Enduring Armageddon (37 page)

I relaxed a little when I saw Ramsey trot out of the house. He waved and called out, “Alright, I have your escort ready.” He paused as about two dozen men filed out of the house and began walking towards us. They were dressed in full riot gear. Each man wore the standard SWAT team get-up that I’d seen on TV many times, plus they had bulletproof vests, shields, helmets with facemasks and they carried wicked-looking metal clubs. These guys weren’t going to take any shit from anyone.

“Shit, these guys mean business,” muttered Alejandro.

“Yeah, well we protect our trade partners,” Ramsey replied.

“You guys ready to go?” one of the escort group asked.

“Yes, uh…sir,” I stammered. “We were just getting ready to run through the crowd until we cleared them”

“Well, don’t do that. Stay with us,” the grizzled veteran said. “We’re going to escort you as far as the energy generation farm, but then you’re on your own. We’ll probably have to kick some of those muties’ asses, so don’t worry about what’s going on around you.”

He held up a finger and said, “But if anyone starts shooting, then take off like a bat out of hell because we can’t protect you from that. During our last escort that turned violent, the guys didn’t run and ended up getting themselves killed.”

“Uh, thanks,” I replied.

“Alright, let’s go!” the escort commander said with a wave of his hand.

They shuffled around until we were completely surrounded by a sea of armored men and then we started moving forward. We passed through the town’s front gates and out into the ramshackle huts immediately outside of the gates. A few people milled around and watched us, but there were very few of the Changed to be seen. I didn’t take that as a good sign.

We rode our horses while the men marched along. At the halfway point of the village, men and women began to stream from between the huts on either side of the road. They had murder in their eyes, but the damned people weren’t
saying
anything. It was like I was watching a movie with the volume turned down and it was one of the creepiest experiences of my life. I could handle the moaning and grunting of zombies, but this absolute silence was scary.

I looked over to Alejandro and said, “Are they saying anything to you?”

His eyes were just as wide as mine probably were. “No, I can’t hear anything.”

“Get ready!” the escort commander yelled.

The Changed closed to within ten feet and then suddenly charged as one. The escort expanded from their protective circle to give themselves room to fight and the two sides met. We did our best to keep the horses calm and in a stable location, but the metallic tang of blood that permeated the air around us made it difficult to rein them in. All around us, the escort bashed away at the continually-pressing mob of Changed with their clubs. A couple of the guards went down and were dragged off into the crowd screaming.

I watched in horror as an escort swung his club with full force into the face of a man. In what seemed to be slow motion, I saw the club collapse his cheek bone and continue downward to the jaw. The force of the blow ripped the poor man’s mandible completely from the side of his face and he stumbled away attempting to hold his jaw in place. The escort didn’t even break stride and by the time that I was able to refocus on him, he’d already delivered another savage blow to a woman’s neck.

The battle raged for a full ten minutes and when the remaining Changed broke and ran for the safety of their huts there were easily a hundred prostrate and bleeding men and women surrounding us. Most of them had severe wounds to the head and with the lack of medical supplies I doubted if they would survive the day. There was no sign of the men from the escort who’d been dragged away.

I felt a tap on my leg and a member of the escort said, “The captain is gone. Come on, we’ll get you to the power generation yard, then we’ve got to come back and try to find him.” The remainder of the escort reformed around us and we ended up trotting the horses to keep up with their newfound pace. They were in a hurry to be rid of us so they could return and rescue their leader, or at least return his corpse to his family.

The men didn’t say anything as we neared the field full of exercise bikes and elliptical machines. Once we reached some magic boundary, they parted to let us through and turned around back towards New El Paso. The guards in the fields acknowledged us with a nod and then refocused their watch upon the men and women who were using the machines to generate power for the water pumps and so the trade minister could receive his blowjobs in air conditioned comfort.

We decided to trot our horses the remainder of the way to Verne’s Garage so we could collect Jackson and his new friend and then get the hell away from this place. The remainder of the trip took less than an hour until we saw the road that Cara had indicated and we turned to take it.

Alejandro held up his hand and told me to stop. He nodded his head a few times, but I could tell that he was having a conversation in his head with someone. “Okay, we can go now,” he muttered.

“What was that about?”

“Someone contacted me from Verne’s,” he answered. “She told me that we had a rifle aimed at our heads and wanted to know what we were doing here. I told her we were here to meet up with Cara and Jackson, then be on our way. Apparently, that was good enough for her because she said we could come in.”

We walked the horses down the lane slowly and deliberately in order to look as non-threatening as possible. I didn’t want the sniper to misinterpret our haste to be away from this forsaken place as a hostile act towards the residents of the garage. As we walked along, a large fenced-in junkyard stretched away as far as the eye could see to the south.

After a half of a mile, we came to the parking area of the old garage and Jackson came out of the building. I swung down off the horse and he wrapped me in a huge hug. “Oh shit, Chuck! Cara told me what was happening at the town, but we weren’t allowed to leave,” he said.

“Wait, you mean Cara is a Changed too?” I asked incredulously.

“Yeah,” the boy responded. “Even though she’s only got a little bit of scar tissue, she can still do the mind-talking thing. The Changed around New El Paso have all linked their minds together and they hadn’t taken her out of the loop yet so she knew the plans to jump you guys.”

“Would have been nice if she told us,” I retorted.

“I did. I told him,” Cara exclaimed as she walked towards us from the garage.

“That was you?” Alejandro asked.

“Of course, who do you think it was?” she replied. “No one else around here gives two shits about you people other than what they can take from you. You guys are my ticket to safety. Besides, Jack would have been devastated if something happened to you.”

“Jack?” I said with a raised eyebrow towards my adopted son.

“Yeah,” he blushed. “Cara likes ‘Jack’ better than ‘Jackson.’ She says it makes me sound more grown up.”

I started to say something that sounded witty in my head, but thought better of it.
Let the boy learn for himself
, I thought. “Alright. I want to thank Verne and be on our way,” I said out loud.

“That’s not necessary. He wants us to leave before there’s any more trouble,” Cara remarked.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“He seemed pretty adamant that we leave as soon as you got here, Chuck,” Jackson answered for her. “He even had me prep Gertie so we could leave right away.”

I glanced towards the building where his horse was tied to a ring set into the wall. She had her saddle on and Jackson’s backpack was strapped down behind the lip of the seat. There was another, smaller bag that hadn’t been there before cinched tightly next to the backpack. Cara saw that my gaze lingered on the second bag. “Verne gave me some of his wife’s old clothes,” she stated. “I really didn’t have but the clothes that I’m wearing and he’s been nice to me all these years. That’s his final gift.”

I nodded and waved towards the wizened old face that appeared behind the safety bars of the garage window. He waved back and then he was gone. “Alright, let’s get going then,” I stated. “I’d like to be well away from here before nightfall.”

The kids mounted old Gertie and I noticed that Jackson had Cara ride in front of him, which was different than they’d been riding before. His arms circled protectively around her to grasp the reins and she leaned into him. There seemed to be a genuine chemistry between the two, but I hoped that Jackson wouldn’t get hurt. He was such a sensitive young man, it would break his heart if the girl he suddenly found out that he liked decided that she liked someone else closer to her age. I guess time would tell.

* * *

The return trip to Balmorhea took almost four days. The trip was quiet and easygoing with no signs of anyone out on the roads. Cara thought that was strange since the Changed had regularly been heading south to gather building supplies, but we assumed that the assault had put a temporary halt to the normal day-to-day operations.

The more time I spent with her, the more I liked Cara. She was extremely intelligent and could carry on a conversation about most topics. Even with the scarring on her face, she was very pretty and I really hoped that she and Jackson could develop a relationship. Even without my secret approval, the two of them were growing closer every day and I was happy for them.

We began to see smoke on the horizon when we were several miles from home. Distances on the plains could be deceiving, but there wasn’t a doubt in anyone’s mind that the fire was at Balmorhea. We spurred our horses to run as fast as they could safely travel and a scene of total devastation awaited us when we came within view of the town.

The walls were still intact, but there were wrecked and burning vehicles piled up at strange angles and bodies were strewn about all over the place outside of town. We pulled up short when the ground in front of us began to kick up in little puffs of dust. A few seconds later, the report from a rifle carried over the distance, confirming that someone from the town was shooting at us.

“What the hell are they doing?” I shouted in frustration.

“We’re still too far away for them to see us clearly,” Alejandro surmised. “They probably think that we’re part of this group out here that attacked them.”

“Hey, hold on,” Jackson exclaimed. He turned in his saddle and reached around Cara to pull an old white t-shirt out of his backpack. He held it above his head and waved it for a few moments.

I answered Alejandro’s unasked question with a shrug. “I don’t know what else to do. Do you?”

“No,” he acknowledged. “Okay, how do we know when it’s safe to walk up to the town?”

“Maybe we should dismount and walk the horses in,” I suggested. “That seems like it would be less threatening.”

Everyone agreed and we stepped down from the horses so we could lead them by the reins towards the town. The majority of the carnage seemed to have come from the north. There were several older vehicles that were flipped over and there were these strange claw marks on everything. We quickly discovered the source of the scrapes and what we assumed had caused the damage.

There were four of them. Each had received massive amounts of damage before they were finally killed. The giant scorpions were about the size of a small pick-up truck with tails that stretched for at least fifteen feet. Their hard carapaces were shredded by holes from bullet wounds. Two of the scorpions had human remains protruding from their mouths and it appeared that they died in the middle of their meal. One had a t-shirt stuck on its stinger and all of them had dried blood crusted on their pincers.

“Hey!” someone yelled from the wall. “Chuck, is that you?”

“Yeah,” I responded. “What the hell happened here?”

“We were attacked yesterday! Wait, I’ll let you in.”

We walked up to the gate and it slowly opened to admit us inside. The same boy who’d been on gate duty when we left over a week ago let us in. “Is everyone okay?” I asked.

“Pedro is dead. Plus Calvin, Jimmie, Barbara Simpson and a few others,” he answered as he secured the gate from the inside with several new crossbeams that hadn’t been there before. “We’ve also got a lot of wounded. They just came from out of nowhere and started shootin’ at us, didn’t even say what they wanted.”

“What about those giant scorpions out there?” Alejandro asked.

“They showed up about an hour after all the shootin’ started. Jose Ruiz thinks that the noise attracted them. Hell, we would’ve been goners if those bugs hadn’t come along and killed most of the attackers out there. Damn, if the attackers hadn’t killed the bugs, we would probably be dead too.”

He wiped his eyes with the back of his sleeve. “There were only a few of ‘em left by the time the bugs were done with ‘em and they hauled ass off towards the north. Chris got one with his rifle, but we think two of ‘em got away.”

“Who’s in charge?” I asked.

“Well, now that you’re back, you are,” the boy answered.

“I mean who’s been in charge since the attack?”

“Oh. Rebecca and Sam. They’re the only ones with any experience with this stuff, so they took over after Pedro died.”

Alejandro clapped the boy on the shoulder. “If I know my wife, she probably had every inch of the wall reinforced.”

“Yeah, well, we needed it. We didn’t realize it before, but there were all sorts of places that those people could have snuck in. We’re working on it though.”

“Alright, thank you, Jeff,” I told the guard. “Keep up the good work.”

“Yes, sir!” he said with a salute. I felt a little silly, but I saluted him back.

“Now that they know where you are, it will only get worse,” Cara stated. “That’s what happened in Dell City. Once they realized that we had enough resources to feed ourselves, they began attacking. Over time, we were too weak through attrition to defend the town anymore.”

I nodded my head in agreement. I just wanted peace for my family. “Let’s go to my place first. I’m sure that Sam is probably there with her.”

Alejandro agreed that our wives were inseparable, especially during a crisis, and would more than likely be together. We made the short trip quickly and when I saw my little home I leapt from Rusty’s back and bounded up the steps to the door.