Green Ice: A Deadly High (48 page)

Mancini
inserted another cartridge, racked the shotgun, preparing to fire another round when the door to his right banged open and he felt the pull of a firm hand. He stumbled into the room and the door was rapidly slammed shut behind him. The guy in the black shirt and matching black pants bolted the door and slid a heavy wooden cabinet in front of the entranceway. The guy in the light blue shirt tried to snatch the shotgun from Mancini’s grasp.

Although he was still in a state of anxiety, the adrenalin still pumped through Mancini’s veins and he was a highly trained combat veteran.
Nobody disarms you in the heat of battle
. He pulled back the shotgun and swung the butt at the man in front of him. A meaty thud echoed through the room and the guy in the light blue shirt went down under the blow. Mancini backed up a couple of paces, aiming the shotgun into the center of the room and taking in his surroundings. The room was small with a dark wooden floor, burgundy painted walls and two large wingback chairs in front of the big desk. Several portraits of men dressed in old fashioned Mexican army clothing adorned the walls. 

The guy
Mancini assumed was Logrono stood behind the wooden desk with an astonished expression on his face. Luiz cowered against the wall to the right and the guy dressed in black raised his hands while he edged away from the door. The guy in the blue shirt groaned and held his jaw as he sat up from the floor.

“
Quien diablos es usted
?” the older guy behind the desk barked.

“Senor Logrono, I presume?” Mancini asked, breathing heavily. “Speak to me in fucking English.”

The guy nodded. “Si, I am Fernando Logrono, but who the fuck are you?”

“I know you,”
Luiz stammered, pointing a finger at Mancini. “You’re one of Oreilles’s guys.”

“At the moment, I’m not anybody’s guy,” Mancini snorted.
“Number one on our agenda is getting the fuck out of here in one piece and number two is finding where you hid the rest of that green ice stash, Luiz. Do you know what the hell you’ve done?”

Luiz
flapped his arms and shrugged. “I didn’t have any clue the product was going to be this powerful. I added an extra kick but I had no idea it was going to create monsters.”

“Well, you fucking
did
, Luiz,” Mancini spat. “I had to just execute a young girl, who’d probably have never touched that shit if it wasn’t for you.”

“No, no, not my daughter,” Logrono gasped. His face screwed up with anguish and he thumped the desk with his fist. “What did she look like? Please tell me.”

Mancini sighed. “She looked in pretty bad shape. I did the kindest thing I could. I’m sorry but it’s not my fault.”

Logrono visibly sagged as he hunched over his desk with his head bowed. Tears rolled down his cheeks and he made a series of whimpering noises
as his body convulsed in refrained sobs.

“We’ve been locked in this fucking room for days with no food or water and we’ve had to piss and shit out of the window,” Logrono wailed. “And all the time my family was being…savaged by those creatures.”

“Well, we need to get out of here and we need to return that green ice stash so it can be destroyed,” Mancini said. “And don’t any of you guys get any ideas of stopping me. Have a little compassion and think about what this so called product has done. Fuck the money. We’re talking about a shit load of wasted lives here. The whole of the Baja Peninsula is in total fucking chaos because of that crap and I’ve been to hell and back trying to make it all the way out here.”

The room fell silent apart from the sound of the infected people’s hands banging and scraping on the opposite side of the door. Logrono,
Luiz and the two other guys looked suitably shocked and ashamed, firstly casting accusing glances at each other and then to the floor.

Logrono wiped his eyes and gazed to the door then across the room. “So…do you have an escape plan in mind, Senor…?”

“My name is Mancini and I’m flying my way through this shit without much of a clue what the hell I’m doing.” He moved across the room towards the window, still covering the four men with the shotgun. “The way I see it, our only way out is through this window. Any of you got any keys to those vehicles down there?”

“My car is the blue Lexus at the back of the line,”
Luiz stammered. “I have the keys in my pocket. We won’t make it to the car in time. Those crazy people are all over the place out there.”

“We’re going to have to try,
Luiz,” Mancini growled. “So, what the hell happened here anyhow?”

“We gave a sample to a guy, Ruben his name was,” the guy in the black shirt said in accented English. “He went ape shit a few minutes later and we tried to take him downstairs but he bit a few people and they too turned crazy ape shit. The whole place go crazy ape shit after that.”  

“Okay, so that’s how it started, huh?” Mancini said, nodding. “What about any weapons? You guys packing any hardware?”

Logrono shook his head. “We had one handgun between us but used up all the ammo.” He nodded at the guy in the black shirt. “Victor, over there was too quick to fire off the remaining bullets out of the window. He was too
trigger happy and the idiot threw the firearm at those infected people, once his magazine was empty.”

Victor, the guy in the black shirt looked suitably embarrassed by his hasty actions.

“We have a whole armory locked away downstairs, with all kinds of firearms,” Logrono continued. “But as you see, we are cut off and not able to get down there to arm ourselves.”  

Mancini huffed and turned his attention back to
Luiz. “Next question – where the hell is the rest of that green shit you and your pals concocted?” 

A guilty expression crossed
Luiz’s face. “I have the remaining twenty pounds of product in the trunk of my car. It is all there apart from a few samples I sold on the way down from LA.”

“How much of that shit did you sell already,
Luiz?” Mancini barked. “A whole load of people have died because of those few samples.”

Luiz
shook his head. “Not much, maybe a few baggies to some hustlers. You know how it is? I needed some cash for gas and stuff.”

“A few baggies, huh?”
Mancini repeated, nodding incredulously. “Those few baggies have wiped out a great deal of the population between here and LA, you asshole. And you had a whole stack of cash that Oreilles gave you back in Ensenada. Why didn’t you just use a bit from that?”

“Jorge and Ernesto would not let me touch the cash,”
Luiz replied. “They said it was to use for setting up our own infrastructure. They said they needed it all.”

“F.Y.I.
motherfucker, Ernesto is now dead and Jorge is out front with a possible broken ankle,” Mancini said. “Your little scam is over, Luiz. It’s time to wake up and smell the steaming stack of shit you’ve created. It’s time to put an end to this whole damn thing.”

Luiz
shook his head again. “You have to believe me. I didn’t know this was going to happen. But I also have worked on a formula to flush the effects of the green ice from your system. I think I can develop a product which will cure the symptoms.”

“You say that now?” Logrono roared.
“After my daughter is dead. Only now you say you have a cure for this disease, you idiot. I should have killed you with my own hands.”

“I’m not sure if it will work,”
Luiz stammered. “It may not but I think it will flush the body of all the toxins included in the
Cristal Verde.
”

“Where is this cure?” Mancini snapped. “Have you actually produced any of it?”

“Yes,” Luiz said, nodding. “I have made up a batch. I was going to call it…”

Mancini didn’t hear
the rest of Luiz’s words. The door almost gave way as an almighty bang echoed through the room. The cabinet blocking the entrance rocked on its feet and Victor rushed to steady it.

“They will break their way through any moment,”
Luiz stammered. “What are we going to do?”

“Like I said, we go out through the window,” Mancini said. “It’s our only choice.”

“It’s a long way down,” Luiz moaned. “What happens if one of us breaks our leg or ankle?”

“Just hope it isn’t you,” Mancini growled, glancing at the driveway through the window.

“So, even if we do get to Luiz’s car, what then?” Logrono asked. “We still have to get out through the gates. There is no power. We can’t open them unless we manually use the crank inside the gatehouse.”

Mancini sighed and gazed down at the floor. Yet another problem had reared its ugly head.

Chapter Seventy-Five

Mancini tried his best to keep himself composed. “Okay, so we can manually open the gates from the gatehouse, which is where?”

Logrono flashed him an incredulous glance and pointed to the window. “Right beside the gates, of course.”

Mancini hadn’t seen any sort of building outside the grounds so he presumed the gatehouse was on the inside of the perimeter fence. “Please don’t tell me the gatehouse is locked up and you don’t have a key for it?”

Logrono shook his head. “No, it is open, as far as I know. It was manned twenty-four hours a day before all this shit started.” He waved his hand in the air and flashed a stern glare at Luiz. “I had armed guards and cameras on every wall. Now they are all gone and I’m stuck inside my own house like a prisoner.”

“Okay, enough already,” Mancini barked. “Let’s just concentrate on getting the hell out of here. We can save all the gripes and accusations until later.”

Another loud bang came from the doorway and the cabinet teetered once again.

“We don’t have much time,”
Luiz wailed.

“I know, there’s a whole bunch of them massing right outside this room,” Mancini said. “You left me sweating out there for a while, remember?”

Mancini glanced down through the window again and saw several infected roaming around by the cars and outside the shattered downstairs window he’d entered the house through. Some more infected had returned to the swimming pool area to finish off chomping on the mangled body parts.

“It’s going to be tight to make it to the car, let alone cranking open that fucking gate,” Mancini sighed, reaching for his cell phone. “We may need a little help right now.”

“Who are you calling?” Logrono snapped. “The police? I’m afraid they won’t help us.”

“No, I’m not calling the fucking police,” Mancini snapped.

“I tried to call out but my phone died,” Luiz said. “Jorge called me a couple of days ago but Senor Logrono answered the call when I left the phone on the desk.”

Mancini flapped his hand at
Luiz in an attempt to make him shut up.

Trey
heard his ring tone and felt his cell phone vibrating in his pocket. He glanced inquisitively at Leticia who crouched next to him on top of the garden wall.

“Take this a moment,” he muttered, handing Leticia the semi automatic rifle.

Trey dug his phone from his pocket and saw Mancini’s name as the caller on the screen.

“
Yo! You still alive, man?”

“It would appear so,” Mancini said.
“Listen, Trey, I haven’t got much battery life left so I’ll have to be brief. Do you see a gatehouse by the entranceway to the property?”

Trey
leaned forward against the railings and saw a one storey, circular building standing to the left on the inside of the gates. “Yeah, I see it, man. What do you want me to do?”

“I need you to get inside that building and manually
crank open those gates so we can all get out of here. But be careful. There may well be some infected goons inside that place, okay?”

“Got it, man.
I’ll try my best.”

“Good luck, Trey and I’ll see you in a moment.”

“Did you find the green ice stash in there?” Trey waited for a reply but Mancini had already cut the connection.

“What is it? What’s up?” Leticia asked.

Trey sighed. “Mancini needs us to go open up those gates. We have to open them manually from inside that gatehouse. It’s not going to be an easy ride, especially if we get spotted by those infected freaks over there.” He nodded towards the pool area.

“I’ll come with you and cover you with the rifle whilst you use the crank, if you want,” Leticia said.

“Okay, it’s a deal,” Trey whispered, rubbing Leticia’s shoulder. “Just keep your eyes open for hostiles.”

Leticia nodded. “I will. I’ll keep us safe. Don’t worry.”