The End Time Saga (Book 2): The Breaking Page 5

  “That wasn’t smart.” He lunged for Ahmed with his stick in hand. “What? Our piss ain’t good enough for you?” In seconds, he had hit Ahmed a dozen times. Ahmed rolled in the mud, unable to get away from Casey’s fury.

  Mauser couldn’t take it anymore. This is going to hurt.

  “Hey Case,” he shouted. Casey stopped and looked at him, rage still scrawled over his face.

  “What in the hell do you want?” He kicked at Ahmed with his foot. Mauser was silent for a moment as he gathered his courage. Casey wound up to give Ahmed another swing.

  Mauser licked his cracked lips and took a deep breath. “I thought I saw your sister the other day.”

  Casey stopped mid-swing, stick wavering in the air. He hastily turned toward Mauser, his eyes narrowing. Must have struck a chord.

  His stick dropped to his side. “Where? Where was that?” Casey said, anger turning to confusion. He strode over to where Mauser was chained. He slapped the stick in the palm of his hand as he walked, squatting down in front of Mauser.

  “Where was that?”

  Mauser outfaced him, never letting his eyes leave Casey’s chinless face.

  “Funny thing about that, Case. Not only was she dead, but everyone was still having their way with her. I thought I might get—,” Mauser didn’t even finish his insult before the man came upon him. Mauser couldn’t block, only turn his head away as Casey’s stick connected with his ribs over and over. Casey struck him as if he were a tree he was trying to cut down.

  “Say it again,” Casey screamed. He swung the stick like a major league hitter whipping his hips into each strike.

  “On her back,” Mauser managed. The stick crushed into his abs.

  “Give it to him,” Chuck yelled.

  Crack. The stick whipped through the air. Crack.

  “Whoa. Nice one,” Henry yelled with a smile.

  Casey wound up again. Crack. And again.

  Mauser felt a rib snap as Casey’s stick snapped against his midsection. Casey dropped the pieces and went with his fists. The last thing Mauser remembered was a fist crashing into his eye socket.

  Unconscious, he entered a whole new nightmare. His best friend’s blood spraying all over the doctor’s face as Steele took a sniper round to the head. Stopping had been a huge mistake. Mauser only had an instant to comprehend what happened as Steele’s head rocketed backward. Steele collapsed like a sack of rocks. Seconds later, bullets whizzed through the Lunchbox, turning it into a piece of Swiss cheese.

  He’d seen the warning signs and they’d ignored it. All the indicators of an ambush were there. The cars in a funneled shape allowing them in, but hindering their retreat. The damsel in distress. The nicely sloped land for elevated shooting.

  He wanted to play savior to the public just as much as Steele did, but they had guessed wrong. Now they were paying the price. Steele had paid the ultimate price for his bleeding heart. The world was a mean place. Now, even more so. Mauser would never again be caught on the wrong side of that dilemma.

  Mauser slowly came back to, vision blurred, still alive, in a living hell. Still chained to a fucking pole. To breathe was painful, thanks to his freshly broken ribs. The hillbillies laughed as they drank, pleased with their current round of torture.

  Ahmed whispered on the other side. “Are you okay?”

  Mauser moaned that he still continued to live. Pain covered his body.

  “Thank you.”

  Mauser gave him another moan to say “you’re welcome.”

  “I’d rather be outside with the crazies than in here with these animals.”

  Mauser spit out some copper-tasting phlegm from his mouth. The red glob settled on the ground in front of him.

  “Don’t make me laugh. It hurts.” Mauser spat again. His chest throbbed, as if his rib jabbed his lung on every breath. “At least the infected kill you and get it over with.” He grimaced in pain.

  Ahmed sighed heavily; chains rattling above him.

  “Why do they hate me? I never did anything to them,” Ahmed whimpered in self-pity. The toll of being the most hated prisoner weighed on him. Mauser slowly twisted his head. It felt like he had been in a car accident, like all the muscles in his neck had been torn in half by whiplash.

  “You’re just different, and they hate themselves. Fuck. I hate you, but not because you’re an Arab.”

  “Why do you hate me?”

  “Cause you’re a cocky asshole.”

  It was Ahmed’s turn to laugh. “Don’t make me laugh. It hurts so bad.” Ahmed sounded off in a coughing fit.

  Mauser dipped his head as the hillbillies realized they were awake. Casey snorted when he looked at them.

  “I can’t wait ’til Puck gets back and we can get some fun out of these two,” Casey said. Chuck laughed like a piglet.

  Casey sneered. “‘Nough of these losers. Let’s see if Old Barnum is done stillin’ up that hooch.” Casey spat at the two captives.

  “Ahmed?” Mauser whispered.

  “Yeah?” Ahmed whispered back.

  “What are they talking about?”

  “I don’t know. And I don’t want to find out.”

  Two pickups rumbled into the camp. The pickups were rusted out and old. Doors slammed shut, and a man that rivaled, Mauser’s old teammate, Jarl, in stature exited the truck. He stretched and grabbed a wood-stocked AK-47 and an axe from the passenger side of his truck. He gave them a glance and walked to his cabin, axe laid across his shoulders. Oh great, Mauser thought. That big bastard must be Puck.

  KINNICK

  Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia

  Former Under Secretary for Political-Military Affairs Michael Kinnick surveyed the mass of bodies accumulating around the monolithic United States Armed Forces headquarters, the Pentagon. From the rooftop seven stories up, it looked like a teeming ant pile as they clambered on top of the dead in an attempt to reach them. Eighteen-inch-thick bulletproof windows and massive two-foot-thick walls prevented a breach on the lower levels.

  “They keep coming,” O’Sullivan said, shading his eyes. He was an IT defense contractor working his second private career out of the military. He was balding and out of shape. Not that Kinnick was in particularly great shape, and feeling every bit his age.

  The Zulus flooded in from the District. They navigated the parking lot of the 14th Street Bridge and crossed into Arlington, Virginia, amassing in the tens of thousands right against the Pentagon’s nuclear blast proof front door.

  Early on, those who had tried to flee to their homes were killed in their cars by the flood of the dead in the parking lot. It had become a maze of twisted metal and death.

  “They don’t seem to end,” Kinnick said. Sweat ran down his back, staining the same clothes he had worn for weeks.

  “If only the Apaches were still running,” O’Sullivan said. If only.

  “We should have used them earlier,” Kinnick said, tossing a roof tile to O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan caught the tile, bending his back and absorbing the toss with his arms. If we’d listened to General Travis, we would have.

  “Too little, too late.” O’Sullivan handed the square tile off to another sweat streaked defense contractor.

  The military had tried to stem the flow of infected, but their efforts had been overrun by mass hysteria and panic as people retreated ahead of the undead. The soldiers had struggled to tell the difference between infected and uninfected and were pushed back. That was during the first days of the outbreak.

  It wasn’t until weeks later that they sent the attack helicopters to strafe the bridges, no longer caring about the loss of living human life. No matter how many times they rained rockets and minigun fire on the infected below, they still came.

  “Any sign of the supply helos?” O’Sullivan asked, but the man already knew the answer. Kinnick was silent.

  Kinnick covered his eyes and searched west anyway. No helicopters. The helos had stopped making runs of weapons and supplies almost seven days ago. They had trie
d desperately to reach the Mount Eden FEMA facility turned military base by radio, but nobody picked up. They only had a finite amount of time they could survive without outside reinforcements, and Kinnick thought that even if they were well-supplied the place was unsalvageable.

  Kinnick nodded to a master sergeant leading the mix of military and civilians. Unsalvageable, but all we got. “Keep tossing desks, chairs, anything hard enough to crack a skull at these things.”

  A smile split the master sergeant’s face despite the dark circles underneath his eyes.

  “There’s plenty of that shit, and not enough bullets to waste on all these Zulus,” Master Sergeant Massey said. Massey was pretty tall and had a wiry endless strength to him. Kinnick thought he would make a good farmer.

  Not one of the men was under forty. Kinnick knew he wasn’t the one giving orders as a retired colonel. Old habits die hard.

  “You heard the full bird. Let’s say hello to our friends down below,” Master Sergeant Massey yelled out. He picked up a piece of roofing tile and dumped it over the edge with a twist of his body.

  The Pentagon’s survival rested on the sheer determination and willpower of the people residing within the building, supplemented by an adequate amount of supplies. Kinnick was proud of the men and women who fought here. They were an eroding symbol of a collapsing military force. Shit, a collapsing government. Collapsing, but still in the fight. If you aren’t knocked out, you’re still in the fight, and we aren’t done yet. A modern day Alamo. He hoped after they fell they would be a rallying cry for the rest of the nation, as opposed to the giant final domino in the death throes of a state.

  Remember the Pentagon. Didn’t have the same ring to it. Or maybe it would be the turning point in the war against the infected where all knew it was lost. That was what he couldn’t let happen. He couldn’t lose this fight. He couldn’t let it become a Tet Offensive.

  He couldn’t let the building collapse and risk destroying the public’s will to continue the war. No, not the same. This war was different. It would be won by the American public at large, not only through their support, but through their strength of arms. This fight wasn’t about “glory,” or “a mission accomplished,” this was a fight for survival, a fight against annihilation. People needed all the hope they could get in a time like this.

  The rooftop crew worked methodically. One squad would haul furniture from inside the building up to the roof. Another worked at ripping up the heavy roof tiles, and the last was tossing the heavy objects over the side onto the infected. They worked diligently, if not hard, but uninspired. The weariness of manual labor weighed heavily on them. Their hearts hurt worse. Their souls despaired beneath a cold weathered sun.

  How can you give someone hope when their loved ones rose from the grave, attempting to rip them into little pieces? How can one pull the trigger on their loved ones? How can you dehumanize someone’s loved ones enough for them to put them down in cold blood? Is it even possible?

  Kinnick wrapped his fingers under a concrete tile. It lifted up an inch before he had to set it back down. It wasn’t slate like the roof tiles.

  “Where did this come from?” he asked aloud. He got his fingers under it and heaved, bear-hugging the tile to his chest.

  “That’s from the courtyard,” Master Sergeant Massey said. Kinnick strained and dropped it off the roof of the Pentagon. He watched with very little grim satisfaction as a small hole appeared in the massive horde where he had crushed the infected.

  “Well, that was heavy.” He wiped his brow.

  The open space below filled in with more infected. It was like being on top of a medieval rampart while the enemy below tried to gain entry by storming the keep. At least this enemy isn’t coordinated enough to scale the walls, he thought. Then they would literally have a medieval battle, and the enemy would overrun them within minutes.

  A radio sounded off in the corner, a loud crackle rippling over the grunts of men and women at hard labor.

  “—Colonel Kinnick—,” the radio popped. Kinnick walked over to the radio and picked it up, holding it close to his ear.

  “Kinnick, over,” he said. It was all he could manage in his rundown state.

  “General Travis wants you below. It’s urgent.” Static filled the air and cut out.

  “Copy. I’ll be right down, over.” Kinnick took a deep breath. He didn’t mind being relieved of such a task, but he most likely walked into an even worse prospect than hard manual labor.

  “Funny thing. Right after we get started the colonel has a very important meeting to attend to,” O’Sullivan chirped.

  “I don’t make the calls. The general does,” Kinnick said.

  “That’s right, O’Sullivan. Quit sandbagging it. Let the full bird do what he’s gotta do,” Master Sergeant Massey barked. Massey gave him a nod of respect. The nod let Kinnick know that Massey would not rest while there was still work to do.

  They all reported to General Travis, a two-star general, as the higher ranking officers had evacuated to safer places farther into the interior of the country. They had the strategic mission in sight. So far it had been to lose tens of thousands of soldiers to the plague, and even more to desertion, and they hadn’t been able to control the outbreak of any city with a population of over a thousand on the East Coast.

  “It could be worse,” Master Sergeant Massey commented.

  Kinnick eyed the thousands of soulless marching to the Pentagon. We have to hold. It is the only way.

  “How so?”

  Moans drifted all the way to the roof. The wiry sergeant smiled.

  “They could be inside.”

  “I guess I should play the lottery then,” Kinnick said. “I’ll be back up to check in after the meeting with the general.”

  “Sir, we will keep up the barrage.”

  Kinnick would make his last stand here. General Travis also had seen the symbolic importance and hunkered down. While his peers evacuated, he elected to hold the Pentagon against all odds. He embodied the spirit of a true leader. A hard man to please, but a man that other men would lay their lives down for, and they did, by the hundreds. Travis was a good soldier. A few inches taller than Kinnick and a bit thicker in the chest, the man presented a strong symbol to the troops in such a horrific time. He was the “kill them all and let God sort them out” type. A man they needed now. Kinnick would follow him to Hell and back, and that was good because Hell had come.

  GWEN

  Moonshiner Camp, WV

  “Lucia. Lucia,” Gwen mumbled through the oily gag. Lucia laid in center of the shed covered in filth.

  “Dios te salve, María,” Lucia whimpered. Her bruised cheeks faced Gwen, but her dark eyes were empty, all feeling lost inside them.

  “It will be okay,” Gwen tried to say. She nodded her head furiously attempting to sooth the woman.

  Lucia rolled her head away from Gwen, her voice barely audible. “Y bendito es el fruto, de tu vientre: Jesús.”

  Gwen banged her head against the wall in frustration. The pain reminded her that she was still alive and she was still in Hell. For the thousandth time, she strained her arms in an attempt to break the rope holding her captive. The rope sawed into the sores rubbed into her arms from days of chafe and friction.

  Lindsay sat in the corner, her head down, arms tied around her knees.

  “Lindsay,” Gwen whispered. It came out more of a grunt.

  “What?” Lindsay mouthed.

  “Help me get free.” Gwen bent her back, showing Lindsay her tied hands.

  “No. They will hit us and…” Lindsay stopped mid-sentence and glanced at Lucia. “We can’t.”

  “Help me escape. I will find help and come back,” Gwen mumbled. Lindsay shook her head mutely.

  Gwen bowed her head. These people were part of her family and like family, they could drive you insane. She had a responsibility to these women. I will not fail them again. We can’t go softly into the night. We must punch, kick, and bite our way to th
e bitter end. She would do it for Steele. She would do it for herself. She would do what she had to do.

  Gwen took her bound wrists and rubbed them along the wood on the wall. It may take three weeks, but I will break out of here. She sanded the rope down stroke by stroke, thread by thread.

  “Gwen,” Lindsay croaked, eyes wide. Her neck tensed and her chest strained as she breathed hard. She nodded at the door.

  Moments later, the door kicked inwards and, in a momentary lapse of fear, Gwen hoped. She dared to hope that Steele had come galloping in like a knight in shining armor to rescue them. One could stand much more steady with a rock to lean on.

  Her hope was crushed against the massive boulder of a man that entered the shed instead. He loomed above her, taking in the women at one glance. Gwen gasped. His frame pressed into all corners of the doorway. He was like a regular man, but only massive in proportion.

  “… Ruega por nosotros pecadores ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte,” Lucia continued.

  The man grinned down at Gwen through a thick scraggly black beard that looked like small black wires running off his cheeks and chin. A hand the size of a ham engulfed her shoulder and he pulled her upright, as if she were a toddler.

  “Amén. Dios te salve, María…” Lucia whispered to the side.

  “This must be the girl,” he said, drinking in Gwen’s body with his eyes. He wiped the corners of his mouth and dusted his fingers off on his dirty white t-shirt.

  “No yelling now, pretty birdie,” he cooed, his voice sounding like two rocks smacking together. Rough calloused fingers removed her gag, and she flexed her jaw, rotating it open and closed.

  “That’s good. What’s your name, little birdie?” he said.

  Gwen stole a glance at Lucia and Lindsay. They looked at her fearfully. She peered up into his eyes, trying to look defiant, a fleeting moment of rebellion punctuated by pain. With speed she hadn’t expected, his bratwurst fingers wrapped around her jaw in a vice grip. How can I protect them or even myself, against such a monster?

  “I said, what is your name, girl?”