Push Back: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (The Disruption Series Book 2) (33 page)

“Why would he care? He’ll be happy to see us go.”

“Only if he can make a big show of kicking us out,” Zach said. “We don’t have time for his drama.”

“Agreed,” Kinsey said. “We’ll leave at ten. I’d like to leave later, but we have to make it past the prison while it’s still dark. We can’t afford any delays.” He looked pointedly at Connie.

She bristled. “You don’t worry about me. And if we have to leave food anyway, as soon as we get packed and ready, I’m feedin’ us all until we pop,” she said.

Same Day, 9:15 p.m.

Kinsey stifled a yawn as he walked into the kitchen and accepted a cup of strong black coffee from Zach. Gathering the supplies for the trip had been finished before noon, and true to her word, Connie had set about preparing a feast. No longer constrained by the need to conserve, the Duhons and their neighbors pitched in with a vengeance, and cook fires topped by cast-iron cookware had sprouted across the privacy-fenced backyard. By midafternoon the dining room table groaned with the weight of a sumptuous buffet of the rich Cajun food Kinsey had grown to love since marrying into the Melancon clan.

Full from the meal, almost two days without sleep had caught up with him, and his eyelids grew increasingly heavy. When it became obvious the rest of his team was in the same shape, Connie and Zach had insisted they sleep while the rest of the group finished departure preparations. Kinsey had agreed, not without reservations.

“The others up?” Kinsey asked.

His brother-in-law nodded in the light of the lantern. “About a half hour. They’re out checking the cars now.” Zach smiled. “Makin’ sure we didn’t screw anything up.”

Kinsey ignored the dig. “Everything go okay?”

“Yeah, we decided to put all the gear and supplies in the boat, that way we can get on our way in a hurry. Since the boats will be lashed together for stability, we can redistribute the load among the three boats en route,” Zach said.

Kinsey nodded and took another sip of coffee. He looked down at the cup. “This stuff could resuscitate the dead.”

Zach laughed. “Yeah, well, the way you were snoring, I figured you needed to be resuscitated.”

Kinsey chuckled and turned toward the door to the garage, cup in hand. Zach followed him out.

The garage was also lantern lit, and the far bay held a large center console fishing boat with an equally large outboard motor. The Duhon’s SUV was backed up to the open garage door and hitched to the trailer. Kinsey reached up and turned on his headlamp so he could see better, then walked over and looked in the boat. He sighed.

“I see Connie’s fine hand here,” Kinsey said. “What part of one small bag per person didn’t she understand?”

Zach shrugged. “You know Connie, she’s kind of like a force of nature. Besides, there is one bag per person, there’s just a little extra, that’s all.”

Kinsey played his light over a collection of boxes and bags, then shook his head. “Zach, we have to hump all this stuff over a fifty-foot-high levee, and even if we get it to Cormier’s place, there’s no way we’ll get it all to Texas. I haven’t even figured out how I’m going to get all the PEOPLE there.”

He played his light over boxes as he spoke, stopping on one with distinctive markings. “What the hell is this?”

Zach looked embarrassed, but he quickly recovered. “What does it look like? It’s a case of Jack Daniel’s.”

“Dammit, Zach—”

“Trade goods,” Zach said. “I’m figuring it will be valuable, and I’d rather give up booze than ammo.”

Kinsey let out a resigned sigh. “Okay, I’ll grant you that, but here’s the deal. One, if you folks want this stuff over the levee, YOU hump it, not me or any of my guys. Two, you do that AFTER you help us get the aluminum boats over. And three and most important, if at any point it slows us down or we can’t find a reasonable way to carry it, we’re dumping it, and I won’t tolerate any bitching about it. Are we clear?”

Zach nodded his head. “Absolutely.”

“Okay,” Kinsey said. “What about life jackets?”

“We got regular life vests for the four kids, but after that it’s a bit of a hodgepodge. Between the three houses we’ve got a mismatched collection of life jackets, ski vests, and ski belts. I think we’ll have enough for everyone to have some sort of flotation, with maybe a few old ski belts extra,” Zach said.

“Bring ’em,” Kinsey said. “They’re light, and you never know when they’ll come in handy. How about glow sticks, got any?”

Zach glanced at the pile of supplies in the boat and grinned. “I suspect we do, why?”

“Break some out and tie one to each flotation device. If anyone goes overboard, they can activate it. Otherwise we don’t have a chance of recovering anyone in the dark in that current.”

Zach nodded just as Bollinger walked in, flanked by Cormier and Bertrand. Bollinger nodded toward the boat and shot Kinsey a questioning look. Kinsey shook his head, then shrugged, and Bollinger grinned. “Looks like you lost that one, boss,” he said.

Kinsey ignored the remark. “How’s everything else look?”

“Pretty good,” Bollinger said. “They found a bunch of empty gallon milk jugs to collect the gasoline. They’re out by the driveway, but we’ll load them in the boat before we take off.”

Kinsey nodded, suppressing a mental picture of the overloaded boat and trailer rolling backwards down the riverbank and straight to the bottom of the river. “What about a route?”

Cormier spoke up and nodded at Zach. “I showed Duhon here where the boats are on a street map. We should let the locals get us there. If we run into trouble, they’ll have a better idea how to bypass it.”

“You okay driving with the NV gear, Zach?” Kinsey asked.

“Do we HAVE to go dark?” Zach asked. “I mean, if everything goes well, we’ll just reverse the route you came in on until we hit River Road and head north beside the levee. Running fast with lights, we can get to that intersection in five minutes tops. We keep a shooter with the NV stuff in each car, and if we run into trouble we can’t avoid, we stop and kill the lights until the shooters take care of it. But I honestly think we’ll be okay; I mean, if anybody sees or hears us, we’ll likely blow past them before they can react. Even if someone decides to chase us, it’ll take ’em a minute or two to get organized, and by then we’ll be at River Road and dark again. We have to go dark the last half-mile stretch anyway to sneak past the projects and over the levee, and you guys wearing the NV gear can take over driving for that. We just stop, switch drivers, and haul ass, quick and quiet.”

Kinsey nodded. “Well, even with the lights on, I guess we can’t possibly be more obvious than we were coming in.”

Cormier laughed, and Bollinger looked indignant until Kinsey grinned to take the sting out of his jibe. Only Zach seemed unamused.

“Problem, Zach?” Kinsey asked.

Zach shook his head. “That last half mile worries me big time. Y’all tied up next to some of the worst projects in Baton Rouge. If we attract the wrong kind of attention, we gotta get over that levee and upriver fast.”

Chapter Eighteen

1615 Lombardy Lane

Baton Rouge, Louisiana

Same Day, 10:00 p.m.

Their plans aside, they did go dark for the first very short leg of the journey. They stuffed both SUVs full to capacity and beyond, every seat occupied, with wives on their husband’s laps and, in places, children perched on top of parents. Kinsey and Bollinger wore the NV gear and eased the vehicles through the subdivision to a side street a block from the entrance gate.

Taking out the guards was child’s play; they weren’t expecting an approach from the rear. Both surrendered without heroics when they felt the M4 muzzles touching the backs of their necks. The Coasties bound the guards’ hands behind them with duct tape and eased them to the floor to wrap their ankles as well. Then they whistled for Zach.

“Gene, Pete,” Zach said as he entered the little guardhouse. The pair squinted in the harsh light of his headlamp, glaring at him over duct-taped mouths. “We’re leaving now,” Zach said, “and we won’t be back. I checked the schedule and see Bill and Dan are set to relieve y’all in two hours. You’re all good people, despite how Fat Ass has your heads twisted up, so I’m gonna give you a little present.”

The glares turned to looks of interest.

“We left all the food and supplies we couldn’t carry in our garages. When Bill and Dan let y’all go, you can go get it and split it four ways. Fat Ass has no idea what we had, so he’ll think we took it all. Nobody but y’all will know when we left, so if you leave Bill and Dan tied up until morning, you got all night to move and hide it and nobody will be the wiser. I don’t care one way or another, but I’d rather y’all have the stuff than Fat Ass. ’Cause make no mistake, anything that goes into his ‘community store’ is gonna end up where HE decides, not the community.”

The men exchanged a glance, then shrugged and nodded to Zach. He nodded back and exited the guardhouse.

“Feelin’ better?” Kinsey asked.

“I am,” Zach said. “The thought of leaving anything for that bastard was irritating the hell out of me. It was like he won somehow.”

***

As Zach predicted, the run to River Road was uneventful. They raced through deserted streets, headlights blazing, with the unencumbered vehicle in the lead and the SUV towing the boat following. They pulled up in front of the veterinary school scarcely three minutes after leaving their subdivision. They killed the lights on the cars, and Kinsey and Bollinger flipped down their NV goggles and changed places with the drivers to head north up River Road. The vehicles swapped places, with Bollinger in the lead, towing the boat. He was to cross the levee first and head immediately to the riverbank while Kinsey followed behind. As soon as they crested the levee and dropped down toward the river and out of sight from town, Kinsey would use the chase car’s headlights to light up the riverbank to aid launching and departure preparations.

All went well until Bollinger approached the road up the levee and slowed to make what was almost a U-turn. Kinsey was almost blinded as red lights flared.

“I thought we took the bulbs out of the brake lights?”

“It’s the trailer,” Zach said. “Someone must have plugged in the lights out of habit. It was in back before, so nobody noticed, and with the lights off, nothing showed until Bollinger braked.”

Kinsey shot a look to his right, into the heart of the projects.

“Maybe nobody saw it,” Zach said.

“Maybe not yet,” Kinsey said, “but Bollinger doesn’t even know he’s doing it, and you can be sure he’ll hit the brakes again at the top of the levee before he heads down. That’s gonna be a great big flashing red sign fifty feet in the air. As dark as things are, it’ll be visible for miles, and it might as well read VICTIMS HERE.”

“What are we going to do?”

Kinsey shook his head. “Improvise.”

In the short time it took Kinsey to make the tight turn to follow Bollinger up the levy, he had a plan.

“All right,” he said to Zach, “I’ll bail out on the crest and take up a defensive position. Take the wheel and turn on the lights; the cat’s out of the bag now anyway, so it won’t make any difference. Use whatever light you need to get the boat launched and everything ready to take off, but send Cormier or Bertrand back up here with the other set of NV gear. We’ll hold off any visitors, and when you’re ready to go, sound the car horn and we’ll come running.”

“Got it,” Zach said as Kinsey bumped over the crest of the levee and skidded to a stop. Both doors flew open, and Zach jumped behind the wheel as Kinsey settled into the grass on top of the levee, eyes focused on the mean streets below.

Kinsey was studying the mob forming at the foot of the levee when Bertrand plopped down beside him five minutes later, puffing from his run up the steep slope.

“What you got, Coast Guard?” Bertrand asked.

“Twenty or thirty bangers, best I can tell. So far they’re just milling around, but they keep looking up this way. We’ll have company sooner or later,” Kinsey said.

Bertrand was studying them now, and he grunted agreement. “Maybe we ought to discourage them.”

“We will, but let’s wait until they actually start up the levee. I’d like to drag this out as long as possible to give the others time to get the boats ready. I doubt these bangers are military geniuses, but they have a lot of cover down there if they decide to use it, and they’ll shoot back at our muzzle flashes. Don’t let them fix your position. Shoot, pull back behind the crest, then pop up someplace else; shoot and move, shoot and move. Got it?”

“This ain’t my first rodeo, Coast Guard,” Bertrand said.

“Army?”

“Travel to exotic places, meet interesting people, and kill them,” Bertrand said. “I’m a sucker for a catchy motto.”

Kinsey chuckled. “Okay, I’ll shut up now.”

“So much for waiting,” Bertrand said. “Here they come. I’ll take the fat guy on the left.”

Kinsey sighed. “I’ll take the tall one in the middle.”

No sooner had Kinsey spoken than Bertrand’s rifle barked, and the fat banger stumbled and fell. Kinsey fired a three-round burst, and the tall banger joined his fallen comrade. Both defenders dropped back below the levee’s crest, and when they rose again in different positions several yards apart, the situation at the foot of the levee had changed dramatically. The bodies of the men they’d shot lay unmoving at the foot of the grassy slope, but the others had scattered, no doubt to positions in and around the houses lining the opposite side of River Road.

“THEY CAPPED FAT DOG AND T-BOY!” someone shouted.

“YO, WHOEVER Y’ALL ARE UP THERE, WE GONNA MESS YOU UP! AIN’T NOBODY DISRESPECTIN’ US IN OUR OWN HOOD.”

“Is it just me, or are they pissed?” Bertrand asked.

“Just as long as they stay pissed off down there, it doesn’t matter.”

Kinsey had hardly finished speaking when his position atop the levee allowed him to glimpse the flash of headlights several blocks away. Then there was another, and within seconds, he could see a steady stream of vehicles pouring out of the surrounding neighborhoods and heading in their direction.