Well Fed - 05 (59 page)

He aimed… fired.

The shot blasted a hole through the silver-faced guy’s chest and out his back. He fell over like an ancient tree.

A shot pinged off Wallace’s helmet then, jerking back his head and upper torso. Wallace dropped down, blinking, waiting for the explosion…

Nothing happened. He was still on the beanbag, still in one piece.

But the impact distracted him enough for the virus to make its final assault.

It attacked his mind in a tidal wave, slamming up against his refusal to give in. The craving didn’t stop this time, flooding his mental defenses, hitting him full on. The urge to bite caused sludge-choked cords in his neck to bulge. Wallace no longer felt pain, but he became aware of the flagella-like movement around the thin membranes of flesh surrounding his mouth. He groaned, set his jaw, and attempted to impose his will once more, but another bullet rang off the bell of his helmet, distracting him at the worst possible moment. Anger ignited, fueled by an untapped reservoir of hate, which whipped along a thin cord toward a flash point.

The hunger… the all-powerful, all-consuming
hunger
… a druggie’s addiction times infinity.

Black-headed knobs sprouted around Wallace’s mouth, pushing out from his skin like overripe pustules.

Collie
, he tried to say, but the hunger swallowed the word, just as it downed Wallace’s remaining resistance.

The last fleeting, smoldering thought that fired through his overwhelmed mind…

Was the face of his wife.

Then it was over.

For long moments, Wallace simply lay there, twitching and grunting. He released his rifle, having no further need for the weapon. The fight for Whitecap continued without him. He mumbled and squirmed, sensing gunfire but making no effort to go anywhere, as if his infected brain was momentarily confused at finally seizing control. He remained that way for a few indecisive seconds, moaning in the decaying foliage, clawing and releasing the earth.

The need to feed grabbed him, insisting that he rise and seek out sustenance. Wallace glanced up, eyes dark and cloudy, and detected people scrambling for their lives in the valley below…

People he could eat.

The once-special operator got to his knees and pushed himself up from the ground.

When he opened his mouth to moan, to curse at the living, the beanbag explosive on the ground before him detonated with all the force of an artillery shell.

The blast shocked Shovel and his people in the valley, and they stopped firing to stare at the dust cloud shrouding the hillside and hear the patter of debris bouncing off the land. Part of what looked like a tree crashed down, enough to earn a few cries of surprise. Then all was still. The sniper had shot seven of his people dead, the most recent being Nolan, who’d hung off Shovel’s ass like a protective mastiff. The bullet had blown a hole through the enforcer’s chest and dropped him not five feet away from where Shovel stood firing off short bursts. He didn’t spare time to grieve.

“Holy shit,” Shovel said, confused by the unexpected explosion and sensing change in the air. “Hold up. Everybody, hold up.”

The resulting silence thrummed in his ears, and he wondered if the violence had truly finished. Shovel waited… waited for someone to die. Someone would definitely die if the sniper was still up there, as they were all standing around and gawking—easy pickings for whoever had been gunning them down.

But no further shots rang out. No one else died.

Shovel considered sending a handful of people up to check out that area, maybe find out who had been firing on them, at least inspect the crater left behind. Shovel drew breath to give the order.

Then one of the women, the new one called Marie, shouted, “Hey!”

She stood with an automatic rifle in her hands, pointing toward the trailers.

Shovel looked, as did most others, and felt his bearded jaw drop in shock.

A second later, fear yanked on his spine.

Sweating torrents and struggling for air, Gus pulled himself up the short ladder hanging off the front bumper of the Komatsu truck, his boots clanging against the metalwork. He groaned upon seeing the long set of stairs, perhaps a story-and-a-half tall, going up the front of the machine. Slabs of metal welded to the staircase’s railing provided substantial protection for anyone heading up to the driver’s cab.

Jesus.
Gus gasped for breath as he climbed.

They’d turned the Kat into a tank.

He got halfway up before gunfire started ricocheting off the armored hide. Gus flattened himself, covered his head, and continued at a hurried crawl. He pressed himself up against what might have been the grill of the monster, cringing from the starbursts exploding over and around his head. Bullets shrieked in his ears, and Gus understood one of those bounces could very well—

A scorching spike of pain hammered into the upturned heel of his left boot, shredding the material and flesh there. Gus howled, fell near the top of the steps, and twisted onto his back in the narrow slot. Crying in pain, Gus lifted the stricken leg and blinked at the blood streaming from the torn padding of his foot. Whimpering, he clawed his way onto the top deck and turned a corner. Railing surrounded the upper deck of the truck, and that too had been armored with sheet metal, with gun ports cut into the iron.

Tears in his eyes, Gus huffed, lay on his side, and located the cab for the truck operator.

Jesus H. Christ
.

The cab had been encased with slabs of iron, and Gus had to search for the door handle for a moment. He found it and crawled toward the door on his three good limbs, his ass stuck into the air. A bright, broken ribbon of blood trailed him. Bullets crashed into the upper deck, some even whining through gun ports and bouncing inside with all the energy of blinded comets. A ricochet
twanged
off the metal plate next to the door handle just as Gus reached for it. He jerked his hand back in fright before grasping and hauling the door open, pulling himself into the seat.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Gus moaned in pain and awe, still fighting for breath. He sat in the worn chair and studied the instrument panel ahead of him. Light came from the narrow cut in the sheet metal covering the removed windshield. Dials, gauges, and dead displays regarded him stoically, waiting to be powered up. He grimaced, despair creeping into his head and chest like mild poison. He hoisted his ruined foot to a rest on the far right of what appeared to be a brake, screwing his face up at the blood dribbling to the floor.

Gus huffed in frustration. Piloting a
jet
might’ve been a better idea.

But then, just as the bullets seemed to target the cab, he saw a push-button start.

“Lord”—Gus aimed a thumb at the large button—“hope you gassed this fucker up.”

He depressed the button and held it.

The dashboard exploded with light.

Air vents in the dash and underneath all exhaled in a cold rush.

Folksy rock music blared out from loudspeakers overhead.

And the Komatsu truck, a sleeping armored behemoth the size of a respectable bungalow, coughed, grumbled, and shook like an awakening, monstrous ogre left for dead on a battlefield. The machine rumbled underneath Gus, and he squinted at the steering column, remembering the detail his brother Sidney had given him.

Just like an automatic
, his ghost said.

Gus grabbed the wheel and the gearstick, eyed the glowing red lettering above the steering column, and shifted. A red bar moved across the lettering familiar in all vehicles and stopped on the one representing DRIVE.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Shovel exclaimed as the machine roared to life. Air brakes screamed, the sound rolling across the valley floor, the very cement crackling under the brunt of the six tires, which weighed fifteen tons each. He stood and stared until Marie, God bless her, took the initiative and resumed firing at the awakened monster. And a monster the Kat was. Shovel had no illusions about what the thing could do, having driven it himself over the years.

It was a six-wheeled kraken, a three-story giant unleashed…

And he had no control over it.

“Pick your shots! Shoot the cab!” Shovel yelled and remembered the minigun on the flatbed. He whirled about and saw Slick Pick up there, struggling with the bands of ammunition as he sought to reload the boxes.

The minigun.

Shovel took one last look at the mechanical titan rumbling across the open space, toward the office building where the kids were.

He bolted for the flatbed.

A slit ran across the left side of the cab, allowing Gus to peek out if he wished. He didn’t, however, as a barrage of bullets tinkled off the sheet metal, making him jump enough to step hard on the accelerator. The Kat jumped up to thirty klicks an hour of a possible eighty, and Gus wasn’t averse to seeing what the leviathan could do.

He hunkered over the wheel, forgetting about the pain in his foot, and watched as the office building came into view. The electric brakes screamed as he applied them, their sensitivity surprising him as he eased the eighteen-meter-high machine to a stop. Two feet remained between the armored staircase and the building’s wall.

Gus laid on the air horn, and a torpedo of sound exploded above him, surprising the hell out of him.

He recovered, opened the operator’s door, and screamed, “Get in!”

Children cried in fear, almost drowned out by the impact of bullets against the sidewalls of the fifteen-foot-high tires.

“Gus!” Collie shouted.

Hearing her voice spiked his spirits. “Collie, get them in!”

Footfalls rang out on the metal steps.

It seemed like years before he saw the first pale face appear––little Becky. Gus glanced around the cab. There was precious little room for a kid, and he didn’t like the way the cab seemed to be attracting bullets. He stuck his head out and took in the upper deck, seeing steel crossbeams above, extending into the dump body. A long metal box extended from the cab to the far side with cushions attached to the top.

“Fuckin’
sofa
?” Gus blurted.

Chad appeared, not too big to be bawling his eyes out in fright.

“Get down,” Gus shouted at them. “Get on the floor!”

Sitting on the sofa just wouldn’t do.

Children filed up into the deck, screaming as the bullets continued blasting off the truck. Gus swiveled and grimaced as he peeked out a side slot, wishing he had something to shoot back with.

“Gus?”

“Collie,” Gus said, seeing her coming up the stairs behind Maggie. “Get on the floor. All of you.”

“Fuck that,” Collie said and crouched in an open gun port, jamming her rifle out.

A youngster Gus didn’t know went to the sofa and, to his surprise, flipped a section of it up. One after the other, six children loaded themselves into that wide coffin of a couch, which had to be at least a dozen feet long, two feet wide, and equally deep. Only then did he notice air holes in the base.

“Get in there,” he shouted at Chad and Becky. They did.

Maggie urged one more inside. She then lowered the lid and pressed herself into the far corner. The other children clung to her as if she were a rock.

“We all in?” Gus shouted, grimacing over the steering wheel, hand on the door.

“All in,” Collie answered.

He slammed the cab’s door, jacked the gearshift into reverse, and backed the monster up.

“You can drive this thing?” Collie shouted.

Gus hunkered down and peered through a slot, seeing her wounds had been plugged by taping down her combat fatigues with rolls of duct tape. Several strips even held her slashed cheek together.

“Oh, fuck, yeah,” Gus answered.

Just as the shit hit.

An unrelenting salvo suddenly replaced the rifle fire pinging away at the tires and cab of the Kat, sounding like a storm of angry hail. It slammed into the truck’s side, hard enough that Gus believed the contact had spun the gigantic machine around. He glanced out his view port and looked to the north, and his bowels turned to liquid.

“Minigun,” Collie shouted. “Get moving!”

Tracer fire streaked across the open field, ripping into the Kat’s steely side, creating a pyrotechnic show to slacken jaws. The minigun hosed the machine from ass to nose, raking the steel-laced sidewalls, pelting tires coated in foot-deep rubber, and creeping up toward the driver’s cab. The tires held, but a frightening crash of metal erupted from the exposed underbody, making Gus wonder if he would be able to get moving.

He shoved the gear into drive and hit the gas.

The Kat jumped ahead and took out the corner of the office building, hip-checking a pile of rubble as he turned away from the deadly hail. Gus turned the wheel hard to the right, peering out the forward slit as light speckled the front in a dazzling display. The truck slammed into a parked pickup, crushing the box in a terrifying crunch of metal and a moment of lift that leaned Gus to the left. Children screamed in fright. The pickup’s cab and engine buckled like a dying insect.

The Kat slammed down.

And rolled on.

When Shovel reached the flatbed, he pulled himself up and took over from Slick Pick. He manned the minigun and immediately sent a killer storm after the chuffing Kat, suspecting the doctor might be aboard the machine and hating the chance of losing her.

The kids, well, they could be replaced—not so the doctor.

The buzz of the rotating cannons deafened Shovel, but he continued spewing bullets at the Kat, lighting up its steel ass.

Gus wasn’t anywhere in his mind.

Shovel winced at the job the Kat did on the pickup, but it wasn’t unexpected. He knew what that machine was capable of.

He also knew the defenses at the main gate didn’t stand a chance.

Gus concentrated on steering, very much aware of the hammering on the Kat’s rear. Light streaked by his right side, chewing into parked vehicles and trailers.

“Pull it left!” Collie yelled from her gun port.