Days Of Perdition: Voodoo Plague Book 6 (18 page)

The casino was massive.  There was no other word for it. 
After cutting her free, Roach had followed Katie through a door that opened
onto the main casino floor.  Row upon row of slot machines sat silent,
seemingly stretching into infinity.  Glass fronted rooms with giant poker
tables and plush chairs looked out onto the gaming area and every couple of
hundred feet was a restaurant or snack bar.

Roach kept Katie to his front, his short barreled H&K
rifle not quite pointed at her, but if he wanted to shoot her it would only
require an adjustment of a couple of inches.  She surveyed the area, careful to
appear docile.  She needed to get an idea of the layout, and at the same time
lull him into believing that she was cowed and wouldn’t put up any form of
resistance or make an attempt to escape.

“How are the lights on?”  Katie asked, realizing they’d also
been on in the VIP suite.

“Solar,” Roach answered.  “We’ve got power, food, water and
a secure location until time to move.”

Happy she’d gotten that much information from him, Katie
decided not to push her luck and ask any more questions.  Instead she kept
walking forward at a slow pace, casually looking around.  Roach seemed content
to let her lead the way, following half a dozen feet behind.  Close enough to
maintain control with his rifle but far enough away that she didn’t have an
opportunity to attack.

Working their way the length of the building they passed several
more poker rooms.  There was no sign anywhere in the building of a struggle. 
No overturned tables or chairs, no spilled drinks, no chips scattered on the
red and blue carpeting.  It looked like the casino had been neatly shut down
and abandoned. 

“In there,” Roach finally said, gesturing at a set of wood
paneled swinging doors that blended well with the décor.

“What’s in there?”  Katie asked, hesitating.

“Food.  Aren’t you hungry?” 

Realizing she was, Katie pushed through the doors and
entered a large, commercial kitchen.  Roach followed her and pointed at a giant
walk-in pantry.

“Plenty of food in there,” he said.  “Don’t open the cold
storage.  The refrigerators must not be connected to the solar so they’re out
and full of rotting meat and vegetables.  The stoves still work.  They’re
propane and there’s a whole row of tanks outside.  Water’s on.  It’s from a
well and the solar is powering the pump.  Make us something to eat.  I’ll be
right here.”

Roach settled down on a hard chair where he could keep an eye
on the pantry and most of the kitchen.  Walking into the room, Katie was
momentarily taken aback at the amount of canned and boxed food stacked on the
shelves.  She was getting a good idea of why Roach had selected this building. 

As long as there was sunshine they had power and water.  If
there really was a whole farm of propane tanks they’d be able to cook for a
long time, and just this one room had enough food to last the two of them for
months, if not a year.  As she thought about what his plan might be, Katie
slowly selected cans, taking the opportunity to check the room for anything she
could use as a weapon.  Finding nothing, she returned to the kitchen and set
about preparing their meal.

Sometime later they sat across from each other, eating the food
she had prepared.  Roach hadn’t said anything to her since he’d shown her the
kitchen, but she felt the weight of his eyes constantly watching her.  Watching
to make sure she didn’t do anything, but also watching
her
.  He even
watched her as he ate, rifle resting on the table with the muzzle pointed
directly at her.

She’d hoped to be sitting close to him.  Wanted an
opportunity to get her hands on the weapon.  She knew if she could get a grip
on the rifle she could most likely take it away from him, but he was alert and
cautious.  An opportunity never presented itself.  She wanted to talk to him. 
Ask questions.  Find out if John was really alive and in the area, or if
somehow the mad man had found out who her husband was and just made up the
story.

But as much as she wanted answers to her questions Katie had
been a very good case officer.  She knew when to press, and when to let things
take their natural course.  There was no doubt that Roach was bat shit crazy,
but that didn’t mean he wasn’t smart.  She had to be smarter and pick her
opportunities.

She also knew he wanted her.  Badly.  Wanted to see her,
touch her.  What she didn’t understand was what was holding him back.  If he
decided to do anything to her, there was very little she could do to stop it as
long as he was armed.  Slowly chewing her food she considered playing to his
desires.  Flirting just a little.  Maybe undoing a button on her shirt at the
right moment.  But she also knew that could backfire on her before she realized
she had gone too far.  There was no predicting the actions of a deranged man.

On the other hand, playing a little seduction might get her
close enough to him to get her hands on his rifle.  Twist it in his grip;
strike his throat with her elbow and balls with her knee to slow him.  Turn the
rifle and put a few rounds in him.  She’d have to move fast and decisively when
the time came.  Hesitation would give him an advantage.

It had been a long time since Katie had been through the
training provided by the CIA, but she’d always been scrappy.  She knew how to
fight, and she knew that when the time to attack came she had to make the most
of it.  There wouldn’t be a second opportunity if she failed.  “Attack with
certainty that you intend to kill,” John had told her a couple of times when
they’d worked out together.  “Make sure you walk away from the encounter alive
and everything else will work itself out.”

She understood, and even though she’d never taken a life,
Katie had no doubt she was capable.  Somehow she’d made it from Arizona to
Oklahoma without having to kill anyone.  Well, at least that she knew of. 
She’d shot at a couple of people along the way but hadn’t stuck around to see
what the results were.  Maybe she was already a killer.

“You don’t want to try that,” Roach said, startling her out
of her thoughts.

Realizing she had been staring at his rifle while thinking,
Katie mentally berated herself for making such a rookie mistake.  She knew
better.  Had been taught better.  She looked up at Roach’s eyes and almost
smiled, but shut that down.  Not the right way to respond to him.

“Try what?”  She asked.

“Whatever you were thinking about that involved my rifle.” 
He said, pushing his empty plate to the side.

Katie glanced down at her half eaten meal, taking a bite to
give herself time to think.  She needed to distract Roach from the idea that
she was thinking about his weapon.

“Actually, I was thinking about my husband.”  She said,
looking him in the eye.  “Were you lying to me, or is he really alive?”

“Oh, he’s very much alive.”  Roach smiled.  “Running around
sticking his nose into business he’s got no reason to get involved in.  And
you’ll be glad to know he’s replaced you.”

“What do you mean, replaced me?”  She asked.

“You should see her,” Roach’s smile spread across his entire
face.  “Her name’s Rachel.  Tall thing, like an Amazon.  Younger than you with
big, perfect tits and legs that go on to Sunday.  They actually make a really
good looking couple.”

 “A couple?”  She asked, wondering where he was going with
this.

“Oh yes.  I first met them in Tennessee.  He brought her with
him from Atlanta.  You’re from Arizona, right?  Did he spend a lot of time in
Atlanta before the attacks?  I’m just asking because they sure seemed familiar
and comfortable with each other.”  Roach succeeded in putting just the right
tone of concern into his voice.

Katie stared back at him, eyes damp.  “Yes.  Several times a
month,” she finally said.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you.  Maybe I’m wrong, but
they sure seem like they’re together.  Perhaps he thinks he made an upgrade,
but I think he’s foolish.  You’re much prettier than she is.”

“He wouldn’t,” Katie said, tears now rolling down her face. 
“He couldn’t.”

“I’m not saying he did,” Roach said, leaning across the
table like he was concerned.  “I’m just telling you what I’ve seen.  Maybe
there’s a perfectly good reason they’re still together after all this time,
living in the same house on Tinker.”

Katie looked back at him for a long time, the tears
continuing to stream down her face.  With a cry, she leapt to her feet and ran
to the far side of the room and stood facing the wall, her whole body racked
with sobs.  Getting slowly to his feet, Roach walked across the room and stood
behind her, watching her cry.  Finally he stepped in and placed his hands on
her shoulders to pull her into an embrace.  To hold her perfect form next to
his was the only thought on his mind.

The instant Katie felt Roach’s hands on her shoulders she
struck.  Stepping back she threw a lightning fast elbow into his solar plexus,
momentarily paralyzing his diaphragm.  Spinning, she batted his arms aside and
punched his larynx with bunched fingers, then twisted her hips as she raised
her knee into his balls, grabbing the rifle as Roach started to fall to the
floor.

The rifle was attached to a sling that was around his
shoulders and she had to follow him down to the floor to maintain her grip on
the weapon.  He tried to struggle with her, but she’d perfectly attacked the
three most vulnerable areas on a man and between being unable to breathe and a
pair of balls that felt like they had been ruptured, Roach had no strength.

Katie dropped onto him with all her weight, one knee on his
throat, the other landing squarely on his bruised solar plexus.  What air remained
in his lungs whistled out of his mouth.

“Fuck you, asshole!” she hissed in Roach’s face as she
quickly disengaged the sling from the rifle, leapt to her feet and took a step
back.  “You think I don’t know my husband better than that?”

As her thumb found the rifle’s safety she froze at the sound
of a shotgun being racked.  Looking around she saw half a dozen men watching
her, a large, older woman standing only a dozen feet away with a 12 gauge
shotgun pointed at her body.

“Why don’t you go ahead and put that gun down, sweetie. 
There’s no killing round here lessen I say so.”  The woman said.

Lillian Nosler smiled when her youngest boy told her about
the massive casino that was only a couple of miles ahead.  She had been on the
road with her family for several days, driven out of their home in Arkansas’
Ozark Mountains by herds of infected and suddenly aggressive animals. 
Razorbacks had killed two of her extended family, one niece and one nephew,
late one afternoon.  Then during the night female infected had begun arriving,
first in small groups, but the volume quickly grew until they had to flee.

Mama, as Lillian was known, led close to sixty people out of
the hills that night.  In her late sixties she was the Matriarch of her
immediate family of seven boys, and being the oldest of a dozen blood and
in-law siblings she had taken on the roll as head of the family.  Her husband
had drunk himself to death twenty years ago leaving Mama to fend for herself
and her family.

The Noslers had settled in Arkansas in the mid-1800s,
claiming land deep in the Ozarks that wasn’t good for much of anything.  It was
too remote, rugged and heavily forested for city folks.  In the late 1800s
Noslers had started working in the mines in the area, extracting lead, and for
several generations they lived and died in the mines.  Then in the 1980s the
economy changed and the mines closed down.

Needing a way to make money, Mama’s late husband had
expanded his still and began producing illegal moonshine, which they sold in
several small towns in the area.  Her oldest boy, who liked to spend his
weekends in Little Rock, came home one Sunday with a new idea to make money.

They were too far back in the woods to worry about the cops
stumbling across them, and soon they had a couple of small patches of marijuana
under cultivation in the rich soil on the sunny side of a mountain.  Once
harvested, dried and taken to town, her boy returned with the biggest stack of
cash any of them had ever seen.  He’d sold every ounce he’d taken with him in
less than twelve hours.

The family pitched in and began clearing and cultivating
more patches while her husband chose to spend his time with his still, often
drunk well before noon.  The more successful the pot business became, the more
he drank.  Late one evening he passed out.  This was nothing unusual and Mama
and her boys left him in the shed with the still to sleep it off.  The next
morning they found his body.  He had died from alcohol poisoning.

Pot business booming, the Noslers became suppliers for local
gangs by the early 90s.  They were making more money than they had ever
imagined possible, and not knowing any better had started spending it.  Cars,
trucks, jewelry and every shiny bauble that caught their eye.  For years they
had stayed under the radar, driving decades old vehicles that were more rust
than metal.  Suddenly, every member of the family had a shiny new pick-up and
someone in the Arkansas State Police that patrolled the area took notice.

Questions were asked and it didn’t take long for the cops to
discover that the Noslers were the source of the cheap marijuana that had
flooded the streets of all the towns and cities in the region.  A warrant was
obtained and over fifty heavily armed police officers descended on the family’s
land.  Legal or not, they didn’t take kindly to an invading army of cops, many
of them fighting back. 

With a veritable armory of brand new weapons purchased with
their drug money they managed to hold out for over a week.  By this time the
FBI, DEA and ATF were all involved, swelling the law enforcement response to well
over 300 men.

When the dust cleared after their assault, 7 Noslers were
dead and 15 injured.  Everyone over the age of 18 was charged with a multitude
of state and federal crimes, and with their drug profits seized by the
government they were unable to afford lawyers.  The public defenders that were
assigned to them weren’t interested in fighting a losing battle and soon nearly
every adult in the family was in prison.  The children were placed into the
foster care system and the giant fields of marijuana were torched. 

The family’s land and homes were seized by the government
and sat empty for ten years until some of the Noslers with lesser charges began
to be released from prison and returned.  They paid no attention to the signs
warning that the property had been confiscated, moving right back into their
homes. 

Prison had been an education for the family.  Survival was
only possible through strength, and even though there were several family
members incarcerated together at multiple facilities, there weren’t enough of
them.  That left them with few options, and most chose to join one of the
prison gangs for protection. 

By the time the first of them started trickling back to the
hills, many were committed to various gangs that were just as powerful on the
outside as they were inside.  The pot business was restarted, though on a much
smaller scale that wouldn’t draw attention, and with their new contacts they
quickly branched out into running guns and prostitutes throughout their part of
the state.

When Mama walked back onto her ancestral land, the family
was again flush with illegal cash.  Guns and drugs were profitable, but nothing
compared with the money they could make off of girls, and the younger the
better.  They would use female family members to lure young homeless girls and
runaways to one of several locations where they kept them as prisoners and
forced them to work as prostitutes.

Then one of Mama’s brothers, half drunk, suggested they
start hosting fights amongst their customers.  The winner would get his pick of
the girls for free, and the family would control all the wagering on the
fights, acting as the house. 

Soon there were several fights every Friday and Saturday
night.  They sold gallons of watered down moonshine and pounds of their pot to
the men who stood in line to watch the fights and fuck the girls.  Cash from
the wagers on the fights rolled in and their biggest problem was how to launder
that much money without the cops noticing.

When they’d had to run from the infected, all but a handful
of the girls had been left behind, locked in their rooms.  Mama wasn’t
concerned.  She knew they could find more as they traveled.  Her only concern
was finding a safe place for her and her family where they could restart their
business.  From what she’d seen of the world, cash was no longer something she
cared about.  But food, weapons and ammunition would be worth more than their
weight in gold.

“Tell me ‘bout it,” she said to the boy who had given her
the news about finding the casino.

“Big fucking place, Mama.  Doors is locked and I couldn’t
get inside, but it looks abandoned.  And it’s a goddamn fortress.  All brick
and shit.  No way’s the infected gettin inside.”  He was excited and tripping
over his words as he talked.

She had told him to lead the way, the heavily armed convoy
of pickups falling in behind.  They covered the two miles quickly, cresting a
small rise in the terrain as they approached.  In a shallow bowl in front of
them sat the massive building, acres of striped blacktop parking lot surrounding
it.  Mama frowned when she saw the silhouette of a helicopter sitting on the
roof, but didn’t call a halt.

They pulled into the parking lot, driving around the
building until they located a service entrance.  The trucks were pulled into a
circular defensive perimeter just like a wagon train in the old west.  Fifty
well armed men sat in the backs of the trucks, facing out; ready to fend off
any infected that attacked.

One of her younger nephews had received an education from a
professional burglar while he was in prison.  He could pick any lock in under a
minute and Mama told him to get to work while she walked over to the boy that
had found the building, slapping him hard across the face.

“You forget to tell me ‘bout that helicopter, boy?”  She
snarled in his face.

“I’m sorry, Mama.  I didn’t mean to,” he flinched as she
raised her hand, but decided not to slap him a second time.  There were more
than enough of them to deal with the handful of men that could fit on the
aircraft.

The lock on the service door clicked and her nephew pulled
on the handle.  The door opened a few inches before a heavy, chrome chain stopped
it.  He peered inside a moment, then reached through the narrow opening and
began working on the padlock holding the chain in place.  It took less time
than the deadbolt to open then he was carefully feeding the chain through the
inside handle, trying not to make any more noise than necessary.  Finally he
pulled the door fully open.

“You six with me,” Mama said, waving at a group that was
four of her own children and two nephews.  “Rest of you stay here and keep
watch.”

As soon as they stepped into the building they all smelled
the aroma of food cooking.  They slowly moved through the service area,
cautiously pushing out onto the casino floor.  Less than fifty feet to their
left a wood paneled door stood open a few inches and Mama could faintly hear
the sound of voices.  Walking to the door she paused and looked through the
gap.

A man and woman were sitting across from each other at a
table, eating.  The man was talking and the woman wasn’t taking whatever he was
telling her very well.  After a couple of minutes she leapt up and ran to hide
her face against a wall.  The man got up and followed, and with their backs to
the door Mama and her group pushed into the room, unnoticed. 

The man walked up behind the sobbing woman and placed his
hands on her shoulders.  Mama was surprised when the woman instantly attacked,
quickly putting him on the floor and taking his rifle.  She was curious, and
decided it was time to intervene before the woman finished him off.  Stepping
forward, she racked the slide of her shotgun.