Green Ice: A Deadly High (22 page)

Trey, Jorge and Leticia followed Mancini onto the sidewalk in front of the garage. They glanced over the building, peering through the front windows into the dark interior. Mancini noticed a sign hanging inside
the front door’s top glass panel.

“
Cerrado
,” he read aloud. “I guess that means the place is closed?” He turned to Jorge and Leticia for confirmation.

Jorge nodded. “You guess right.”

“Aghh, man,” Trey groaned. “What in the hell are we going to do now?”

“I’m sorry guys, but I really need to take a
shit,” Jorge moaned, hopping from one foot to another. “I got to find someplace to go, real bad.”

Mancini glanced at Trey, who screwed up his face in revulsion.
Another wave of sand whipped through the thoroughfare on a gust of wind. The four of them turned their backs against the sand filled breeze. Mancini wanted to try and call Eddie Steinbeck in LA and speak to him in private. He decided Jorge wouldn’t run any sort of risk in absconding, due to the lack of any mobile transport in the vicinity.

“All right, Jorge. Go and find someplace to dump. You stay with Leticia, Trey and see if you can raise
somebody inside that garage. I’ve got to make a call so I’ll just take a short walk,” Mancini said.

“I’ll be right back,” Jorge stammered and scurried along the street
, back along the way they’d entered the town.

“Keep an eye out for him,” Mancini said to Trey, pointing down the road.

Trey nodded. “Sure thing.”

“You got your piece on you?”

Trey nodded. “U-huh. I might just use it to open up this god damn garage.” He rattled the door and knocked on the glass panel.

“Okay, I’m going to call HQ and find out if there are any new developments,” Mancini said and turned away from the garage. He walked a few paces, taking out his cell phone and his pack of smokes.

A few narrow side roads crisscrossed the town’s main street and Mancini strolled across the road, lighting a smoke before he dialed Reinbeck’s number. The phone rang a few times before the call was answered.

“Talk to me, Marco. What have you got?” Reinbeck sounded tired and stressed.

“I was hoping you’d have some more news for me,” Mancini sighed. “It appears that Luiz has got into bed with a cartel guy by the name of Logrono. Ring any bells?”

The line went dead for a few seconds and Mancini briefly thought the weak phone signal had petered out altogether.

“Eddie…you there?”

“Yeah, Logrono
…the guy’s supposed to be a real badass. Into all kinds of trafficking across the border, north and south of Mexico. So, what’s the whole story?”

“We got a call on
Luiz’s cell phone from a guy claiming to be Logrono. He says he’s holed up in this place in La Paz and he’s surrounded by bad guys. We’re not sure who he meant though. This green shit is leaving a real trail of fucking destruction down this way so we got to assume that’s the cause of the problem.”

“That’s why we need to can it as soon as we can, Marco. You anywhere near La Paz yet?”

Mancini sighed. “Nah, we’re only about halfway down Baja, Eddie. We ran into a real shit storm a few miles back. The kid’s T-Bird got totaled and now we’re in some freaky town called Sandblast, trying to get the damn car fixed up but there don’t seem to be anybody around this place. It’s like a damn ghost town out here.”

“All right, just hang on in there, Marco and keep me updated, okay? Listen, I got to go. Call me when you have some
good
news.”

“But Eddie, we m
ight need to find another vehicle from someplace if we can’t fix up this damn T-Bird and…” Mancini stopped when he realized he was talking to a dead line. Reinbeck had basically washed his hands of them. “Thanks Eddie, you fucking prick,” he spat.

Mancini replaced his cell phone in his pocket and took a long hard suck on his cigarette. Without any kind of transport, they were
marooned in the shitty little, sand swept town.

Chapter Thirty

Mancini swung around with an increasing sense of anxiety when he heard a gunshot echo across the terrain. He couldn’t see the garage from his position, as he’d walked a little way down the side street. Crouching low to the ground, Mancini drew his handgun and tried to pinpoint where the gunfire had come from. The town was deserted as far as he knew but were the local residents suddenly looming from their hiding places?

He swiveled and surveyed the side street behind him but still nobody occupied the
surrounding area. The dwellings tapered into the distance and only bland desert lay beyond the buildings. Another wave of sand blew into his face and he spat out the tiny grains stuck on his lips and around his front teeth.

Mancini scurried to the corner of the side street and peered around the edge of the building
, onto the town’s main thoroughfare. He couldn’t see anybody moving around the square but a prone body lay on the sidewalk, a few yards from the garage. The Thunderbird was still in the position they’d left it, with a steady, shimmering heat haze emanating from the engine. Mancini couldn’t see the body clearly from his position as the felled individual lay feet first towards him. He could make out the soles of the shoes and the victim’s blue denim jeans but that was as much as he saw.

“Shit,” he hissed. “Where the
hell have all the others gone?”

He pulled out his cell phone and dialed Trey’s number. The call went straight to voice mail. Weighing up the risks, Mancini decided to bolt from his position. He ran towards the garage and the immobile Thunderbird
, taking up cover crouching beside the vehicle. The heat from the water starved engine radiated against the side of Mancini’s face and his shoulder. He shimmied around the car to take a look at the body on the sandy ground. The fatally injured person was a big, stout guy with long hair tied up in a pony tail, splayed on the ground amongst a pool of blood behind his head. A single bullet hole had pierced the center of his forehead. The guy’s eyes were closed so Mancini couldn’t decipher if the body had been infected by the green ice virus. The garage interior remained darkened and the closed sign was still in place inside the front door.

“What the hell is going on?” Mancini muttered and took out his cell phone
from his pocket again. He attempted to call Trey once more but received the same answer service.

He glanced around the buildings along the main street, studying the dark interiors behind the windows. No signs of life were visible from behind the panes and he couldn’t be sure which direction the shot
had come from that had felled the big guy. The sound of running footfalls to his right caused Mancini to swivel around, leaning against the side of the vehicle with his handgun held at the ready. He peered around the Thunderbird’s trunk as the onrushing steps grew louder and drew nearer.

Mancini saw Jorge slow down to a shuffling jog
, before coming to a halt when he drew level with the car. His face was coated with sweat and his expression was of a worried man, deep in trouble. His eyes bulged wide and his mouth hung open, huffing heavily and nervously whimpering with every inward suck of breath. Mancini noticed Jorge fumbling with his belt and the fastenings around the top of his pants. Jorge gasped when he saw the dead body lying in the sand and stared down at the deceased man.

“Hey, Jorge,” Mancini hissed.

“Huh?” Jorge anxiously twisted, shuffling to look in each direction along the street.

“Down here,” Mancini whispered.

Jorge finally caught sight of Mancini crouching behind the rear wheel, between the Thunderbird and the garage exterior.

“What the hell is going on?”

Jorge hurried to join Mancini and hunkered down beside him, still breathing heavily.

“U-oh, you look like you’ve seen a ghost, Jorge. What the hell is the matter with you? Shit you
r pants, or what?”

“Worse than that,” Jorge stammered. “I went into that bar back down the street to take a
shit and saw the bathroom, right inside the entrance door. I did my business and thought I’d grab a nice cold beer while I was there so I went further inside, right into the bar but then I saw bodies, lots of them. They were all just laying around the floor.”

“So
, were they dead or what?” Mancini huffed.

“I thought so at first, so I started to back out of the bar but then one of them sat up and looked at me with those horrible black eyes,” Jorge explained.
“He kind of groaned at me and his noise seemed to wake up the others around the bar. It was like they were kind of asleep or something. Then they all started to get up so I ran away and came back here.”

“Are they headed this way?” Mancini craned his neck around the side of the back fender, taking a long glance down the main street.

“I don’t know,” Jorge sighed. “They started to follow me but I don’t see them.” He nodded towards the dead body on the ground by the car. “Who is that guy and why did you shoot him?”

“Hell, I didn’t shoot him,” Mancini snapped. “I heard the shot from way over there.”
He jutted his chin towards the side street. “I came right back here and now there’s no sign of Trey and that girl…what’s her name?”

“Leticia,” Jorge confirmed.
“Where did they go?”

“They were right here when I walked up the street. I was only gone a few minutes, for Christ’s sake. Trey was trying to raise somebody in that damn garage.” He jabbed his thumb at the building behind him. 

“What the heck are we going to do now?”

Mancini sighed. It was a good question, a query he didn’t have any immediate answer for. 

Chapter Thirty-One

The overhead sun reflected off the red paintwork across the Thunderbird’s trunk. Mancini tried to blink away the dazzle as he studied the main street. He flipped his sunshades down from his forehead to cover his eyes.

“We sure as shit can’t stay put here forever,” he muttered. “It looks like whoever shot that guy was facing down the street, that way.” He indicated a left to right movement from their position behind the car.

“You think Trey shot the guy?” Jorge asked.

Mancini shrugged. “I don’t know.
It’s a possibility but we can’t take it for granted. There may be some mystery shooter inside one of the buildings down this street. Every damn thing seems like a total mystery since you and your co-workers unleashed that green shit on the world, Jorge.”

“I’m sorry…but I had no idea the merchandise would cause all this…this chaos,” Jorge stammered.
He felt a sinking sensation in his guts, as the increasing enormity of the effects of his produce continued to weigh heavily on his conscience.    

Mancini weighed up the situation. “It seems it only takes one infected person, one guy who has taken some of that shit, to infect a whole bunch of other people. My guess is, that’s what’s happened right here in this town.”

As long as they remained mobile they could
continue to escape the horrors but now they remained stranded until the Thunderbird was fixed or they found alternative transport. The lack of numbers of parked vehicles along the main street worried Mancini. “I think the uninfected people got out of here while they still could,” he murmured. “An outbreak of an infection would have a devastating affect on a rural place like this.”

“Surely, the cops or the military must get wind of what’s going on soon?” Jorge
said.

“That’s what I’m worried about,” Mancini groaned. “We’ll all be held in some god
damn quarantine center, if that happens. We’ve got to keep moving. Keep on the road. We can’t waste time like this.”

He impatiently pulled out his cell phone and tried Trey’s number again.
The call went straight to voice mail. This time Mancini left a message. “Where the hell are you, Trey? We’ve got a whole bunch of hostiles heading our way and we need to get the fuck out of this shit hole town. Call me back or get your ass back to the Thunderbird, right now.” He clicked to end the call and stuffed the cell back into his pocket. “There’s no point hanging out here any longer. We ‘aint going to get this crate fixed up with any ease.” He flicked his free hand against the side of the Thunderbird, producing a metallic clang. “We need to find another working vehicle and get the hell out of
Dodge
.” He decided they couldn’t wait for Trey any longer. Trey and Leticia’s survival weren’t a necessity in the grand scheme of things.