It took us only two minutes to make the trek from the canal to their base, if you could call it that. It was a shoddily put together base of operations if I’ve ever seen one. There was a temporary fence haphazardly put together around a large parking lot. Campfires burned throughout the main thoroughfare and men of all ages milled about. Some were cooking and some were chopping wood, but others looked to be just talking and socializing. Out of the maybe forty or so men, only about ten of them looked to be visibly armed.
I noticed immediately that it was the ones that wore leather and had the MC colors emblazoned on their jackets that were packing. I also noticed a trailer in the corner of the lot that seemed to be under heavy guard and was leaking some kind of smoke from a vent in the top.
I took solace in the fact that they only allowed the MC guys to carry. It was a good thing for me anyway; soldier versus citizen would be very easy to spot if the bad guys wore patches declaring their bad-guy-ness.
The truck pulled into a back lot that wasn’t part of the fenced area and there didn’t seem to be anyone guarding this area. U1 and U2 pulled us from the back of the truck and pushed us forward toward what was once the grocery store. There was an armed guard at the entrance to the building, but he moved aside when Spider gave him some sort of hand signal.
“Senior’s gonna want to see this haul, he in his office?” Spider asked the guard, who just nodded an affirmative as we pushed past.
I used to shop at this grocery when I lived in the area. It was one of those fancy ones, with everything organic and wine tastings on the weekends. Now it was the church of an outlaw biker gang, specializing in human trafficking. The grocery, which was once pristine and posh, had been cleared out and was now peppered with hastily thrown up “rooms” which were only shelves with tarps draped between them. It looked like a bunch of Boy Scouts had made forts. Silly, but in reality each one was home to another biker, and every biker meant a potential threat.
Senior’s “office” was a raised area that had once been customer service. There were glass walls that cut it off from the main area and it looked like they had strung up bed sheets to give him privacy when he needed it. Right now they were pulled to the side and who I assumed was the man in question, sat like a king looking down at his domain. He was seated in front of the office on the high counter that was set up around the glass area. A few leather-clad bikers surrounded him, pouring shots and smoking cigarettes, talking loudly as one scantily clad girl acted like everything they said was the funniest thing ever, pouring them something out of a jug and sashaying around in nothing but a pair of panties and a tiny crop tee.
Everyone turned when we walked in, all eyes on me and the evil traitor next to me. I tried to take in my surroundings without looking like I was scoping out the place, but I had to play it cool like I was useless, innocent, and not a threat. The cash registers and checkout lanes were still in place, but everything else was ripped out and moved around. The store was set up differently than most grocery stores. The lanes faced an empty wall and forced consumers to go either left or right to exit the store. There was access to both parking lots of the shopping mall, east, and west, with doors placed at both sides of the store. The back lot, or west lot, was the one that they hadn’t gated and was only a few lanes of parking spots that led into a residential area. The east lot was the gated area, a large expanse that fed other stores and could be accessed from two major roads.
The west door would be the easiest point of exit if I managed to get around the crew inside the store. They should have gated the back lot also, but they were using it for quick access to vehicles, which were parked along the back wall of the store. Their laziness would work out well in the long game, or so I hoped. I felt a tingling of hope take residence in my gut.
I could get out of here
.
“Whatcha have here?” asked the man that was clearly the leader, judging by his confidence and how the other bikers seemed to orbit him. He jumped off of the counter, his boots making a loud thump on the linoleum floor. He strode quickly over to us to inspect the new arrivals. He had a patch on his right shoulder that proclaimed him President and 100% Southern Clan which confirmed his dictatorship role. I didn’t know much about motorcycle clubs, but I knew enough to recognize some of his patches. The 1% patch on his vest declared his club in the outlaw group, which was usually tied to criminal activity and at the very least misogynist and often racist behavior.
Like that wasn’t obvious from this set-up though.
His club was obviously running a sex slavery ring and from the look of the countertop and the various implements and powder, they were also doing a ton of drugs. I would bet money that the trailer outside was their own personal chemistry lab.
A little apocalypse meth cooking, fun for one and all
. If I didn’t get the fuck out of here I might be roadkill if this place blew up in a meth-plosion, which I didn’t need to worry about on top of all the other crap. The shit just kept getting thicker.
“Girls for trade, brother. These two want food for two girls.” Spider stepped up and did some lame fist bump with the president.
“Where’d ya get these girls, boys?” Brandon directed his attention at U2.
“Off Highway 90, they were beating the crap out of each other,” he answered.
“Were they now?” he laughed, and it was actually a pretty jovial laugh for a man of his nature. I was reticent to admit that he was a rather handsome older man, even if he was obviously a supreme dick. He had a distinguished look to him that would fit well in a board room and a suit…instead of the leathers he wore.
“Why were you pretty little things beating the crap out of each other?” He looked at Clara’s leg and raised a brow.
“She was pissed ‘cause I was fucking the guy she wanted,” I said giving a pointed look in Clara’s direction, telling her clearly, “shut the fuck up, I got this.”
“And where is this guy you were fucking?” he asked.
“They’re holed up somewhere off of Chef Menteur, out near Slidell. We haven’t located them…
yet
. Only a few guys, but they got a lot of guns,” U2 spoke up, cutting off anything I was going to say.
“How many men?” He looked at me this time. I did a quick calculation, the trailer trash would know about maybe six of us, including me.
“Five,” I said quickly.
“They gonna come lookin’ for you two?” he asked me.
“Probably not,” I said shrugging my shoulders. “This one kinda screwed them over when we left.” I cocked my thumb at Clara who was staring big-eyed and dumb at me.
“You don’t say. They have a lot of guns, though, what we talking about?” He directed this question at U1 and U2, but I answered.
“They got some rifles off of a few dead National Guardsmen, along with a Hummer, no ammo though. Why?” I tried to make my voice shrill, higher pitched than usual, a little less assertive than my regular tone. I didn’t know if the theatrics would work, but at this point anything was better than the truth. If these guys found out we were coming from a well-fortified compound of skilled mercenaries, I might not make it through the night.
“We got that here too, probably a little more than a few, though,” he chuckled all superior.
“You understand what we’re doing here, ladies? These boys here are selling you to us, that means you’ll be
our
property. You’ll do as we tell you, you’ll fuck who we tell you, you won’t throw a hissy because you don’t get your way. And we ain’t buying you because of your conversation skills.” He stepped up until his face was only inches from mine and I dropped my eyes to stare at my bare feet.
One, two, three, four…stay calm.
Clara was now sobbing. I was second guessing myself. Should I be crying too, playing the wilting flower? I didn’t think I could force myself to cry. I was barely restraining myself from head-butting this piece of shit.
“If you don’t perform, you’ll die. Simple. You live to serve. You fuck, we feed you. Simple. I’ll give you three cases for this one.” He stepped back and pointed at me. “One case for buckets here.” He dismissed Clara with a wave.
“Nah, that ain’t enough, Sen…uh, Brandon. That’s only two weeks of food for us.”
“They ain’t worth more than that.” Senior, whose real name must be Brandon, spit on the linoleum floor and turned, they were dismissed. Such a normal name for such a raunchy animal.
“This one is, she’s worth at least five cases, just her.” He gestured to me, his voice raised in an angry tone. “Look at her tits, have you seen her tits? And she’s young, probably ain’t even twenty-one yet. And you’ll get some work out of this one when she heals,” he pointed to Clara, “She’s pretty, just needs a little time on her back.”
Senior turned, his lips pulled back in a grimace, but enjoyment sparkled behind his gaze, he liked to barter. “Six, that’s it.”
“Fine.” U2 nodded his head, but looked disappointed.
“Load ‘em up, Spider, and get these two citizens out of my sight.” He dismissed U1 and U2 with a wave of his hand and turned back to the party going on at the counter. He sauntered up to the counter, grabbed the girl’s ass, all up in the crack, leaned over, snorted something up his nose and turned back to face us.
“I’m claiming this one as my property,” he declared as he pointed to me. “You hear that bitch, you belong to me? What I say, you do it, or I give you up for a gang. You know what that means?”
ZACH
The camps along Highway 90 led from elitist vacation homes to industrial enterprises and then to extremely poor areas in the blink of an eye. I knew the area the kid spoke of, Blake and I had done some work for a contractor in the area before Z hit.
If the camp couldn’t be seen from the highway though, it posed a challenge.
“We should take to the water.” I pulled the SUV we were in over to the side of the road. We were still in Venetian Isles, where every house had a boat in a slip behind the house. We could go aquatic in a snap.
“Something small that we can row if it requires silence,” Blake said and I agreed with him.
We exited our vehicle and I drew my weapon, affixing the silencer onto its end for stealth.
The neighborhood was posh, large houses towering over us on raised pilings. They were right next door to each other though, giving the impression of an actual neighborhood instead of the usual fishing camps, which were separated by a good expanse of marsh and took up a few acres.
Custom dredged canals fed through the neighborhood, following the winding streets and giving the houses a sense of living in a marina instead of a suburb. The first two houses had large boats, raised out of the water on their lifts. We couldn’t use these.
We hit pay dirt at the next house, finding a few jet skis that ran on electric power. Their charges were about halfway full, which would give us a good 2 hours at max on them if we didn’t push them too hard. The fact that they were the new electric kind would keep the sound down and allow us to get close to the shoreline without being heard.
“Rich eco-friendly people sure prove useful in the apocalypse,” Blake laughed as we pushed the things into the water and climbed aboard.
“Too bad they probably died in their Prius out on I-10,” I responded.
“It says this thing can go up to 50 miles per hour, damn, I want to keep mine. If we could hook it up to a solar power this would be perfect for clean-up.”
“Keep your head in the game,” I hissed, knowing my comment was unfair, but I wasn’t in the mood to hear Blake rattle on about a cool new toy. These were to get us to the big yellow camp, anything else was lagniappe.
“My head is in the game, dickhead,” he shot back, but got quiet after, which is all I wanted. I had no idea what kind of people we were dealing with. They seemed to be sloppy, but I didn’t want to underestimate them. If I made one more mistake we could lose Alexis forever.
We pulled out of Venetian Isles’ private waterways and into the lake, hugging the shoreline and heading west. The sun was still high in the sky, beating down on my back. I was dressed in full battle dress, which didn’t make for great sea-worthy attire, but I hadn’t expected to go into the water. Stupid move, as usual. I was making a habit of that lately.
The lake was calm, there was hardly any wind, which aided us in moving quickly, but didn’t do anything to mask the sound of our approach. It couldn’t be helped. Luckily the lap of the water on the machine and the wake it made could be explained by a lot of things other than what it was. The kid had mentioned a yellow camp and after about fifteen minutes of hugging the shore we saw the peak of a second story rising over the marsh grass.
I signaled for Blake and pulled into the overgrown shoreline, he followed behind me. The water was only a few inches deep and the grass was high enough to provide significant cover, so we crouched low and pushed closer to the house.