Forsaken World:Coming of Age (17 page)

“Well, technically, they aren’t zombies,” Lance said, getting up and tossing his bone to Dino.

Jennifer looked over her shoulder at Lance as he put his plate in the dishwasher. “If they’re not zombies, then what are they?”

“Flammable walking targets,” Lance said, walking back to the table. “Stinkers.”

Letting out a sigh, Jennifer turned back to the notebook. “In there was another file that listed possible FEMA camps, and the one in Manchester is listed. There’s another one listed in Williamsburg. In that file, he said, ‘avoid at all cost.’”

“And you found that in Doug’s file?” Lance asked, and Jennifer nodded. “I looked in that file but didn’t see that.”

“Did you look in documents? That’s where this file was at,” Jennifer said, leaning back. “He also has another file on the K hard drive that I didn’t get to look at.”

Ian stood up, shaking his head. “No, we are going to bed so we can get this scouting shit done,” he said, grabbing his plate.

“Ian, we still have to log the hundred and seventy-six houses we photographed, and I want to listen to what the computer monitored on the radio when the little dicks came charging down the valley,” Lance said as he got up.

“You two start, and we’ll clean up and come and help,” Jennifer said.

Ian and Lance headed downstairs and pulled cards from cameras. Ian sat down and started downloading pictures into numbered files for the houses. Each house was known by number and had its own file. Whenever they went out on patrol, they would take a picture. Then, they could compare it to the last one to see if anything had changed.

Lance got on the computer and pulled all transmissions around the firefight on the frequencies he knew the gang used. “Hey, tell Boss we have smoke up here east of Girdler,” a man called out, and Lance looked at the timestamp and knew that was damn near the time they had set it.

“Who’s calling?” a man answered.

“This is Bones. Tell Boss we have a big fire that just started.”

“Bones, there are fires everywhere from those gasbags.”

“Who is this so I can come down there and gut your ass?”

“It’s Don, Bones.”

“Ah, sorry Don,” Bones called back meekly, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out he was terrified. “The fire is next to the road. We may have another group trapped in a house. It may even be that group that got away two days ago.”

“That’s a lot of ‘maybes,’” Don said. “I’ll tell the boss.”

Writing the new name down, Lance continued listening and grabbed Ian’s tablet as the time stamp started getting closer to when he and Ian had seen the gang. A thought hit Lance, and he paused the computer then went back to Bones’ transmission and triangulated. When the computer gave him direction and distance, Lance plotted it out on his map. “Son of a bitch,” Lance said, looking at map.

It was a house sitting alone on a dirt road way up a draw. What scared Lance was when they had parked and watched the battle, the house was only six hundred yards over the ridge. They never planned to check it that day because it was in section two, and they still had sixty houses to check in section one.

“Ah, Ian,” Lance said, turning in his chair. “You’re never going to guess where they saw that fire from.”

Pushing away from his laptop, Ian sighed, rolled over to Lance in his chair, and looked down at the map where Lance marked it. Ian jumped up out of his chair and pointed just to the left of the mark. “Is that where we watched the battle from?”

“Yep,” Lance said, looking back at the map. “You feel like heading there tomorrow?”

“You realize that area is going to be crawling with stinkers, right?”

“Well, we know the little dicks aren’t there now,” Lance said, still looking at the map. “I would rather face the stinkers. The little dicks like to use full auto, spraying the countryside.”

“What about the rest of section one?” Ian said. “We need to finish a section before moving on.”

Lance looked at the map then over at Ian. “Okay, since this house is just over the line we have for section two, we head out to finish section one and stop by this house first.”

Ian took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Fine, and we can start on section two as well,” he said, dropping down in his chair. “I’m sure we’ll be done with section one before noon.”

“If no one is there, I want to look around it,” Lance said, opening the map program on the computer then zoomed in on the house. “That’s a big ass house to sit way up the draw all alone. Shit, it’s bigger than either of our houses, Ian.”

“I like all alone,” Ian said, rolling back to his computer. “We aren’t moving into it, so I don’t care how big the damn thing is.”

Jennifer and the girls came down, and soon, everyone was working to organize what the boys had found.

Chapter Thirteen

Raising his hand, Lance motioned for Ian to stop as Dino looked to his right. Turning to his right, Lance pulled his AR to his shoulder and soon saw the glow of a stinky moving down the draw beside them. Stinkers were warm and showed up almost the same color as humans did; where humans were a bright white, stinkers where a pale white.

Lance kept the dot on the stinker’s ear and waited for it to slow down as it walked down the draw. When the stinker paused, Lance’s AR coughed, and sixty yards away, the stinker dropped. Lowering his rifle, Lance looked down at Dino, who was panting again. “Forty-two and no misses,” Lance said over his shoulder.

“Fuck you,” Ian hissed back.

They had left the cabin an hour before sunup, and truth be told, they were petrified of driving in the darkened woods. By the time they topped the ridge behind the cabin, they came across stinkers. Thankfully, all of them were well below the ridge at different heights, walking parallel to the slope or walking down. They even found several just standing around, swaying on their feet.

Only one saw them, and it only saw Dino. They had parked on the east slope of the valley where the battle had taken place, making sure they could cross without being seen by stinkers or people. Today, they brought the thermal binoculars and a spotting scope.

As they looked out over the valley, Dino gave a soft growl to their right. They turned to see a stinker fifty yards away, coming up the slope at them with its arms out, looking at Dino. Since Ian had been scanning the valley through his scope, he just dropped his aim and pulled the trigger.

“You notice it didn’t see us,” Lance said, lifting the thermal binoculars again.

“Yeah, I noticed,” Ian said, ejecting his magazine and replacing the round. “Maybe they don’t register we’re human until we move.”

“Good thought,” Lance said, lowering the thermals. “It’s still my turn; you had your three misses.”

They headed down the draw to where Bones had called from, and the sun was only halfway up. They came to a stop in the backyard behind some large oak trees. The house was thirty yards away, and it looked much bigger in person. Ian moved over beside Lance, putting his mouth next to his ear. “Does a movie star live here?”

“I don’t know,” Lance breathed out. “I don’t see lights or hot spots.”

“Fuck that,” Ian said, patting Dino. “Dino let us down here.”

“Good point,” Lance said, standing up. “Let’s check that building on the side first.”

They trotted across the yard to a large building and looked in a window. They saw several bikes broken down in the middle of the building and looked along the walls, realizing it was a shop. In the back were stacks of boxes. Ian moved over to open a door on the side of the building, and Lance grabbed his hand. “No doors. We would booby trap a door,” he said, taking out his knife. He ran it along the window, forcing the lock open.

Lance knelt down and patted his knee for Ian to use as a step. Ian stood on it and crawled inside the window. He looked around then noticed something tied to the front door. Ian walked up but stopped, seeing a sawed off, double barrel shotgun pointed at the door with a wire tied to the knob. When someone opened it, they were in for a bad day.

He moved over to the side door and didn’t see anything. Taking a deep breath, Ian opened it, and Lance and Dino walked in. “You’re right; the front door is booby trapped. Double barrel shotgun,” Ian said, pointing.

“Shit, I would’ve booby trapped the side door, not the front,” Lance said, walking to the back. “Ian, this is boxes of food, whiskey, water, and cases of beer.”

Ian came back and looked at the stuff. “I thought they were in Pineville. I really don’t like having them this close.”

Lance stepped around the shop then over to the two motorcycles being worked on. “There is no way they can get a thousand people here.”

“Nice bikes,” Ian said, looking at the broken down engines. Grinning, he picked up a carburetor and pulled out his knife.

Lance grinned and stepped over. “What are you doing?”

“Popping the throttle valve arm,” Ian chuckled. “After they put it together and hopefully as they’re riding, the throttle will flip wide open.”

“Cool, like we did Mr. Oliver’s lawn mower?”

“No.” Ian looked up with a dark grin. “I only broke his idler needle. This is much worse, and since this goes faster, sucks to be them.”

Lance watched as Ian moved over to the other bike and did the same thing. When he was done, they left through the side door and headed toward the house. Lance eased up to the sliding glass door, looked in and didn’t see anything, then looked at the door handle on the inside. “Something’s tied to the handle,” he said, moving to his right, trying to see what it was.

“Let’s just go in a window,” Ian said, moving to the closest one.

“Go slow in case they booby trapped them as well,” Lance said as Dino growled behind them. They spun around and saw a stinker stepping out of the trees into the backyard. “Got ’em,” Lance said, snapping his AR up and pulling the trigger as the stock touched his shoulder.

The stinker had just seen them and was raising his arms when his head exploded. They moved to a window and saw security bars. “I didn’t bring a cutting torch,” Ian said.

Lance stepped out from under the roof that covered the back porch. “Ian, open the window  over the roof,” Lance said and looked around. He pulled a rolling grill over to use as a ladder, and they climbed up on the roof with Dino whining on the ground. “Dino, I’ll let you in; hold on,” Lance called out quietly.

Moving over the roof, Lance cautiously looked in the window and jerked his head back out, making Ian aim his rifle at the window. “What?” Ian hissed.

“They fucked someone up in there,” Lance said, taking a breath and pulling himself in.

Ian followed and found he was in a bedroom with a large, four-poster bed, and the bed had chains from each post with handcuffs at the end. The bed had some blood on it, but on the floor were body parts—all female. “This is fucked up,” Ian said, moving out of the room fast.

He saw Lance coming from a bedroom down the hall shaking his head. “Man, these guys are twisted in a way that even Satan would call them fucked.”

They checked the other rooms, and thankfully, only those two had bodies. There were seven bedrooms upstairs with a library that had been trashed.

When they came downstairs, Lance moved to the back sliding door and found what was tied to it. “Ah, Ian, they have a hand grenade tied to the door.”

“Fuckers don’t like company,” Ian said, moving to the side of the house where the garage was. He opened the garage and froze. “Lance, these guys really don’t have to worry about shooting on full auto.”

Lance came over and saw the four-car garage was packed with pallets of metal ammunition cans. “Holy shit, I thought we had some ammo,” Lance said, moving around Ian and looking at a paper on the side of one of the shrink-wrapped pallets. “There are eighty thousand rounds of 5.56 on this one pallet.”

Stepping back, Lance looked at the pallets stacked three high and four long. “There’s almost a million rounds in this one row,” Lance said, moving into the garage.

“Fuckers need it with the way they shoot,” Ian said, moving to the back door, and saw it had a shotgun attached to it like the shop did. Ian undid the wire from the door, opened it, and called for Dino.

Dino came running over with what looked like a smile as he ran in the door. Ian patted Dino as he went by, closed the door, and reconnected the wire.

“These motherfuckers knocked off the Army,” Lance said, coming back. “This stuff is marked for Ft. Campbell. They have 5.56, 7.62, 9mm, .45 and six pallets of fifty caliber. Ian, there’s over a hundred pallets here.”

“Yeah, and this isn’t even their base,” Ian said, looking around.

Lance glanced at his watch. “I took pictures of the ammo; let’s check the rest of the house.”

They walked back in and started going through the house. “Lance, we have our action cameras on. Do we need pictures?” Ian asked, looking at the mountain of beer cans in the TV room. The night before, they had mounted the cameras on their helmets since it had a rail system for them. They figured it couldn’t hurt.

“Yeah, they don’t have great detail,” Lance said, stepping into an office and saw a stack of radio receivers, and all of them had lights on. “What the fuck,” he said, moving over to look at them.

He flipped the light switch and blinked when they came on. Lance shut them off and moved around the desk to a map of the area on the wall loaded with push pins. A black push pin was shoved in the map where they were at in the house. Looking over the map, Lance saw four more black push pins with another one inside the cabins three-mile zone.

Where the survivalists were had a green pin, and Lance looked around but didn’t see any more. He pulled out his camera and took a bunch of pictures of the map. He saw yellow, white, a few blue, a few silver, and a shit load of red pins but couldn’t figure out what they meant. Satisfied he had good pictures of the map, Lance looked the desk over.

A nice laptop sat on the desk, and Lance really doubted it belonged to the bikers. Then he thought about it, opened it up, and saw a password protected screen with two bones forming an X. “Bikers that use computers? No way,” he said, looking at it. “Oh, yeah, I’m going to pop your cherry.”

Ian came running in the room, making Lance jump. “Lance, this house has power. There are twenty panels out there, and you won’t believe the size of the battery house. I checked, and it has running water as well.”

“They have a computer,” Lance said, pointing at the desk.

“You sure it’s theirs?”

“It’s on, asking for a password, and I’m guessing it belongs to Bones,” Lance said as he opened the top drawer and pulled out two notepads. He flipped open the first one and saw notes and a list. “Ian, come here, and take a picture of each page of these notebooks. We can go over them later.”

“Think you can hack that computer?” Ian asked, walking over, and Lance just gave him a flat stare. “Yeah, that was a stupid question,” Ian said, pulling out his camera.

Lance took off his pack and pulled out a pouch that held ten zip drives. “Don’t worry; I’ll be gentle,” Lance said, sitting down at the computer.

“You bring hacker stuff to combat?” Ian asked, quickly flipping pages and snapping pictures.

“Yeah, unlike the movies, hacking shit isn’t easy with just a keyboard,” Lance said, grabbing a silver flash drive. “You’ll like the silver, baby,” Lance said, slipping in the flash drive and making Ian chuckle.

The screen blinked several times, and the lock screen went away. “See, that didn’t hurt, did it?” Lance said, removing the silver flash drive then pulling out a large black one. “Now, I’m going to suck you dry,” he laughed, plugging it in. A task window popped up that asked, “Copy Hard Drive?” Lance clicked yes and started going through some of the files.

“Bones looks to be a biker geek,” Lance said, looking at the files. “Seems like he’s the accountant and over supplies.”

“You can look at that later. Check out the rest of the room,” Ian said, moving the first notebook away and starting on the second.

Getting up, Lance walked over to the desk the radios were stacked on and found another notebook. “Another one,” he said, tossing it on the desk.

“I’ll do that one, but any more and you’re doing them,” Ian huffed.

Moving back to the radios, Lance looked them over and nodded. “Nice gear,” he said and noticed a large sheet of paper taped to the wall with frequencies written on it and names to the side. “Ooh, call sheet.” He grinned and took a good picture.

When Ian finished the last notebook, he looked up at Lance. “What drawer you get the notepads from?”

“Center, green was on top, and they were in the middle of the drawer,” Lance said, picking up a large paper binder. “I’ll do this one,” he said as he moved over to the desk and started taking pictures.

Ian put the notepads back in the desk then searched the other drawers and found drugs, booze, and a Glock. Grinning, Ian pulled out the whiskey, unscrewed the top, and unzipped his pants. Hearing the zipper, Lance looked up and chuckled. “The oldest pranks are still the best,” he laughed then went back to the binder, snapping pictures as he flipped the pages rapidly.

After peeing in the whiskey, Ian put it back in the desk. He grabbed the notebook that Lance had brought over from the radios. “Where?” he asked, holding it up.

“Right-hand side of the desk facing up with the spirals facing you,” Lance said, never stopping the pictures.

“I’m heading to the TV room and kitchen,” Ian said and walked out.

When he finished with the binder, Lance put it back, and the laptop beeped. Lance trotted over and sat down in the chair, pulling out the flash drive and putting it back in the case. Lance pulled out a shimmering gold flash drive and looked at the laptop. “Don’t worry; it won’t hurt now, but it will later. I don’t like your daddy.” He grinned as he pushed in the flash drive.

He tapped the keyboard and loaded the virus then pulled out the flash drive and locked the computer back down. Closing it up, Lance put his flash drive case in his backpack and put it on. “Let’s see what else they have,” he said, walking out.