First Wave (The Travis Combs Post-Apocalypse Thrillers) (15 page)

“We have two significant masses of RAMs moving toward
your position, within a mile radius. Looks like a few hundred coming out of the
west end of Chino.”

“ETA?”

“Twenty minutes tops before they’re in the area.
Sooner, if they pinpoint you guys.”

Crawford paused, “Hold your current position. We are
exiting the building in two minutes and will rendezvous with you. Get the helos
in here. We’ve also got four friendlies in tow.”

“You guys have helos? How did you get those?” said
Travis.

“What do you mean? We didn’t all revert back to the
stone age and start livin’ in buckskins,” said Crawford. “Right now, I’m sure
you got a lot of questions, but we gotta roll.”

Travis studied him for a moment. The man handled
himself with a quiet confidence and seemed like someone who was no stranger to
combat operations.

“My best suggestion is to come with us,” Crawford
said, grabbing his rifle. “The only way outta here is to the east, where our
numbers are greater and the terrain our ally.”

Travis looked up at Katy, Nora, and Rachel who were all
nodding in agreement but waiting to hear a decision. “I could go for a change
of scenery about now,” he said, grabbing his pack and weapon off the table.

Squealing, rodent-like garbles could be heard in the
distance, as throngs of undead were moving in the street near the runway
entrance, as Crawford and the group poured out of the building.

“How the hell did they find us?” Travis sneered.

“These things are smart and have heightened senses,”
said Clara, who was in front of him, as they sprinted past the lookout tower and
across the tarmac.

They ran past a dozen abandoned vehicles scattered
around the runway until they arrived at a hole in the fence, near a cluster of manzanita
bushes. One by one, they squirmed through the fence and bolted up a small
embankment with more cover. Then Travis could hear the sound of three
suppressed sniper rifles, and saw the men behind them, lying prone.

Crawford knelt down beside a slender man. “Where the
hell are the helos? They should have been here by now.”

“Inbound in five minutes sir,” said the man, firing
another round into the head of a running mutant.

The undead had homed in on them after they emerged
from the building and were now in a trot, within five hundred yards of the
fence. Their screeching vocal sound and ammonia-like odor permeated the night
air.

“The rest of you spread out on this berm and wait
for my command to start shooting. Travis you come with me. Then he and Travis
ran parallel to the fence line for thirty yards. The older man dropped on one
knee and opened his pack, taking out six grenades and handing three to Travis.
“Next to me, I’m guessing you have some experience with these, so lob ‘em at
the vehicles on the runway. Let’s take some of these unholy bastards out and
give the helos a beacon.”

“Copy that,” he said, pulling the pin out of the
first grenade and hurling it under a blue Toyota pickup. As the creatures began
swarming in, Crawford turned and yelled back at the group, “Fire!”

The Toyota went up in flames as twisted metal, limbs,
and heads rained over the tarmac.

The three snipers had already dropped a dozen
creatures with their rifles, which were equipped with nightscopes. Travis and Crawford
picked out their targets and threw the remaining grenades, causing the runway
to look like a series of miniscule volcanos. Undead remains were scattered in
every direction, and Travis saw a hunk of burnt limb hanging on the fence with its
flannel, arm sleeve on fire. The creatures in the front half of the mass had
been reduced or obliterated, but the crowd just swarmed over the carnage of
remains and rushed towards the eight-foot high fence.

Over Travis’s right shoulder, he could hear the hum
of rotors, as the two helos began circling in search of a landing zone. Crawford
turned to him, “Go! Tell the others to get out of here. My snipers and I will
cover your asses.”

Travis wasn’t used to being the first one departing
from a firefight and smirked in response. He shot off two more rounds into the
head of a chubby, undead figure climbing the fence and then bolted over to the
others. He tapped them on the backs and motioned to a hilltop sixty yards away
where the helos landed. He did a quick reload of his AK, as the women ran up
the slow incline, peering at every bush and boulder along the way. The din of
rifle fire, and the fence rattling, was all he could hear as the burgeoning
mass of creatures climbed over like a ribbon of hungry ants. Once the women
were secure at the helos, Travis scrambled back down the slope.

Crawford had run back over to the snipers, who had
slung their rifles, and were now hammering the creatures with their M4s. He
patted the men on their backs, “get the hell on that bird, now!” As they
retreated, Travis and Crawford provided cover support. From the shadow of a
nearby boulder, a gangly creature with an ulcerated nose hurtled itself on to
the back of the last sniper. It quickly bit through his cervical region and flung
him back. Crawford turned and dispatched the mutant, and saw his own man’s
lifeless corpse coating the sand, as bright red blood issued out from the
carotid.

It was now down to double taps to the head, with the
range down to forty feet. The slippery gravel slope of the berm provided some
advantage, but there were just too many of the crazed beasts. The men began
backing up, changing out mags, and shooting into the crowd. “Crawford, you and
your man get flying up that hill. I’ll buy you some time.”

“Don’t be too long, I’m buying beers tonight,” the
older man said, as he and the snipers sprinted up the hill. Katy and the others
had their rifles back in action, from the interior of the helo, dropping
zombies along the fence line to Travis’s left. With a quick glance over his
shoulder, he saw that Crawford and the other man were nearly at the helo. With
sweat streaming down his cheeks, Travis emptied his rounds into three
blue-mottled creatures bolting at him, then sprinted for the hill. As he ran,
the sound of bodies splitting apart, from rifle rounds coming from the helos, could
be heard behind him as each creature was dispatched within arm’s length.

Katy was hanging off the deck, waving him in with
one arm, as he ran up the rocky terrain and jumped into the helicopter while
gunfire lit up the desert, strafing the hordes of undead racing up the hill in a
frenzied lust.

The helos took off at the same time and swung a hard
right. The creatures abruptly stopped below them and shrieked, while pawing at
the air. The helos sped off, passing over several canyons and miles of
untrammeled wilderness, before making a beeline for Mingus Mountain, looming in
the distance. Travis rested the butt of his, still smoking, AK on the floor and
planted his head against the back wall, taking a deep breath. Katy ran her hand
over his face, brushing flecks of dirt away from his cheek, as he stared down at
the moonlit escarpment, which had returned to its former silence.

“Enrique, la mujer esta aqui,” a stout man, with a rifle,
shouted up from the room below in the Weatherford Hotel, in downtown Flagstaff.
On the second floor dining room was the man’s boss who stepped towards the
railing and nodded, “Si, si” he said, with disgust in his voice. Enrique’s ear
had scarred over into a doughy edge since the meeting with Nikki, and he
occasionally ran his finger over it, as if wondering when it would grow back
and when the woman,
la diabla
and her ilk, would leave for good.

He mulled over his accomplishments of the last few
weeks. The civilians in the small towns of Williams, Ashfork, and Paulden had
been crushed, the scourge of undead being all that roamed there; the northern
border of Flagstaff was lightly patrolled, but it backed up to the barren
Painted Desert and trackless stretches of the Navajo Reservation which posed no
threat, that tribe being scattered in remote regions towards the Four Corners
area.

The eastern recesses of the city were an irritant,
with thousands of undead clamoring upon one another, trying to get through the
blocks of razor wire and barricades of demolished cars that separated the
downtown from the mutants. The creatures were too numerous to waste priceless
ammunition on and too lethargic to be capable of getting beyond the barricades.
Instead, Enrique’s men used the mutants for target practice, employing bricks they
hurled off the roofs in their nightly, drunken sprees. The stench of ammonia in
the air, and the high-pitched noises emanating beyond the barricade, required Enrique
to sleep with earplugs and the windows closed.

He thought there may be some truth to the news
reports about elevation affecting the virus as the majority of undead were
sluggish, like the classic, dubbed zombie films he had seen when he was a kid living
in Sinaloa, where the only other enjoyable distraction was kicking dogs around in
the dusty alleys.

It was the border to the south of Flagstaff, where a
pocket of ranchers and fighters resided in rocky retreats near Sedona, that occupied
Enrique’s days and nights. He had spent the past two days having his men gather
information on the group below and their counterparts in Jerome, while dreading
another visit from Nikki,
la diabla,
who came every few days to check on
his progress. It had only been a few weeks but he was tired of living in the
mountains. There were too many trees, too many cold nights, and an inability to
enjoy exquisite vistas like he could from the desert porch of his once
illustrious, three-story hacienda in Mexico. Even his villa in Scottsdale was
better than this stifling compound. Now, he was cursed by that ghastly woman
and her mysterious agenda. What did it matter if they crushed the ranchers in
the coming month or waited until the spring when the weather was more conducive
to success, and he had taken care of his men’s needs in preparing for the cold
winter ahead?

Nikki had come up from the underground corridors
that connected the buildings. These had been put in during the prohibition days
in the 1930s and kept intact as novelties from another time. They allowed easy
access to the immediate core of buildings surrounding a two block radius of
downtown, and enabled her to come and go without raising suspicion from
Enrique’s men.

She was walking up the creaky, velvet covered steps
that led to Enrique’s makeshift living room. “Ay chingada,” he whispered to
himself, turning to face her, as she strode through the antique, double doors
that opened up into what was once a historic, western bar.

“I like your sense of décor Rick,” she said in a
thick North Carolina accent. “It would look a whole lot better with the heads
of those cowpunchers to the south, taxidermied on the wall.” She tossed her tactical
shoulder bag and MP-5 rifle on the round table in the middle of the room.

Enrique thought back to the last meeting, when two
of his men had questioned her recommendations with laughter and scorn. Before
he could reprimand them, both were bleeding out with finely sliced carotids,
while Nikki resheathed her blade before the first man had even dropped to his
knees. Enrique had grown up around machete men in the jungle and was no
stranger to dispatching untold enemies with a blade, but he had never seen
anyone move with such ferocity and speed, let alone a woman.
La diabla.

He edged forward, his hands oscillating between
resting on his hips and hanging by his sides. “There was an attack on some of
our forces near Chino Valley that may interest you,” he said. “More than a
dozen of my men were killed by a group of four people in a valley, not far from
the highway.

“Go ahead darlin’. I came for the talk not your
divine company,” she said, lifting her leather boot on to a chair.

“The only survivor there said the group had been poisoned
by some kind of plant root put in the water tanker. The rest of the men were dispatched
in a swift attack that rivaled anything we’ve seen in other encounters. Before mi
hombre died, he said that the group consisted of three women and one man, who
moved like someone with exceptional training.”

“That is an instructive little tale, amigo,” Nikki
said, walking past Enrique over to the balcony. He moved aside, his tan face
growing small and eyes widening as she passed him. “Lots of folks out there
with exceptional training backgrounds,” she paused, looking over the downtown,
“but combined with the use of natural biotoxins- now that intrigues me. There
are only a handful of wild plants that can be used for such ends and use of
such a thing isn’t common knowledge.” She stared hard for a few minutes at the
San Francisco Peaks in the distance, her chest rising and falling with tapered
breaths.

Nikki turned and looked into Enrique’s face,
glancing at his ear and the comma shaped scar on his cheek. “Recall the men you
have searching Peach Springs and Kingman, and bring them back here. No need to
patrol those areas any further. That should take two days,” she said, walking
back inside. “Once they’ve returned, contact me. Then we will begin staging
efforts for destroying the group in Sedona and making the push to Jerome.”

“But, wouldn’t it be better to wait until April,
when we’ve had the winter to prepare for such a large scale assault and gather
more firepower?”

“My reports indicate the weather won’t be a major
factor for another month. As for firepower, you’ll have whatever it takes to
get the job done,
Sugar
.” She grabbed the bag off the table and walked
towards the double doors. “Oh, and don’t worry-  I’ll be sure to tell your two men
on the way out that we’re just old pals. I wouldn’t want them losing respect
for you, thinking you’re taking orders from a chica,” she laughed then sauntered
down the steps, waving goodbye as her head disappeared below the wood railing.

Enrique cursed as he unclenched his fists and let
out a deep sigh, “Ay, la diabla…la bruja. I want this city to be mine and to
have that bitch’s head on my mantle! Then there will no one left to challenge
me again in this world.”