Winter's Edge: A Post Apocalyptic/Dystopian Adventure (Outzone Drifter Series Book 1) (8 page)

As if to herald their pronouncements, Brogan heard a volley of shots ring out from an automatic weapon somewhere ahead. From inside the bus, it was hard to tell how far away they were.

“Somebody shooting at us already?” Staunton said, peering out the window. “Boy, they couldn’t wait, could they?”

Brogan doubted the gunfire was aimed at them. “I don’t think so,” he said. “There’s easier prey out there than us.”

A moment later, the gunfire intensified as more weapons joined in. The picture of a terrified mother and teenage girl flashed into Brogan’s mind. They quickly morphed into the faces of his own wife and daughter, and his stomach bunched up into a hard knot.

Something inside him gave way. Without being able to help himself, he stood up and walked up toward the front of the bus.

“Hey, what the hell are you doing?” the conductor yelled at him angrily, rising from his seat. He stepped out into the aisle and blocked Brogan’s way. “Get back to your seat, pal. This ain’t no goddamned sightseeing tour.”

Brogan pushed the conductor back roughly into his seat, then strode up to the front of the bus, staring out the front window.

Heading west, the bus was moving fast, rumbling down an unpaved road across a small plain surrounded by a series of low-lying hills. To the north, he could make out the snowy peaks of Wolf Mountain. Twenty yards ahead, the back fender of the lead technical bounced up and down on the road’s uneven surface, and in the driver’s side mirror, Brogan spotted the second pickup following close behind.

To either side of the road, interspersed between sparse grassland, stood clusters of rundown tin-roofed shacks made of bare cinderblock. Few had proper windows, and instead filthy semi-transparent plastic sheets were nailed across their frames. Cole had told Brogan that the inhabitants of these squalid dwellings took in the bandits who roamed the plains, allowing them to set up ambushes in return for a little money. Before the border closed, this had been a thriving area. Many Outzoners who had worked as day laborers in New Haven’s industrial zones had lived here. It hadn’t taken long for the place to become rundown and stripped of anything valuable.

Fifty yards ahead, on the side of the road, Brogan spotted somebody sprawled face down in the mud. As the bus passed by, he recognized the light tan jacket of one of the men he had seen earlier in the enclosure. There was no sign of his wife, nor the rest of the group.

Then he spotted them. To the left, running down a sloping hill toward a derelict building a few hundred yards from the roadside, its front door and windows long since removed and its roof torn off.

At the front of the group, running as fast as they could, Brogan spotted the two wives and the teenage girl. Following them, stumbling under the weight of their packs, were three men. Ten yards behind them, bringing up the rear, was the tall man. He fired his rifle across to his right as he ran. He moved awkwardly, and Brogan saw he had been injured.

From the upper window of a house up at the roadside, Brogan caught a flash of gunfire and one of the three men stumbled, then fell to the ground. The group had been caught in a classic ambush. From their elevated positions to either side of the road, the bandits had fired down on them without the risk of hitting each other in the crossfire, and the group had been forced off the road and down the hill. He knew the move wouldn’t keep them alive very much longer.

The conductor had followed Brogan up the aisle and now stood beside him, staring out the window. “Can’t say they weren’t warned,” he said. “Damn fools deserve everything they get. Especially the big one.”

“How about the women?” Brogan asked. “They deserve everything they get too?”

An unpleasant smile came over the conductor’s face. “The bandits won’t shoot them, so long as they don’t handle a gun,” he said. “But they’re going to get it, whether they deserve it or not. What’s left of them will be sold up north to the slavers.”

The bus had drawn level with the fleeing group. With a sense of relief, Brogan saw the three women make it into the shack, immediately ducking out of sight. Inside the bus, the rest of the passengers could see what was happening now, and peered out their windows. Brogan heard cries of concern from some of the women.

“Stop! We’ve got to help!” a voice yelled out. “We can’t just leave them here.”

“This bus won’t be stopping anywhere, lady,” the conductor said flatly, turning his head around. “It’s too dangerous out there. Those people made their choice.”

Ignoring the conductor’s comment, Brogan said to the driver, “Hey mister, pull up right here,” he said. “We can help them make a break for it.”

“
Amigo
, I have to make this run every week. Like hell we’re stopping,” the driver said, barely glancing at Brogan as the bus kept on straight without slowing. “Now you know why the fare costs so much. I don’t hear nobody complaining about that now. Hey—what the hell!”

Brogan had pulled one of the Glocks from his holster and pointed it at the driver. “Mister, I said stop the bus.”

The startled driver stared at him. Brogan stuck the pistol under his ear. “Do it!” he roared. “Or I’ll blow your damned brains out and drive it myself.”

The driver slammed his foot on the brakes and brought the bus to a skidding halt. Out of the corner of his eye, Brogan caught the conductor reaching for his pistol. He swiveled the Glock around toward him.

“Don’t even think about it, fellah,” a deep voice growled from behind him.

Tickling the back of the conductor’s head was the muzzle of a nine-millimeter Sig Sauer pistol. Its owner, Dan Staunton.

Brogan signaled his thanks to Staunton, then turned back to the driver. “Turn this thing around,” he ordered.

The driver shook his head in disbelief, then drove the bus slowly forward to where the road widened by a grass verge, and started making a three point turn.

Brogan looked down the aisle, facing the passengers staring at him open-mouthed.

“Listen up, everybody. We’re going back to help those people. Our priority is the women. Anyone else is a bonus. Those that got rifles or pistols, get them out. We’ll need shooters on both sides of the bus. Get yourselves into position, armed and ready.”

With a busy whir, all around the bus both men and women began pulling out their rifle cases and checking their weapons. While they prepared, something John Cole told him the other day popped into Brogan’s mind. Seemed like his friend was right. There
were
good people in the Outzone.

They got back in under two minutes. As they approached the shack three hundred yards to their right, Brogan spotted several men making their way down the slope toward it. They moved confidently, using the cover of trees and a few abandoned vehicles to get into position. Brogan could tell they had done this a dozen times before.

He tapped the driver on the shoulder and pointed past him out the window. “You need to get off the road here,” he said. “We’ve got to get closer to them.”

The driver slowed the bus to a crawl. He looked across at Brogan, his eyes widening. “Are you crazy, mister? We’ll bust an axle for sure.”

“Just do it.”

The driver muttered something under his breath then, swinging the steering wheel hard to his right, he drove the bus over the bank and down the hill, bouncing violently over the rough terrain and jostling everyone on board.

While Staunton kept an eye on the conductor and driver, Brogan went back down the aisle to his seat. He pulled down his rifle case from the rack and took out his HK419 rifle. Grabbing a 20-round magazine, he loaded it and charged a round in the chamber.

It was a weapon he had used many times before. Though not as accurate as a bolt-action rifle, it was effective up to twelve hundred meters and perfect for urban combat, allowing a shooter to stay sighted and continually fire on a moving target until it dropped.

He stared out the window. Up at the roadside, one of the technicals had followed them back, though careful to remain out of range. The gunner stood on the load bed staring down at them, his machine gun dangling on its mount facing in the opposite direction. It didn’t appear he intended on being much help.

At that moment, the bandits started firing at the bus. Bullets pinged off the body, then came the
thwacking
sound from a heavier caliber weapon, probably a .50-cal rifle. Now he knew why they put such heavy armor on the bus. Without it, the bullets would easily pierce it. From inside the bus, the passengers returned fire.

They had been moving slowly down the hill across rough scrubland. Suddenly the bus swung around hard to the right and came to a stop parallel to the shack, still over a hundred yards away.

“Hey, keep going!” Brogan shouted up to the driver. “We’re not close enough yet.”

“That’s as far as I can take you!” the driver yelled back. “That’s a waterlogged hollow straight ahead. Any farther, we’re gonna get stuck in it.”

Brogan stared out the window and scanned the ground ahead of him. What the driver said was true. A few yards away, the land dipped down into a shallow hollow, and he could make out dark pools of water among the cattails. The bus would never get out of there; its wheels would skid helplessly in the mud.

“Okay!” Brogan shouted. “This’ll have to do.”

Inside the shack, he spotted someone at the window. At least now, those trapped inside knew help had arrived.

With the bus no longer in motion, it made shooting easier. Soon the bandits were pinned down behind the trees to either side of the shack. Brogan crossed the aisle to the far window and scoured the hillside, checking out what was coming from behind them. He used the butt of his rifle to smash out the window, poked the muzzle out through the metal grill, then crouched down on the seat.

He trained his weapon up toward the roadside, to a house less than two hundred yards away where he spotted a muzzle flash. Peering through the rifle’s scope, he tracked across to an upstairs window.

The window was open and a man stood in full view, a bolt-action hunting rifle at his shoulder. Brogan made him out clearly through the eight-power scope, a skinny guy wearing a filthy baseball cap and a week’s worth of gray stubble on his sallow face.

It was an easy shot. Brogan did a quick calculation to account for the upward elevation, aimed the reticle crosshairs at the upper part of the man’s chest, exhaled slowly, and squeezed the trigger. There was a sharp crack, then he felt the soft kick of the rifle’s recoil in his shoulder. Through the scope he watched the man stagger back, then fall, dropping out of sight below the window ledge.

Years of training kicked in as Brogan went through a series of well-practiced moves. Less than a hundred yards away, two men broke cover from the back of a house built halfway down the hill and started running down the slope, rifles clutched in their hands.

Brogan knew where they were going. Thirty yards away, he spotted the rusting body of an old 8-wheeler truck. It had been stripped down, its wheels, windscreen, and doors all removed. From its position, a shooter would have a clear view from the entrance of the shack all the way to the door of the bus. Anybody running out would be ripped apart.

Cool and smooth, he shifted his aim and targeted the front man’s center mass. He shot…and missed, shot again, and a bullet caught the man under the ribs. His legs buckled and he stumbled on the uneven ground, somehow managing to stay on his feet. Brogan adjusted his aim.
Crack!
He hit him in the neck. A pink mist of blood and body tissue sprayed into the air. The man was dead before his body hit to the ground.

Next target
. Brogan swiveled his rifle to the left. He had the range now, squeezed the trigger, and another 7.62mm NATO round spat out of the HK419. It caught the man in the thigh. He fell onto one knee, then got up again, began half running, half hobbling toward the abandoned truck, his face jerked up toward the sky in a painful grimace.

He made it three more yards. Brogan caught him in the reticle’s crosshairs, aimed, and pulled the trigger. A moment later the man fell face forward on the ground and didn’t move again. Not even a twitch.

Three men dead in less than sixty seconds.

“Holy shit, mister. That’s some shooting!”

Brogan turned to see a lean young man with a tight crew-cut squatting down on his haunches in the aisle, staring past him out the window. Brogan recognized him as one of the two released convicts. The prison pallor gave it away.

“What is it, kid?”

“I was thinking maybe you could give me a pistol….” The young man turned his head toward the back of the bus. “Somebody’s already given my brother one. No point us just sitting here twiddling our thumbs.”

Brogan thought quickly. There were plenty of armed men on board to make sure he’d get his pistol back if any trouble arose later. He pulled back the Velcro fastener on his holster and pulled out his Glock.

“Make sure to get that back to me,” he said, handing him the weapon.

The ex-convict grabbed the Glock. “Don’t worry, there’ll be no trouble from either of us. That’s a promise.” He turned away. Keeping his head low, he hurried back down toward the rear of the bus.

The shooting had subsided somewhat. With several of their men dead, the bandits were taking stock of their situation.

Brogan called Staunton down from the front of the bus, handing him his rifle when he arrived. “You know how to use this?”

“Of course,” Staunton said, taking it from him.

Brogan handed him a spare magazine from his case. He pointed out the window. “Don’t let them get to that old truck there,” he said. “They’ll be able to pick anyone off coming out of the building, got it?”

Staunton nodded, and took his position by the window.

Brogan made his way to the front of the bus to where the conductor crouched behind one of the seats.

“Time to open the door,” Brogan said to him. “The people out there can make a dash for it while we lay down some covering fire for them.”

The conductor gave him a glowering look. “How about you open it?” he said. “Seeing as you’re the hero around here.”

Brogan stared back at him, his upper lip twitching. “How about I open it and throw your ass down the steps?” he said. “We could do with some bait.”