First Wave (The Travis Combs Post-Apocalypse Thrillers) (6 page)

The two-story, cobblestone building at Northern
Arizona University looked like any other hall of academe on campus. The wooden
sign in front of the building simply read,
Sciences.
Beyond the
sandstone-block walls were double doors, where hundreds of students had passed
on a daily basis, unaware of the secure facility that lay three levels below.
Back in the 1960s, the university had been one of several institutions to
receive substantial grants from the Department of Energy to conduct experiments
on microwave radiation. The facility had, in recent years, been used for
experimental biology research.

“The new HQ in Flagstaff is almost operational. I’ve
got my usual team of twelve mercs and recon efforts for the Professor will
commence from here,” said a dark-haired woman dressed in tactical gear with a rose
tattoo on her left arm. She spoke into the laptop at an older man’s televised
image. “The former cartel members and his thugs will soon be dialed into what I
expect and the consequences if they fail.”

“We scoured the river-rafting company warehouse in
Flagstaff but no signs of any intel yet on the passenger list. We did find some
photos at the river guide’s apartment and I am uploading the scanned images
now. Your facial software database will pull up anything we have,” said the
woman, with a heavy southern inflection.

“And your presence is low-profile still?” said the clean-cut
man on the laptop.

“We drove in two nights ago from the north without
incident. We come and go through the underground walkways between buildings and
have control over the main facility down. Several of my men are working on
insinuating themselves among the local rabble.”

“Excellent. And what of Flagstaff and the surrounding
towns…are they all under the control of the bikers?”

“Their leader is being brought to me as we speak.
Our proxy war is about to get underway and, with our backing, they will be able
to crush any resistance in northern and central Arizona and help us close the
noose around the man we’re looking for. We only control a portion of the city,
at present. The rest is still over run by the undead mutants. Containment
efforts are impossible at this point other than around our immediate facility
and the downtown area, which has been barricaded.”

“Once you are done employing the local thugs,
incinerate the HQ and dispatch the bikers however you see fit. Despite the
distraction posed by the global pandemic, it’s never a good thing to have any
loose ends. Are we clear Nikki?”

“We sure are darlin’,” she smirked, then clicked the
video conference off and closed the laptop. Nikki walked over to a table beside
the wall of the stark room. The oblong mirror, with its wood trim, seemed out of
place amidst the rifle magazines and ammo cans on the floor below it. Standing
in front of it, she pulled her shoulders back and glanced down at her arms,
then moved her gaze slowly up to her neck and face. She exhaled and brushed a
lock of hair aside from her temple. Her lithe figure was that of an athletic
thirty six year old but the parallel scars on her neck, from an IED blast and a
deep furrow on her left temple, made her look much older.

She stood transfixed on her eyes, lips, and hair.
She tilted her head, trying not to focus on the unsightly scars. Nikki scanned
the contours of her face and powder-blue eyes. She knew that her lovely figure
and southern charm were only surpassed by her brilliant intellect. She was the
best of the interrogators in a largely male dominated agency. Her track record
during the past nine years of rogue operations had caused her employer to
recognize her considerable psychology skills and, most importantly, moral
flexibility when it came to completing assignments.

Nikki grabbed a Sig Sauer pistol off the table and
walked towards the elevator doors at the far end of the room. She wasn’t used
to being in such modern settings. Most of her work had been spent in psy-ops in
third-world countries with little more than a handful of crude instruments and
a few vials of persuasive meds to peel back her subjects psyche.

She walked through a series of steel doors and then
down a dimly lit hallway to the library. Inside were three of her men. One of
the men was leaning against the concrete wall, flipping a toothpick between his
fingers. The other two stood in the center of the room around a burly figure that
was zip tied to a wooden chair. Each of Nikki’s men had their MP-5 rifles
strung against their chests in a relaxed fashion. Two of the men had neatly
trimmed beards, while the man by the wall sported a mustache with a single stud
earring on his left side. On a nearby table were several walk-talkies, a neat
stack of MREs, and trauma kits, alongside a single row of rifle mags.

The man squirming in the chair was a bear-sized figure,
clad in a leather jacket, who went by the name Enrique. He had formerly headed
up the Sanchez Cartel in northern Mexico and his claws ran deep into Tucson and
Phoenix, before the collapse. His massive, hunched form barely fit on the seat
portion of the chair.

Nikki strode up to him. He squirmed his wrists in
the zip-ties and threw his bearded chin up, revealing a smile as she approached.

“Hey, alright. Now this is the kinda action I was
hopin’ for,” he said with a heavy accent. “I ain’t done it tied up in a while,
not since last week and that was in a backstreet, not at some fancy college.”

Nikki moved closer. The burly man’s breath and body
odor were overpowering. “Your putrescent demeanor reminds me of a hostage I
once tortured. I left him tied at the bottom of a mass grave in the desert heat
for a few days before his mind peeled back. Looks like there’s no point in
applying that tactic to you though.”

The smile left Enrique’s face as he stared into her eyes.
As she walked around him, she removed a folding knife from her vest pocket and
palmed it behind her back. She knew there wasn’t time for more sophisticated
tactics and a man like Enrique would respond well to an act of tremendous
violence displayed towards him.

The giant man sneered over at the two armed men
beside him and then back at Nikki. “Nobody talks to me that way bitch. What the
hell kinda place is this and what am I doing here?”

“Don’t you know sugar” she said, in a honey-sweet
voice. “This is a new kind of of Bed & Breakfast in town where we ask you
questions and, if you answer correctly, you get to continue enjoying the
ability to eat solid food.”

“I just took ownership of this city and I don’t
recall seeing you or your pretty soldier-boys here in these parts before. What
do you want chica?”

She leaned forward and placed the shiny blade
against his right cheek, the tip near his brown eye. “So many questions but you
just leave those to me.”

“Your laughs will turn into screams for mercy when my
men come for me and level this building. Then, they’ll skewer the three of you pendejos
on the flagpole outside.”

“You must be someone to reckon with. Maybe we messed
with the wrong guy,” she smiled. “Though it was pretty easy to ambush your
small convoy and separate you out from the rest of the garbage,” she said, walking
around the front of him. The two guards let out a faint chuckle and glanced at
each other.

He swung his head around smiling. “Do you know who I
am? What I’ve done to people? You better let me go, you scar-faced whore.”

Nikki’s eyes narrowed and lips tightened. She lunged
forward and with a single, blinding stroke, sliced off half of the man’s left
ear. He screamed and landed on the floor, like a piece of fallen timber, writhing
in pain. “What have you done….you crazy, fucking bitch. You cut off my ear….”

She sprung upon him and delivered another slash
across his right cheek exposing the thin muscles and gums below. Grabbing his
greasy hair and yanking his head back, she thrust her knife towards his eye,
pulling back at the last second with her hand quivering. Her face was red and a
bead of sweat rolled down her forehead as her mind reeled back to his comment.
Before the IED explosion that raked open her neck, Nikki was always the collected,
calm operator. Now, comments on her looks unraveled her, sending to her into a
rage she could barely contain. The nature of her work had long provided an
outlet for her personal demons, but she could never seem to squelch the anguish
arising from such assaults on her indelible beauty.

She held the tip of the blade before the man’s eye,
with a white-knuckled grip. She took a deep breath, rocking the knife back and
forth. The guards looked at one another with hesitation. The seated guard
jumped to his feet. Nikki looked up, studying each man, all of whom were new in
her unit. “Don’t worry your pretty faces. I only shred a person back to the
point of
their
perceived physical collapse. The mind fails long before
the body,” she said.

Enrique was silent, his eyes swollen with terror
while his ear leaked out on the tiled floor. Nikki eased her grip on his hair
and flung his head back. She held the knife inches from his face while
straddling his body. Then she wiped the blade across his leather jacket and
slowly closed it, placing it back in her vest. Nikki stood straight, took a
deep breath and gently brushed a lock of her hair back. She clenched her fist
behind her and turned back towards the wailing man.

“The next words that come out of your mouth should
involve more fore-thought or my blade will strike much, much lower and your
days of taking innocent women will be over. Savvy?”

The squirming man nodded and attempted to sit up on
his knees, the sliced facial muscles quivering uncontrollably.

Nikki motioned to the guard on the right. “Cut him
loose and get him some gauze. I need him to be coherent.”

The guard moved forward and severed the zip-tie
around Enrique’s wrists, then retrieved a package of gauze from the table and
flung down at the man’s boots. He sat back on the chair and packed the gauze
around his ear and cheek. He looked up at Nikki with darting glances, then back
at the floor. 

“If you are done bleeding, I am going to explain how
you and your gang are going to reign supreme over northern Arizona, having all
the resources you need,” she said, folding her muscular arms across her chest. “After
today, you will answer only to me, and when you have done my bidding, you will
be an untouchable force in the Southwest. Now- isn’t that worth an ear?”

Several forms began to stir under the massive,
grandmother juniper trees on the plateau as the first orange slivers of
sunlight issued forth from the East. Covered in a thick layer of duff and leaf litter,
Travis sat up as a mound of brown debris fell off his chest and sides. The cool
morning air was permeated with the scent of rain, mixed with the cedar-like
aroma emanating from the grove around him. The cavern-top mouth they had
emerged from sat a half mile off.

He looked up at the juniper tree with gratitude and
understood why the local tribe called it
Bittahatsi
-
the one that
provides for us
. With twilight upon them last night and the temps dropping,
their soaked bones would have struggled to fend off hypothermia. Like a band of
prairie dogs, they burrowed into the duff layer under the ancient trees and
covered themselves generously with the fluffy, insulative material. Travis had
slept before in such improvised natural beds, well below freezing, and with
only the clothes on his back. Not the most comfortable of accommodations but
then survival and comfort didn’t go together, he had reminded them.

From the familiar configuration of distant mountains,
he estimated that they were around twenty miles southeast of the ranch house.
The terrain about them consisted of undulating layers of beige slickrock peppered
with orange lichens. Littering the ground were occasional piles of antelope and
jackrabbit droppings. Their juniper grove was nestled in a valley between two immense
mesas that rose a few thousand feet off the desert floor. Beyond this stretched
a backstop of sand dunes that resembled large ships.

Sprawling, in sandstone depressions in front of
Travis, were hundreds of glimmering pools of water born of the recent
thunderstorm. Some of the water pockets were tub-sized while others spanned
fifty feet. To outsiders, such a region seems like it could provide for all of
one’s needs but ephemeral water sources evaporate quickly in the heat of the
afternoon, causing the landscape to quickly reclaim its arid reputation.

Travis crawled out from under the twisted maze of
branches and sat down on a flat rock, near LB, to empty his boots of silt.
Dotting the ground were purple-colored juniper berries
.
LB was picking
up the berries, rolling them around between his fingers like an inspector.
“They look tempting but don’t eat ‘em,” said Travis. “Juniper, in quantity,
stimulates the appetite and most people get sick from more than a few berries.”

“Damn. I thought I wasn’t going to have to venture far
for breakfast,” said LB.

“The most useful thing about the berries is the
white coating on the outside. It can be used as a yeast substitute for baking
bread so just keep that in mind for future calzone recipes.”

Travis laced up his boots and walked over to a water
pocket. He knelt down to drink and noticed his face mirrored in the surface. A
sight he’d not seen in three weeks. Spreading his mouth over the surface, he
dipped his lips and began drinking.

“Aren’t you going to purify that first?” said LB.

“The water scouring through here last night blasted
these holes out pretty good. I’ve drank from such sources for years. Now, if
these had been sitting a few days and were filled with animal shit and bugs,
then I’d rethink that,” he said sitting back. “We oughta save our remaining
iodine tablets for less than desirable waterholes. Besides, there’s no cure for
death from dehydration that I know of, so find a water pocket and start
gulping—just remember to grit your teeth to strain out the big stuff,” Travis
said with a half-smile as he resumed drinking.

“Whatever you say boss,” said LB.

‘Boss’, that was a term I hadn’t heard
in a while and had hoped to not have in my next job title.

The rest of the group began stirring from their tree-bound
cocoons. Travis went back and sat down by his gear to do a quick inventory. The
food was gone, water bottles empty, and everything else was caked with sand. He
sat down and pulled out his pistol and began field-stripping it to remove any
grit wedged inside. Afterwards, he cleaned the mags as best he could with a
bandanna and then commenced cleaning the filthy lever action rifle. Unlike the
Glock, it was a fickle weapon when it came to maintenance. His mind ran back to
a mission he had done in northern Afghanistan with a small contingent of
Uzbekis, his unit had trained. He recalled an old Uzbeki man, after one battle,
field-stripping his Glock and cleaning it with the powdery, grey dirt at his
feet.
Some weapons and some people are just made to keep on going no matter
what the day throws at ‘em.

LB sat down next to him and began dismantling his 1911
pistol. In a series of flowing actions, the man detached the magazine, emptied
the chamber and removed the slide. Travis handed him the bandanna and then
began reassembling his own weapons.

Pete came up and stood beside the two men letting
out an overdue yawn and wiggling the sand out of his right ear.

“Doesn’t that look like Picacho Butte over there?”
said Travis pointing to a large conical rock jutting out of the ground.

“Sure does. That would put us about twenty-five
miles southwest of the town of Ashfork,” replied Pete, as he sauntered over to
a waterhole and swigged down some water. He stood up and wiped the droplets
from his scruffy blonde chin and paused for a minute, squinting into the
distance. “Do you see that reflection out there? There’s something moving a few
miles away.”

Travis and LB put their weapons aside and began
scanning the area two miles up. They noticed what looked like a long, metallic
ribbon coasting towards the east on what appeared to be the interstate. Travis
reached back and grabbed the binoculars from his pack. After quickly dusting
them off, he glassed the horizon. “Looks like a convoy of trucks and choppers,”
he said. Travis scanned towards the direction from where the riders had just
come and saw a single plume of black smoke in what looked like a house near the
highway.

“Do you think these guys are connected with the
people at the hotel?” said LB.

“Maybe. Who knows? This looks like a well-organized
gang who’ve been surviving on the road quite nicely. Question is- where are
they based?”

The convoy continued east until they were out of Travis’s
range. “I imagine the world is now divided up into those who simply want to live
and those who live to kill,” he said, placing the binos atop his pack.

Jim was curled in a fetal position under a nearby
juniper still sleeping. Becka, who had slept in between Katy and Evelyn, was
sitting up while Evelyn was gently brushing her fingers through the girl’s hair
trying to untangle the bunched up strands.

“LB, can you rouse everyone and have them gather
around,” said Travis.

“Sure thing,” said LB who walked over to the three
ladies first.

Travis stood next to Pete. “It looks like there’s a
pretty good-sized canyon about three miles south of here. My thought is, we
head there and set up camp for a few days to rest, hydrate, and do some
trapping, as that area will afford more protection than this open country here.
We shouldn’t run into any of those creatures way out here in the sticks and
it’d be safer than venturing into one of the towns, until we can recon the
situation and see how things look.”

Pete scanned the area behind the juniper grove where
Travis had motioned.  The winding escarpment ran for miles and had deep furrows
on the sides indicating numerous canyons. He could see the bright green foliage
of cottonwood and sycamore trees whose canopies poked out, which indicated a
good possibility of permanent water.  In the wilderness beyond the canyon,
there were more open dunes that unfurled to the east where they were abruptly pierced
by a range of jagged mountains.

“As you know, if there’s reliable water and edible
plants to be found, it would be there. And possibly some caves or alcoves to
hole up in for a while. I agree. It’s our best option for now. This is pretty
level terrain, we can make it there in a few hours,” Pete said in a faint
voice, his energy low from lack of food.

Travis nodded at his friend as the rest of the group
encircled them. “You missed out on the morning coffee but I’m sure glad to see
you all,” he said making his rounds over each person’s face. “The rain has
provided us with many drinking fountains to get tanked up on and these pools
are about as close as you’ll get to a bottle of spring water. You all know the
drill about hydrating from hearing Pete and I harp at you for many weeks, so
get some fluids in, until your belly feels beyond full, and then gather up your
gear. There’s a canyon a short walk from here that will provide us with more
resources than what we have in this location. We can rest there for a few days
until we come up with a plan.”

Pete chimed in, “Does anyone have any food left? We
should divvy that up so we can at least spike our blood sugar a bit for the
walk.”

Everyone went through their packs and pockets. There
were three flattened protein bars and half a bag of trail mix. “Becka, why
don’t you divide that up and pass it around,” said Travis, who recognized the
importance of giving a role to one who felt so powerless. “Everyone else, fill
up your remaining water bottles or empty containers of any kind, and let’s depart
in ten minutes.”

The walk to the canyon was a pleasure on the feet as
the sandy terrain was far more forgiving than the heel-bruising rubble of the
cavern. At first, the hike felt like many other exploratory ventures they had
gone on together in side canyons during the river trip. But then the bitter
realization that they were cut off permanently from the world they once knew,
cast a tight grip on their senses. Everything they did now, every step, wasn’t
driven by a tourist’s curiosity but a need to stay alive and take care of
critical priorities.  Their spirits lifted as they neared the canyon’s edge and
saw a vertical oasis of large, green trees lining the bottom and heard the
sound of a stream meandering beneath it.

There was a faint, mule deer trail that wound like a
thread to the floor of the canyon. Pete began the easy descent and when they
reached bottom, led them under a thick swath of mature trees where they rested.
The ankle-deep stream, a creek by eastern standards, sported swathes of
cattails waving in the wind. For now, the world outside this sanctuary would
wait.

Travis surveyed the canyon floor in both directions.
There were plenty of defensible positions and several small alcoves where they
could retreat from the elements. Cottonwood bark hung like drapes from the
massive skeletons of dead trees and would be sufficient for bedding material,
while there was ample wood for fuel. Banana yuccas lined the canyon walls,
heavy with their potato-sized fruits and, further above, were an abundance of
pinon pine trees full of calorie-laden nuts. The car-sized boulders, strewn
throughout every level of the canyon, were home to plenty of small game.
This
place will take care of our needs for a while until everyone has recuperated,
he
thought.

“Let’s head over to that small alcove and make camp
there,” Travis said, pointing down canyon to a divet in the rock escarpment
just above a ribbon of cottonwood trees.

They could already feel the rocks radiating heat
from the morning sun as they clambered over to the shady alcove. It resembled a
small amphitheater, with its curved walls and arching backside that went into
the bedrock twenty feet. On either side of the arching entrance were animal
trails that led up to the canyon rim. Tangled logjams, from previous flash
floods, were well below the lip of the alcove.

 “We’ll make our camp here. I’m going to scout the
ridgeline above and see if there are any nuts to harvest if anyone wants to
come,” said Travis. “If you’re staying put down below, then we’ll need heaps of
cottonwood bark to be gathered for bedding material. This place is going to be
our three-star hotel for tonight.”

Katy and Becka followed on Travis’s heels as they
scampered up the narrow trail a few hundred yards to an outcropping of pine
trees. August and September were the best months for living off the land in the
Southwest and they were just getting to the tail end of that window of
abundance. As they reached the row of short-needled conifers, they could see
the oblong, brown exteriors of nuts spread like shotgun pellets around the base
of each tree. Travis knelt down and grabbed a few off the ground, cracking them,
one at a time, between his teeth and spitting out the thin shell. The beige,
inner meat was oily and sweet. With nearly three-thousand calories to a pound,
these would be an important staple in their newfound diet and, unlike animal
hunting, there was little chase involved.

Becka watched and then simulated the toothy removal
method, looking up at Katy with delight as she downed more nuts in earnest. Katy
threw her long hair back over a shoulder and knelt down alongside the young girl
to join in the harvest.

After they had eaten and filled their hats to overflowing
with nuts for the others, the three sat down alongside one another with legs
extended. After a long silence taking in the scenery and trying to process the
last few days’ events, Katy leaned back on her elbows. “What happens next
Travis? Do we stay here? I mean, maybe we should get to a city somewhere and
see if there are others like us who’ve survived.”