LZR-1143: Redemption (16 page)

He only got one shot. Then it was my turn.

My arm flashed to the side and flicked a heavy bar stool into the air, and it slammed into the shooter’s face, knocking him back from his chair. I pivoted to the side and between two tables, pressing the actuator buttons hidden in the cuffs of my jacket. The long, dirk-like blades sprung from within the garment’s sleeves, and I struck quickly as I passed the man still struggling on the floor, trying to stem the flow of blood from his shattered face. The metal slid into his eye and back out so quickly that he didn’t have time to flinch.

Someone screamed and I heard the click of a loaded weapon, and I instantly dove for the bar, as another shot was fired from the small man who had searched me. A bottle shattered above me as I landed behind the bar, and rolled to the side.

The two large men that had been lounging idly were scrambling in a drink-induced haze to find their weapons at their belts, and the one who had spoken up about taking a go with me was the first to find out that I was far too much woman for him to handle.

I reached them in two long bounds, dodging behind the first and using him as a body shield as I shot my hand forward in three quick jabs, piercing the blond man in the chest, the stomach and the throat, and watching blood spout from the wounds. The bald man, who I held now by the back of the neck, squirmed and grabbed at a bottle from the counter.

I forced his head down, shattering the bottle he was grasping for with his forehead, and pressing his face down into the broken glass. I ducked behind him as the bullets flew from his friends, and forced the long blade into his back, watching as it emerged from his chest and then pulling back. A long gasp escaped from his chest as I picked up his massive body and stood, throwing it headlong into the ringleader, who was trying to find a clear shot.

The hispanic woman was screaming, and she fled to the back of the bar. Not wanting to spare the time to run her down, I grabbed a whisky bottle from the shelf.

“Stick around a while,” I said, launching the bottle as hard as I could, clocking her in the temple and dropping her near the door to the bathrooms.

The small man was crouched behind an overturned table, and was firing shots from the concealed position. Bullets slammed into the mirrored glass behind me, showering the floor with broken shards. I rolled out of the hidden position and heard the blast of thunder before I felt the sting.

Rod had found a shotgun and was cocking it once again as I crawled to a protected position in a far booth. My side felt wet and sticky, and it stung as if peppered with small cuts.

My blood boiled again, and I raged inside.

I wanted hurt. I wanted death.

I pushed against the floor and shot into the air, flying over the table and taking the ringleader by surprise as I hit the ground and rolled forward. His next shot went wide, and took the wood paneling from the wall behind me as I rocketed into his midsection, taking the air from his lungs.

I heard the movement behind me as the small man saw his chance, rising from the protection of the heavy tabletop. His feet crunched on glass as I moved to the side, watching his first bullet plow into the leader’s arm.

“God damn it!” he cried, and I spun, my hand spinning past the bar surface where my knife lay after being confiscated. I grabbed the hilt, and in one movement, threw the blade.

He staggered back two steps in shock, before looking at his chest slowly. A trickle of dark red blood ran from the corner of his mouth slowly as he looked back up at me. I picked up a chair from the table next to me with one hand.

“Sit down, asshole,” I spat, throwing the chair into his chest, driving the knife in to the hilt and forcing him back over the next table and onto the floor.

“Please,” the leader whimpered as I paced toward him, crumpled against the bar, holding his injured arm. “Please, don’t.”

I looked up meaningfully at the young woman, who still lay prone and naked, bound to the pool table, her dignity taken from her by these animals. My pulse pounded in my head, all rational thoughts left my body, and my voice was cold.

“Did she beg? Did she ask you to stop?”

He simply stared at me, his lip quivering.

“Did she find mercy at your hand?”

The coward began to cry.

I didn’t care.

I picked him up off the ground easily, ignoring his attempts to dislodge my hand from his vest, and then slapping him once hard in the face as he tried to punch at me as we walked.

Outside the front door, I could see the shadows of several bodies, and I knew them to be the undead.

But I wasn’t going outside.

Not yet.

Next to the door, several large, thick metal coat hooks were bolted into the wall with thick lag bolts. Very sturdy, those.

I walked slowly to the wall, listening to him trying to reason himself out of his fate.

“She was just… convenient. You know how it is. You have to take what you want. What you need. I did what I had to. There aren’t any laws or cops or anything. Please, please have mercy!”

His eyes were flashing on the shadows outside, and at the last minute, I turned away from the doors, and his face betrayed a glimmer of hope.

“You were wrong about one thing,” I said slowly and softly.

“What? What are you…”

“There aren’t any cops or laws,” I lifted him up higher, staring him in the watery, bloodshot eyes. “But there’s still me. And there’s still justice left in the world.”

I dropped him down hard, slamming him into the large hook on the wall and allowing the weight of his large body to pull him down. He screamed loudly, and the bodies outside stopped.

I didn’t linger.

Pulling the clothing from the table, I snapped the nylon ropes from the woman’s ankles and wrists. She didn’t speak, and she didn’t cry. She simply stared, her eyes vacant. I pulled the pants and shirt onto her bruised body, expecting at least a whimper of pain.

Next to the table, Drake was stirring. I collected the extra weapons and tossed them into a trashcan near the bar as I moved Drake’s friend into a small storeroom near the back. Then, I crouched over the small man as he began to sit up, his eyes glazed and his face confused amid the bloody mess of his mouth and chin.

“I just bought you a second chance, friend. Use it wisely, you understand? What you did—even with a gun to your head—I can’t abide. You had a choice, and you made the wrong one. But in the end, no matter how late, you grew a pair. So I’ll let you and your friend go. I’m not going to help you, but I’m going to give you a chance. There aren’t so many of us left that I can afford to waste lives so callously.”

He shook his head slightly, taking in the scene around the room and muttering something under his breath.

“Why?” I answered, picking up his bewildered question as I stood up.

“Because I wanted to.” No, that wasn’t the whole of it, I realized. “No, because I
had
to. You remember this the next time you have a decision to make. You remember what your last one came to. And how it ended. There aren’t rules anymore. But there’s us. Just us. Make that be enough.”

He stood and followed my hand to the storeroom, where he started to attend his friend.

Behind me, hands were slamming against the front door, and I remembered my guns outside as I focused on Rod, and my own exit. There were only a few of them, but it would be difficult with the young woman in my arms.

I slung her prone form over my shoulders in a fireman carry, and retrieved my knife from the small man’s body. The knife went back to the boot, but the machete went to my right hand. I picked up the pistol from the small man as well, shaking my head at the trace amounts of rust on the grip, and ducked behind the bar with her, placing her gently on the rubber mat.

I stood up, aiming carefully at the heavy lock on the door.

Rod was still crying, but his face turned to me, knowing what was going to happen to him.

I pulled the trigger, taking the latching mechanism off in three shots. The doors flew open, and three creatures stumbled in as I dropped below the bar.

He screamed for several long minutes, while I held the young woman close, watching in the shards of the mirror above our heads. Then, the screaming stopped, and I stood up. They saw me, but I didn’t care. The machete fell once, twice, three times.

I picked up the unfortunate young woman, and we walked out of the bar.

TWENTY-FOUR

“You threw a knife at him?”

Ky’s voice was awed, and I didn’t like the admiration in the tone.

“Yeah, well. Didn’t have much choice, I guess.” My voice reflected my disgust with the whole encounter, and I hadn’t told the kid half of what happened. But I was hoping to give her enough that she’d stop asking.

“Where’d you learn to do that?”

I absently plucked at a string hanging from the top bunk, grunting slightly as the train hit a small bump on the tracks. The constant clicking was both calming and slightly baleful in its monotony.

“Movie I did about five years ago about an assassin. They wanted it to look realistic when I shot the knife scenes. So they brought in a guy. I think he was Special Forces.”

She looked impressed, but I shook my head.

“Truth is, I only nailed it one out of every five times or so. I got lucky this time.”

“And what about the last guy? The leader? Did you totally cave in his freaking face?”

She didn’t understand.

She didn’t know how it was.

I told her that there was a woman, and she was a captive. But not the rest.

She tried to play the part of an adult because she had to. She wanted to be older, and she wanted to understand. But I wasn’t ready for her to know that there was a special, horrible danger in being a woman in the end of days.

“Yeah, kid. I knocked him out with a pool cue, and we left.”

“But there were things out there, right? Maybe they got him.”

Kate came into the cabin carrying two water bottles, and I looked up.

“Probably. Hard to hide dinner from them,” I stood up from the bed and scratched Romeo’s ears absently.

“I’m gonna rack out, okay?”

She sighed and got up.

“You sleep too early,” she said. “Just ‘cause you’re some nocturnal owl-creature now, doesn’t mean the rest of us have to do the same. I’m going to go hang out in the dining car. We’re heading into the mountains. Good views until the sun sets.”

She disappeared into the hallway with Romeo in tow, and Kate shut the door softly.

“How is she?” I asked.

Kate shrugged, taking a drink from the bottle.

“About as you’d expect,” she said. “Her life will never be the same. Even in the midst of this… this new world… you don’t expect your dignity and your bare sense of self to leave you. When something like that happens, it takes you down to nothing. If she didn’t have her son, she’d probably try to kill herself immediately. Even with her son next to her, we’ll have to watch her. It takes a lot of strength and resilience to bounce back from something like this.”

“Did she know him when she saw him?”

“Oh yes, it got a big response. She hugged him for about ten minutes. He cried, she cried. The whole thing. Apparently, the dad was killed a week ago in a grocery store looking for food. They were on foot on one of those rural roads, going from house to house, when the bikers found them. That was about five days ago.”

“Jesus. She was… for five days?”

Kate nodded.

“She said she tried to fight, but they threatened the boy. He escaped yesterday when they were passed out, but…” She just shook her head, wiping back a tear. Then her eyes found mine.

“How are you? What happened in there?”

“I’m okay. I told you everything.”

I hadn’t.

“I took them by surprise, and it was a pretty quick fight.”

And satisfying.

I didn’t tell her that, either.

“I imagine it felt good to… to have them find justice.” Her voice was slightly vitriolic, as if she wished she could have been there.

“It was just a fight, I guess.”

But it did feel good.

Too good.

My tendencies toward violence were becoming too extreme. Too ready. I was ashamed of it.

“Gaffney says we’re about six hours out,” I said to her, looking to change the subject. “I guess the mountain portion of the ride is a little slow-going, but we make up time on the straight-away. You seen Rhodes?”

She noticed the change of subject, but went with it, squeezing behind me on the small bed and taking my shoulders in her hands.

“Yeah, he’s ready to be up and out, but they’re watching his wound until we get to Seattle. Something about infection. How does this work, anyway? The train somehow has access to a secure camp? How do they keep the things out?”

I leaned into her strong hands, thankful for the relaxation.

“Gaffney gave me a quick brief when we loaded up. SeaTac is surrounded by forty-foot containers, stacked three high, one on top of another. The engineers have added extra security by drilling six-foot anchors into the bottom of each one, and every four or five container length, there’s another one stacked vertically for a watchtower. The train apparently accesses the camp through one of only two gates. The other gate is for vehicle and other traffic, and operates with a series of two separate airlock-type confinement areas—they call them backstops—each one of which is closed off as people come in. If any zeds get in the first backstop, they eliminate them after the gate closes, and the same for the next backstop. Finally, the main gate follows. Each large entrance—for the train and the vehicle traffic—is two containers welded and secured, one on top of another, and attached to a giant crane that can only move them up or down, along guideposts set in the ground. The smaller backstop gates are only one container high, and are reinforced steel plates on automated hinges. Only the base commander and two gate officers can order them opened.”

She nodded appreciatively.

“Different from the Pentagon, I guess. But better than having our asses hang in the breeze. What about the train entrance? Do they use these—backstops?”

“Yeah, but they’re longer. The trick with the train is that it’s so damn long and noisy that it’s a massive target. So the primary backstop for the first stage of the train—when it first approaches the camp—is all chain link and barbed wire strung between the old factories and warehouses that line the tracks. They don’t make it airtight, they just make it difficult for the bastards to clump up. Then, when the train slows down, and gets within a mile of the base, they have constructed chain link and rebar fencing, and a thick automated gate on the end. Even if those things get in with the train, they can’t fit too many on either side. The last backstop before the station is half-containers, and half chain link. But they have flamethrower teams and machine gunners that keep the sides of the tracks clear. They don’t give them enough time to mass up, since the train unloads and leaves within hours of arriving.”

“Does it go all the way into the base? Seems dicey,” she frowned, “given that they don’t have the solid steel the whole run.”

“No, the second entrance doesn’t allow the train in. It’s not for vehicles, it’s only for foot and cargo traffic. When the train arrives, it pulls into its enclosure and it’s offloaded into a special entrance ramp, through a series of containers from the fortified station to the main camp. The ramp itself has two backstops, just like the front gate, but smaller. They use steel plating in rigid, fixed tracks, in six layers. Same rules as the front gate. If the zeds overrun the train enclosure, they’re still not going anywhere.”

“How the hell did they have time to build this shit?” she asked, and I shrugged, serving the dual purpose of helping her push against the knots in my shoulders.

“Hell if I know. Gaffney doesn’t know either, but he’s been in Idaho the whole time.”

“Seems like it’s not a winning war out here if they had to bug out of Boise.”

“He said it was a planned withdrawal that was intended to consolidate forces in Seattle for a big push. Apparently they have multiple herds in the area, and central command thinks they can pull together enough sonic buoys and firepower to take them out in Olympia and further east. Not sure why that’s running concurrently with our little op, but my guess is that we were intended to benefit from pulling them out of the city.”

“What about the terminal?” she asked. “I mean at SeaTac. It’s an airport, right. Did they incorporate the terminal in their camp?”

“Nope. Wrote it off. Built the walls right up to the jet ways, then burned the terminal to the ground. It doesn’t exist any more.”

“I remember liking that airport,” she said wistfully. “They had a coffee bar in every other kiosk in there. And the smell of the unwashed just blanketed the place. We used to play punch-dreads when we walked through.” Her voice cracked.

“Punch-dreads?” I asked, trying to keep her focused.

She laughed, and hiccupped, taking her hands from my shoulders and to her face. I knew she was wiping tears from her eyes.

“Every time we saw natty, unwashed dreads, we had to say the color and punch. Like punch-buggy, but… there were way more dreads out here than Volkswagens.”

“I shot a movie out there, once.”

“Yeah,” she said, sniffling. “Which high quality, Oscar-contender was that?”

“Ouch. That hurts. You know, I was quite popular once.”

“So were pet rocks, acid-washed jeans, and well-done meat. Things change.”

I laughed despite myself.

“Subterranean,” I said simply.

“Sub-what? Like underground?”

I sat up and turned away, laying down on the bed and closing my eyes, hoping that sleep would find me. We had been on the train for five hours since the stop, and the activities there had wiped me out, mentally and physically.

“It was about a civilization of people that had been buried and forgotten in the old city under Seattle. You know, the Seattle underground. Old city that was just built over when a fire took out thirty blocks in the 1800’s. There’s a whole warren of tunnels and old buildings down there. Fascinating stuff.”

“And your character was a smart, sophisticated fellow?”

She laid down next to me, closing her eyes as well.

“No, more of a pizza delivery man turned reluctant hero sort,” I said sleepily, letting my memories take me away from the place where I thought about what I had done this afternoon.

About what I had become, and how little I seemed to care.

“Sounds about right,” she said.

Sleep came quickly.