratch.

She’d ordered the rifle in component parts via the mail through Cheaper-Than-Dirt, then—after she’d determined its flaws—redesigned its firing pin and feed system, nearly doubling the weapons rate of fire. After completing that, Rae had custom machined a new front housing and attached a 40mm grenade launcher she’d fabricated that was capable of holding three rounds at a time, negating the need to reload after every shot. After she’d completed the weapon, she wanted to see exactly what it could do so she taken steps. Since a one and a half by twelve inch tungsten rod was nearly five-hundred dollars on eBay before the zombies rose, she’d hacked her way into the Defense Department’s database. No big task, that. After making their secure server sit up and say “Mama,” with a few keystrokes Rae had earmarked roughly eight hundred thousand dollars for “structural improvement” of her cache. 680,000 dollars of which she spent on the tungsten rods. The rest she blew on shipping, brass, bullets, gunpowder, and loading
supplies.

Rae bought a new pair of Nike cross-trainers too. And three sports bras. Hey, she needed them, okay? The twins had to be held securely in place when she jogged, or she’d have black eyes. Besides, the bill had only totaled up to $162. Since she’d “reallocated” more than three-hundred times that much, she wasn’t going to sweat some running shoes and boob-holders.

When Penny fell lifeless to the pavement, Rae activated a subroutine she’d written the day prior. Unlike the programs she’d used to crack the server at the Department of Defense, this one was fairly simple. Fire/don’t fire. A little X and Y axis adjustment. No biggie. The buxom woman just wished she could be there to see the results.

* * *

The zombies didn’t discover Elle and Leo hiding in the Hummer. They didn’t see Jake and Kat huddled a-top the slap-dash fortifications of Langley’s school bus watchtower. They paid the wall itself no mind at all, only stumbled for the opening left by the absent dump truck. The barely acknowledged the lines of barrels stretching nearly all the way across the byway on top of the dam.

They
did
however, notice the circle of men sitting lashed elbow-to-elbow in the center of the road. The ones attempting to hide behind each other, cowering as Foster’s only remaining M134 minigun rose from a pair of specially doctored, empty fifty gallon barrels, on a pair of hydraulic cylinders.

There had been modifications made to the weapon. They’d been done ‘fast and dirty’ style, but the changes didn’t need to last. It was a one-time use only job. A heavy turnstile linked to a pair of high-tension cables had been added to the weapon’s pedestal mount providing a way to turn its muzzle from side to side. A small video camera—linked to a series of nineteen car batteries which ran along the backside of the barrel line nearest to the wall—sat behind a thick piece of bulletproof glass, bolted to the minigun’s rail system in place of a scope. Kat and Jake had cannibalized the glass from the driver’s door of an armored car. The weapons drive motor also ran off the batteries, but they didn’t need to last long anyway. Not when the M134 could send up to three thousand rounds per minute streaking out to vaporize a target and, with the whine of a few small servomotors, that is exactly what the minigun began to do.

Tungsten, or W2C, is commonly used in armor-piercing rounds when depleted uranium isn’t available. The material was first used in ammunition back in World War II by German Luftwaffle tank-hunter squadrons, with good reason. The high-density and extreme hardness of the element makes it a
very
good penetrator, even when used against heavy machinery.

Like say, deuce-and-a-half, or even IAV assault vehicles.

The minigun began spitting out two second bursts, sending 7.62x51mm Tungsten rounds into—and
through—
the leading vehicles in the RUST convoy. Quarter-panels, doors, engine blocks, it didn’t matter where the rounds hit. They cut through like knives. Hot, little knives moving at twenty-eight hundred feet per second. One of the Strykers exploded as the sabot rounds penetrated its shell, sheared through the fuel tank, and ignited the diesel fuel within. The following explosion killed the crew, and turned it into what amounted to an eighteen ton burning paperweight. The other Stryker fared better, for a few moments anyway. The thick nose of the monster MATTOC sheltered it from the first few volleys sent downrange by the minigun. Not even the fifty-two hundred degree Fahrenheit sabot rounds could tear through its armor. But once the Stryker moved in an attempt to target Rae’s remotely controlled weapon, the M134 scrapped it, cutting the eight-wheeled transport completely in half and separating its occupants into their component pieces. Steel and flesh exploded back towards the RUST convoy, breaking windshields and splattering vehicles with things best left
inside
the human body.

While the sight of men and machines being turned into so much impressionistic art was horrid, Jake couldn’t help but smile. Kat actually gave a whoop of glee as the minigun continued chewing up the front of the MATTOC. The now continuous stream of rounds spewing from the weapon was beginning to shear large chunks away from the nose-plate, leaving it look like Luna’s meteor-riddled face. At that pace, it wouldn’t be long until Rae’s hastily-modified engine of destruction managed to bore a hole through the steel and into the vehicle itself. Jake fervently hoped the good general would catch one through the nose when that happened. Or maybe the groin.

The dead paid the minigun no mind. They staggered through the barrels and fell upon the soldiers still cowering on the pavement where the creatures made short work of Kirk and his men, dog-piling on their screaming, zip-tied forms until the mound was chest high. Even over the noise of the minigun—and that of their opponents scattered replies—Jake could hear Kirk screaming for his mother as zombies began taking mouthfuls of flesh from his appendages. The screams didn’t last long. If nothing else, at least
that
was comforting. One less ass-hat on the planet anyway.

The other members of Kirk’s team didn’t last much longer. The creatures made fast work of them, and in short order bloody limbs were being pulled viciously about the pile. Then, bereft of further prey, the things began their ponderous walk towards the only living humans they saw.

Those of the RUST convoy.

Some few did make their way into the path of the minigun and became gory Jackson Pollocks, more yet continued to stream through Langley’s gates. When Foster had suggested using the ghouls of the west as shock troops against Hess and his army, the rest of Jake’s party—needless to say—had a crap-ton of reservations about the man’s sanity. Mooney flat-out told George he was “
Out of his fool-ass mind!”
and suggested Foster lay off the Maker’s Mark until the suicidal ideas went away. Their old fixer had in turn pointed out the benefits of the idea.

One: They already had a trio of zombie escape vehicles, the Mimi plus two, seriously tricked out monster-mashing buses.

Two: There were a hell of a lot of ghouls roaming down from Vanita, ever since Jake’s little search party brought back Doctor Barker a few days back.

Three: Regardless of how well trained Hess’ men were,
anyone
in their right mind would soil their drawers if confronted by a horde of zombies thousands strong, sans the benefit of some pretty substantial fortifications.

Four: While Jake didn’t enjoy using zombies that way—because the creatures
had
once been people’s loved ones—doing so would provide yet another layer of defense. The forces of General Hess could smash Langley and all of its defenders like so many insects, so Jake and his friends needed something to even the odds. The dead could do that in spades. So, the survivors had begun drawing them in after Penny was bitten.

The hellish parade continued pouring through the gates onto the Pensacola Dam. Hundreds of them already, with even more on the way. Down in the Hummer, Elle and Leo watched them from behind its darkened windows. The young man’s eyes were wide in the face of such horror and even the hard-nosed, blonde sergeant felt the cold touch of fear. There were so many. So very many. They’d only witnessed one larger horde since their journey west began weeks prior, and two of their party had died that day.

“Easy.” She put a hand on Leo’s arm. “They don’t know we’re here. As long as we don’t make any noise we’ll be okay.”

“I don’t think I’m ever going to be ‘okay’ again.” The younger man replied, glancing left at her quickly before sending his eyes back to the crowd. “Holy shit, look at that one! What could
do
that?”

Elle followed his gaze. “I think someone used a circular saw on his chest. Well, half of his chest anyway. That would explain the straight angle of the cuts going up his ribs...”

Up in the tower, O’Connor and Cho huddled together. While there
were
some things they needed to talk about, Jake was focused on the men now hopping from the trucks beyond the wall, attempting to avoid fire from the still humming minigun while preparing to fight the oncoming ghouls. Some few were splattered across and into their vehicles as rounds passed through them—and then their rides—at high rates of speed—but still more sought cover in the roadside ditches. The wild-haired man beside Kat recognized a tactical cross-fire formation when he saw one, but didn’t know if it would be effective against enemies who couldn’t experience fear and was physically incapable of feeling pain. It really came down to whether or not Hess’s men had been trained to go for head-shots and not the center mass on a target. If so there was a fair chance they could stop the lumbering horde coming for their flesh and, if he were to be honest, Jake didn’t know how he felt about that. Kat was all but cheering on the zombies, but he was conflicted. If the things managed to overrun the general’s men, their dependents—moral or otherwise—would be fodder for them. They’d die screaming under those skeletal hands and hungry rotting jaws. He could almost see it happening as he crouched next to the pretty, blue-haired woman sharing his hiding spot.

On the other hand, if Hess and his men managed to destroy the oncoming pod of corpses, they’d be on the survivors’ heels as they fled for the safety of Pecos.

That was something O’Connor couldn’t allow, and he felt the moment when his resolve firmed deep in his gut. The people he’d spent the past months with were important to him. As close as anyone in his life—with the possible exception of his absent long-time friend Allen Ryker—had become previously. All Jake had before the zombies rose up were painful memories, bad dreams, and some noteworthy scars. He had more of all those now too, but the little band of misfits crewing George Foster’s Screamin’ Mimi mattered to him. He couldn’t imagine what reality would be like if he didn’t wake up in the morning to George snoring away like a tornado full of chain-saws. If he didn’t hear the old man arguing with his niece Bee, Leo, and his female counterpart Rae, about how to best prepare MREs. As if there were a
good
way. If Henry, Gwen, and even Elle weren’t there with unwanted advice—and the occasional one-liner—when the situation called for it. If Kat didn’t do her level best to drive him stark-raving looney, one way or another, every single goddamn day...

Jake realized right then and there he owed the zombies a debt. His life had become far better, since whatever it was that brought them into being occurred. He’d been alone—save for Allan—ever since his return from Great Britain.

Laurel had more than filled the great, gaping hole within him all by herself, but she was gone now. Long gone. Taken from Jake’s grasp and blown to bits months ago, high upon the now-destroyed Purifier clubhouse sitting on the banks of the Ohio/Indiana border. Her death had pushed him right to the brink, and not just because he’d failed to protect her. He believed he’d loved her. And, if it was the very last thing he did, he wasn’t going to allow a pack of assholes—led by a power-hungry traitor—within a mile of anyone else he cared for.

It was high time Jacob O’Connor took control of the situation, and he knew it.

“Are you ready?” he turned his head to regard Kat.

“What? Now?” Cho asked, quite surprised. “Ten out of ten for spontaneity, but I can’t say I’m sure about your timing. Pretty sure
I
could manage it mind you, but then we’d both get hungry—and you’d want to have a cigarette—and I don’t think all those buttheads out there shooting up the place would be willing to take five, you know?”