Assuming Room Temperature (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 3) (7 page)

George’s counterpart smiled. “Well, sure you can.”

Mel pointed through the open dock door. “What the heck is that?”

Rae followed the girl’s gesture and laughed. “Ah, yes.
That
. That, my girl, is a MATTOC. That stands for ‘Mobile Armored Troop Transport and Command’ vehicle. It’s our primary mode transportation and sometimes home. Her name is the Screamin’ Mimi.”

The vehicle that sat at the opposite end of the garage was massive. Almost as long as those triple-trailer, eighteen wheeler trucks had been before the outbreak, though not as tall. It had enormous all-terrain tires that provided a full three feet of clearance between the bottom of its heavily armored hull and the ground, and its axles were as thick as the filthy girl’s waist. The transport was segmented like a trio of subway cars—which would presumably allow it to make turns easily without having to jockey around—and there were no visible windows, save in the lead drive section. Its nose was an eight foot tall, vertical wedge, like a snowplow, which flowed seamlessly into its main body. Mel had no problem envisioning that blade pushing aside the dead, good sized automobile wrecks, and maybe even ramming its way through a cinder-block wall.

As she followed Kat and Rae to the Screamin’ Mimi’s rear, clam shell-style hatch, the pretty brunette explained some its added benefits. “This vehicle was originally designed for use during possible civil unrest, when everyone was flipping out over Y2K in the late 90’s. The technical term for it is a MATTOC That stands for: Mobile Armored Troop Transport and Command. It can hold nearly a month’s worth of food which we resupply periodically from caches along our route west, enough ammunition to take over a small country, and has room inside to sleep twelve in relative comfort.”

“Why is it pink?” Mel asked incredulously.

“Well, from what I’m told, the SEP skin outer coating—that means Synthetically Electrified Polymer, by the way—could only be produced in one color. That would be ugly-as-sin, lawn-flamingo, Pepto-Bismol pink.” Rae laughed as they stepped close to the rear hatch. “Run your hand across the hull. Don’t lean against it, just brush it.”

The teen did as Rae instructed. “It feels slick.”

Kat nodded. “That stuff was produced by NASA, believe it or not. Once it’s applied? It dries into an almost frictionless surface. If you tried to stand on top of the Mimi, you’d just slide right off. Nothing clings to it, which is a good thing really, considering we all know how sticky zombie goop is. I’ve had to toss almost a dozen of my best Hello Kitty shirts because I couldn’t get the icky stuff out of the fabric.”

Mel laughed and Rae went on. “Our blue-haired friend here has the right of it. The SEP skin is virtually impervious to damage. Bullets, rocket propelled grenades, pretty much anything short of a nuclear bomb—
maybe
even an armor piercing shell from a Mark-8 battleship gun—just bounces right off. The infected can’t get a grip on it either, let alone penetrate its surface.”

“So the zombies attack and you can just stay inside? That’s amazing!” Mel followed the two women up into the transport and ogled at the pair of motorcycles strapped to its hull on the right, just inside the hatch. Large storage lockers lined the starboard side as well, competing for space with a small medical station. The port side (or left) hull was lined two-high with seven-foot long, horizontal hatches that resembled oversized coffins. “What are these?”

“Sleeping bunks.” Rae confirmed as the three continued on into the second module. They passed through a pair of double-thick, quick-locking, airtight, steel hatches, each
more
than capable of sealing off the cabins beyond, then moved yet deeper into the armored machine. “Strange, I know. The engineers modeled them after budget-style rooms in Japanese hotels, which are really just like oversized coffins. They’re better than rolling out a mummy bag on the floor, but just barely.”

“That’s debatable,” Kat murmured. Personally, she hated being confined in the bunks, and actually
did
sack out on the floor near the Mimi’s rear hatch on one of Foster’s extra sleeping bags.

Mel continued to follow them into the tight confines of the drive unit at the front of the vehicle. She wasn’t surprised to find it looked much like the rest of the rolling fortress. Conduit lined the walls along the steel bulkhead and the awesome transport’s frame remained largely uncovered. There was a communications station on the left as they entered, possessing everything from a basic short-wave radio to a portable computer and scanner/printer set up. The girl didn’t know how much good a large database would do them, seeing that the World-Wide Web was surely a thing of the past. There were six comfortable looking swivel chairs in the module; two at the communications station, two on a small slightly raised platform, and a navigator’s seat in front beside the driver’s position. The latter pair of seats were currently occupied by a very pretty, green-haired girl around the age of twenty, and a burly, older man who looked to be in his late sixties or seventies. Both were cursing up a storm as they argued how to best optimize the transport’s interior, hopefully providing their group with more space.

“Bee, I don’t want that stupid-ass thing up here in the cab with us!” the man fumed. “We hit any major problems—like say havin’ to take the Mimi off-road for a bit—then it’ll just bounce around the compartment, an’ I don’ wanna get smacked in the damn face with it while I’m drivin’!”

“You’re getting really fucking whiny as you get older, Uncle George.” The young woman brushed a few strands out of her face that had escaped one of her pair of long, green pig-tails. “Fine. I’ll lag-bolt my I-Home to the dash. That way you won’t have to worry about your precious nose being broken
again
, okay? Jeez.”

“And just what’s wrong with the music on my cassette tapes?” George demanded.

“Um. It’s older than dirt? Like you? And all of it sucks?”

The older man shook his head. “I can’t believe we’re related.”

Kat suppressed a giggle as Rae coughed politely, which caused the bickering pair to swivel their chairs around. “Guys? I thought you might want to know Kat and the others are back and they found a survivor. This is Mel. Can the two of you save the wrangling for Dr. Phil and take a minute to say hello?”

The man snorted, fished inside the breast pocket of his shirt for a moment, and then pulled out a cigar. He put it between his teeth and lit it with a wooden match. That he stuck to life against his
cheek
. The fragrant smell of Cuban tobacco wafted through the cabin to tickle Mel’s nose, but it was an oddly comforting aroma. Then the rough looking man studied her for a minute.

“Hi’ya kid.” He said finally. “Don’t mind us. Me and the niece here don’t agree on much—”

“That’s
an understatement.” The green-haired girl grumbled.

“—
but
, you show me a family that don’t argue? I’ll show you one that only sees each other every so often. Like say once a year. During the holidays or somethin’.” He rose and stuck out a sandpaper rough hand for Mel to shake. “I’m George Foster, United States Navy. Retired now, thanks to our smelly-ass friends walking around out there.”

George was a stocky, muscular man of average height, with a head-full of close-trimmed, long-gone-to-gray hair. He wasn’t fat by any means, he simply had the beefy look prominent in some males after a hard life full of sweat and physical exertion. Foster still had a thick chest, along with large biceps that bulged under his Army-green undershirt, and the man’s scarred forearms were rock hard. He’d been Jake’s landlord and owned the building the journalist had lived it, prior to the outbreak. That had only been his cover though. George Montgomery Foster was what those in the military called a “fixer”.

Fixers maintained the countries secure safe-houses. They also worked both within the United States and abroad with Special Forces units around the globe. After a career in the Navy, George had leapt at the chance to keep “killin’ things an’ breakin’ people” as he put it, and become a domestic operative. He’d taken part in some of the dirtiest, most dangerous missions the US Government could devise, and had killed more scumbags than most would like to believe freely walked the face of the Earth at any
given moment.

Mel smiled meekly and shook his hand. “Hi. Um. Yeah.”

“So you been alone out there, kid?” He asked, not really noticing how uncomfortable the girl was around new people after months of terror-punctuated isolation. “No family? Nobody else?”

The teen shook her head.

Foster scratched his stubbled cheek. “How the hell did you manage that? We been doin’ good just to keep our asses from getting’ chomped, and we got a shit-load of weaponry. Can’t imagine how hard it was for you, bein’ on your own and all.”

“Uh.”

George frowned as Mel attempted to speak and gave her a curious look. “What? Cat got yer’ tongue? Speak up, girl.”

Mel tried to talk. She really did. The words just wouldn’t come out. Instead, she stood, meekly looking down at her dirty cross-trainers.

“Well. That concludes the
insensitive jackass
portion of our programming.” Foster’s niece stood and brushed her hands on her jeans. “Hey Mel, I’m Beatrix. Just call me Bee, everyone does. Mr. Charm here never quite grasped the concept that
normal
people don’t spend their lives with an M4 assault rifle in one hand, and a vodka martini in the other.”

Despite Foster’s unamused glance—which Bee ignored—Mel giggled briefly.

“I—I hate to ask, but Kat and the others said you guys had...Um, food?” The smudge-faced teen looked at her shoes again. “All I’ve had to eat... Well, I had some fruit cups earlier, but—”

Bee crossed her arm, then gave Kat and Rae a squinty-eyed gaze. “Of course we do! Did these two not get you anything yet?”

“I was going to do that next,” Kat interjected, raising one finger. “
Someone
made a big deal about how George was having a snit-fit because we’d been out of radio contact though, so—”

Rae glared at the pretty Asian. “Hey! Don’t try to throw
me
under the bus just because—”

“Okay! Mel, come with me. Let’s get some eats in you.” Bee wrinkled her nose. “Afterward, I’ll grab you a bar of Zest. Not trying to be rude here, girlfriend. I understand you’ve been alone for months, but damn. It’s
lo-o-ong
past time for a shower. Then we’ll go through our stores in the back and find you some duds. Clothes that don’t smell as if they’ve been worn by a ‘Ded-header’ for the last few dozen or so concerts, ‘kay?”

Mel nodded, then followed the still-babbling Bee back toward the rear of the Mimi and the survivors’ supply of Government-issue nutrition. More specifically, the cases and cases of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) that they’d packed into the transport’s primary storage units.

“Just out of curiosity,” Bee continued as they left the drive compartment, “What
is
your natural hair color? It’s a little hard to tell under all the grit.”

Rae sighed as the younger woman’s voice continued to recede. “Sometimes I wonder about your niece, George. Then sometimes I’m sure.”

“I don’t see anything wrong with her.” Kat raised one eyebrow in confusion.

“You wouldn’t.” Rae sniffed.

Kat was about to initiate hostilities when Foster growled, “Girls? Can the two of ya’ give it a rest for a while? I’m too old—and way too goddamn sweaty, after bein’ stuck in this giant, fuckin’ sauna all damn morning—to listen to the pair of you carp at each other like a pair a’ harpies today.”

George was telling the truth. With no electricity to run the building’s air conditioning units, the garage and Post Office were beginning to get more than a bit stuffy in the midday sun. All they could do was stay hydrated, keep watch for any infected approaching the barricades with the rest of the survivors, and take turns going to the gravity fed showers in pairs.

“Harpies?” Kat asked mildly.

Rae didn’t sound pleased by Foster’s comment either. “And to think, I used to wonder why someone with all of your technical and tactical knowledge hadn’t been snapped up by a big-breasted bimbo, somewhere over the course of your career.”

“We all have ta’ deal with life’s little disappointments,” George told her wryly, and taking a healthy puff from his Cuban, exhaled fragrant smoke toward the transport’s ceiling. “While we’re on the topic; what part of ‘check in every hour’ was unclear to you... Cho?”

“I already got a scolding from Rae.” The ninja-girl really, really didn’t want to go through yet another lecture about “operational procedures”. She needed to fill the Hummer’s gas tank from the diesel pump at the rear of the garage interior, distribute the “feminine supplies” they’d stopped for, clean her sword, then her pistol, and then herself too. Her team had only been back maybe a half hour, and she was already funky from riding around in the Troll for half the day (without air conditioning), never mind fighting a pack of infected.

Foster wasn’t appeased. “Dammit, Cho. I
told
you to keep in contact! What if the fuckin’ Humvee broke down and—”

“Then Rae would be able to tell from the tracking device she installed before the outbreak, and you guys could come get us.” Kat said amicably. She took a seat in one of the swivel chairs on the cab’s raised platform and began kicking her feet easily.

“Alright, what if you’d run outta gas—” George began.

“Again. Tracking device?” She began spinning the seat, leaning back as it turned round-and-round, to look at the hull above.

George pressed on. “Then what about if one of ya’ got bit? Or hurt? What—”

“Then we would have radioed in.” Kat smiled innocently at the gray-haired fixer.

Her response obviously caught him flat-footed, because George began waving his arms and sputtered incoherently.

Kat sighed. “Look, George. I know you worry about us when—”

The fixer laughed. “Worry about the Hummer? Yes. You? Not so much. When we agreed to make this little jaunt, I thought everyone was pretty goddamn clear, on just how goddamn
dangerous
roaming around out here, with the goddamn infected trying to
eat
us, would be. I knew I should’a told them boys it wasn’t a goddamn workable solution!”