“Since most of you have no concept of what formal military radio communications are, we simplified things. The fuel trucks will be referred to as
Sugar
, supply trucks are
Soda
, the gun trucks are
Salt
, the recovery vehicle is
Pepper
, Gulf Shores is
Spice Rack
, the motorcycles are
Tabasco
and the Captain is
Iron Chef
. Each vehicle has a number written on the side of it. That, and the codename is the call sign you have in the convoy”
A beefy dump truck driver looked over at the door of his truck and saw the large
4
painted there in white spray paint on his green door. He motioned to his truck and questioned, “So, I am Soda-4, right?”
“There you go, Einstein,” Reid replied before resuming his briefing. “We are traveling light, no food, no sleeping gear, just water, gas, weapons and ammo. Our objective will be to follow the route outlined on the white board and try to locate the Big Three.”
“Pussy, beer, and drugs?” one of Spud’s clowns asked through a laugh, joined by about half of the collected road warriors.
Reid scowled across his crew cut face, “The Big Three are ammunition, non-perishable food, and gasoline. Just like in the rehearsals the past few days. Each section has their detail target, their rally point, their feeder card, and their battle roster number. No one is left behind. No one does anything stupid. Hooah?”
The soldiers in the crowd, both old vets and salty new recruits yelled back, “Hooah!”
Stone stood up from his seat on the bumper of his hummer and cleared his throat, “This morning an airship left the island to scout out 400 miles in every direction. The Coast Guard Cutter
Fish Hawk
, our own little navy, also left port on its own mission. Each of these other two missions is going to come back. So are we, only we are going to come back with good news, and good stuff for the island. Let’s move out.”
With that, the crews checked their weapons, radios and equipment one last, quick time and engines started up all along the line. Tiny and three of his motorcycle clan roared out across the bridge to scout out the distance. As briefed, they would stay two miles ahead of the convoy, just inside the range of the cheap-o walkie-talkies, and provide intelligence of what was just down the road.
Everyone was taking pictures in front of everything. Groups of people were always taking pictures with strangers they just met to preserve the moment, ‘just in case something happens.’
Next moved out the alternating gun trucks and hummers, then the empty gas tanker, Stone’s command hummer, and finally the
Juggernaut
bringing up the rear. The wrecker was something of a mother truck that carried additional equipment, ammunition, water, fuel, tow kits, MRE’s, tires, tools and floor jacks that could be used to change a blown or shot out tire very quickly.
They had gone a mile through the deserted wasteland of blowing trash, burned and abandoned buildings and random clumps of bodies when the first dump truck and hummer peeled off the road to the right. Its target was the parking lot of a strip mall that held Deep South Sporting Goods, a Radio Shack, a hardware store, and a few other small businesses that were still largely intact. These had been scouted out previously and were high on the list.
“Hopefully, this thing won’t turn into an 8-hour long drive-by shooting. Tiny says he has seen minimal activity the past few days,” Stone said to Reid, who was driving the command hummer. A pair of heavily armed MPs sat nervous in the back seats. The last pictures Tiny had shown him of the area they were moving across consisted mainly of Rough Riders posing with a zombie corpse, propped up with a cigarette in the mouth of, and shades covering the eyes of, said zombie corpse.
“Well, it is Friday the 13th. Perfect choice for a convoy sir,” Reid grunted as a response.
The next hummer/dump truck pair peeled to the right in another mile to a bigbox department store. The store had its doors long ago pulled open and its contents scattered and destroyed by looters, swarms of infected, and animals. However, its garden center was still intact and the team sent there had a list of items including seeds, fertilizer, and agricultural hand tools like shovels and hoes that could prove to be the most precious cargo on the convoy’s wish list.
Stone did not have much faith in finding any ammunition there. Some 5,000 weapons were believed to exist on the island. Only about half were in viable calibers and in working condition. Precious few of the island’s weapons had a box or two of tattered ammunition with them, while most had none. This left a great ammo shortage after the outbreak. While there was generally a working modern firearm for almost every man woman and child, most of their owners only had a pocket full of shells if any.
With the advent in the past decade of the efficient Wal-Mart Model of ‘just in time’ inventory system, most of the grocery store and big box shelves were emptied before the lights even went out. The system was set up to automatically order items whenever they were scanned at the point of sale. It prevented large stocks of un-bought merchandise sitting in storerooms. It also caused the replacement stocks to be somewhere between the distribution centers and the stores, doing no good to anyone, by the height of the outbreak.
The third truck and hummer team, made up of Spud’s crew and escorted by a group of the more shady volunteers, stopped abruptly at a strip mall that held a small a pharmacy and liquor store, both with red X’s recently spray painted on them.
The fourth dump truck and its hummer escort turned down a service road behind a chicken place and drove quickly to a small State-run commodities distribution center. The center, in a squat brick building was a mini-warehouse for non-perishable foods and formulae for needy women, infants, and children before the outbreak. Its staff had locked the heavy metal fire doors and vanished, but its food and baby formula was thought to be intact inside.
As they drove through the small towns along the highway, one of the most eerie things was the mass of dogs everywhere. There were strays wandering around, packing up in groups, and reverting to their ancient behavior. There were two types of dog packs. The first was the beggars. They would be a small group of dogs, including a lot of older animals and scrawny thin limping beasts. They would linger around the convoy constantly, trying to get scraps and handouts. They were the ones who had always been and would always be pets. The second group lived in the shadows. They were the wild dogs. They held themselves away from people as much as possible, lurking in the wood line and the burned neighborhoods. Rumors of these packs being as large as 30-40 animals held true.
The reason why it was rumor was that the wild dogs had taken to being nocturnal and hiding from humans. Most were seen around dusk and seemed to be as a rule medium-sized mixes: Chows, shepherds, labs, mutts. You could hear them barking and howling, fighting over scrounged scraps in the night. They were believed to be responsible for the clearing of the bodies that could not be found as well as keeping the cat and rat population down to a manageable level.
“You don’t want to be in this neighborhood after dark,” Reid said as he drove.
Finally, the empty fuel tanker semi-truck, some fifty feet long, stopped with its lights flashing at a small roadside gas station. Its hummer escort came to a halt on the highway next to it and Stone watched with satisfaction as the security team was already fanning out in a tactical formation to watch the area as he passed in his hummer with the
Juggernaut
wrecker bringing up the rear behind him.
He toggled the small plastic walkie-talkie. “Ok gang, listen up. This is Iron Chef; give me a status report by the numbers from section 1 to 4.”
“Salt 1, Iron Chef. We are picking through what’s left over here. Not a lot of useful stuff. But no Romeo-Alphas around,” came the voice of the MP Corporal that was in charge of the group looting the sporting goods store.
“Iron Chef, Salt 2, report.”
“Salt 2 here, we are good, sir. Lots of rats everywhere and had to splash a Romeo-Alpha but we are loading what we can,” said the sergeant at the department store with the sound of shovels and rakes rattling into the bed of a steel-boxed dump truck behind him.
“Salt 3, we’re solid, sir. We have located a pallet of Dr. Pepper. I repeat we have the soda secured. Good times.”
Stone looked at Reid who was behind the driver’s seat, his head swiveling left and right looking for threats. “Friggin’ jokers here.”
“Your idea to let them come, Captain,” Reid muttered in reply.
“They scored us the dump trucks. It was kind of a no-brainer.”
The radio crackled again. “Salt 4 here, we are in the building and it’s good. May need assistance,” said the team at the commodities warehouse.
“Roger, everyone. Sugar-1, have you started pumping yet?” Stone asked.
The radio keyed up and the sound of a generator running loud in the background all but muffled the announcement from the tanker truck driver that he had the homemade pump that Doug had built sucking fifty gallons per minute of gasoline from the full ground tanks at the gas station into the empty tanker. According to depth plumbs and scratchpad math, they had estimated that the tanks at the station could have 20,000 gallons of fuel under its parking lot.
At the agreed upon point, the
Juggernaut
and Stone’s hummer stopped in the middle of Highway 59. They had passed through Foley and Summerdale and sat at the crossroads with Highway 104 surrounded by ancient pecan orchards on both sides. Stone, Reid, the four MPs with them, and the
Juggernaut’s
driver stood around their silent vehicles and watched in each direction for movement. They were to be the quick response force for the five teams spread out now seven miles behind them and the Rough Riders still two miles down the highway.
After seeing no activity, the wrecker driver left the roadway and started gathering fat pecans that had fallen from the trees. In a half-hour, he had filled a plastic bag with nuts, which he then commenced to crack with a ballpeen hammer and shove in his mouth.
One of the MPs took advantage of the afternoon boredom to make a spread of the pecans with some MRE peanut butter and some crackers. Soldiers are Ph.D.s on making a meal out of the most random combinations of items. Stone let each of his MPs in turn take their swing at the field after their puppy dog eyes beat him down.
Finally, he and Reid walked slowly out into the grove and stuffed the billowing cargo pockets on their battle uniforms with smooth brown pecans plucked from the tall grass and dry leaves.
“Jenny would love it out here. We should have brought her,” Reid said, bending over by a tree truck to retrieve an especially fat nut.
Stone did not reply but only walked on, dragging his bad leg over the uneven ground in places. He was deep in thought about other times and places. In his mind, he was in a field of mimosa trees along Weeks Bay with a girl he should have asked out, then in a grove of Date palms in Iraq, then by the monument to a tulip tree at Walter Reed on crutches.
Reid pointed to a pecan tree at the end of the field. “That tree about 1500m north…it’s got cancer, see? Tree cancer,” the First Sergeant said. “A tree is all long semi-strait lines, that one has a man-sized rounded cancer at the base of the trunk.”
Stone froze in his tracks and looked at the tree in question. Sure enough, a figure lowly crawled away from it and was swallowed up in the wood line beyond. Stone glassed the spot with his binoculars and saw a small piece of tan plastic with black-stenciled writing glint in the sun briefly.
“Tree cancer that eats MREs,” Stone said as he passed the binos to Reid.
“Baby Jesus on roller skates,” Reid said as he slowly started walking backwards towards the road.
They withdrew from the pecan grove and did not venture back.
In all they sat on the roadside checkpoint for almost three hours, doing radio checks every thirty minutes with the scattered teams to their north and south. The Soda and Salt teams finished with their work and fell back towards the gas station where they reformed a perimeter with the Sugar team who was still slowly syphoning fuel from the ground.
Ever felt funny about using a public toilet? How about trying to pop a squat in an open field while keeping your rifle handy in case some undead prick comes and tries to eat your asshole off? The tactical mindset involved in that is unlike anything you ever had to deal with in your life. It is pretty much unlike anything anyone else has ever had to deal with in their life until then either.
Finally, as the noon sun climbed directly overhead, Stone made a twirling sign in the air with his hand. “Let’s fall back to the station, and wait for Sugar 1 to finish.”
Reid tried to call in the Rough Riders who were operating two miles north of them almost to Robertsdale but got only static. After four more calls and no response, Stone ordered Reid to fall back with the
Juggernaut
while he and two MPs went forward in the command hummer to see if they could make contact.
The First Sergeant was enlightening Stone with a well-developed vocabulary about his faith in the mission brief when the sound of a single motorcycle approaching at a high rate of speed whined far to the north. The defenders of the roadblock took positions around their vehicles and made ready to defend it from anything that came down the road.