Green Ice: A Deadly High (40 page)

“Hey, don’t go that way,” Mancini hissed. “The streets are full of crazy people who’ll hurt you. Take your bottle and go home.”

The guy turned back to look at Mancini, belched loudly and made some sort of disapproving groaning sound. Mancini was now faced with a further set of problems. The drunken guy, however he had so far survived, wasn’t going to live much longer if he carried on his staggering path. The infected around the warehouse would soon sniff him out and attack, a situation which would ultimately lead them to Mancini. And he seriously doubted the drunken guy actually possessed any sort of home and probably had nowhere to go in any case.

“I should have just clubbed the prick,” Mancini sighed.

The drunken guy staggered further down the street, swaying and zigzagging across the sidewalk. Mancini followed at a distance, still keeping out of sight in the shadows beside the row of buildings at the right side of the street. He noticed a wide, squat building with two closed roller shutter doors at the front, standing on the opposite side of the road. At least two dozen infected people milled around the building perimeter, wailing and bashing their hands against the roller shutters. The building stood a little further back from the roadside than either of its neighboring structures on each side. A narrow driveway lane sat to the left and snaked around to the rear of the property. Mancini wondered if it was the place Trey and Leticia were holed up.

The building looked as though it was some type of storage space or warehouse and the number of infected patrolling the area
matched Trey’s description but Mancini had to be sure. He didn’t have time to waste searching through the wrong place. The drunken guy was also going to cause a big problem if the infected spotted him. Mancini felt for his cell phone in his pocket but stopped searching when the drunken guy staggered within sight of the front of the warehouse.

Mancini decided he had to act quickly. He moved rapidly out of the shadows, cutting down the space between him and the drunken guy
but still keeping a vigilant eye on the building opposite. The infected still shrieked and wailed uncontrollably, thrashing against the roller shutters. At least a dozen contaminated people also huddled around a closed, single door to the right side of the front facing wall. They jostled and barged each other as they ripped at the wooden door frame with their finger nails.

The drunken guy didn’t he
ar and wasn’t aware of Mancini’s approach from behind him. He seemed oblivious to the chaos going on across the street and appeared to be wrapped up in his own, drunken little world. Mancini raised the shotgun in his hands and firmly struck the back of the guy’s skull with the flat bottom edge of the shotgun butt. The drunken guy silently lurched forward and landed face first on the sidewalk. He didn’t move or make any kind of audible sound. The half empty liquor bottle was still in his hand. The cap was in place and surprisingly the glass hadn’t smashed when the guy had hit the deck.   

Mancini gripped the shotgun’s stock with his right hand and grabbed the drunk’s ankle with his left. He glanced across the street to check he hadn’t been noticed. The infected were still preoccupied with trying to gain access to the warehouse and hadn’t spotted his assault o
n the hobo. Mancini dragged the prone drunken guy into the shadows of an inactive bar doorway on the opposite side of the road to the warehouse. He turned the hobo around and propped him up in a sitting position against the bar’s closed door. Mancini checked the drunken guy’s pulse and if he was still breathing. His head lolled forward onto his chest and Mancini heard heavy snorts as though the guy was in an alcohol induced slumber.

“Sorry, man, but I couldn’t let you walk right by there and give my position away,” Mancini whispered, while retrieving his cell phone.

Studying the warehouse from the shadow beneath the bar’s doorway, Mancini hit the call button and hoped Trey had a signal and was in a position to answer his phone. Mancini listened intently to the ringtone. He heard a click then an elongated silence, followed by a chilling moan.

Chapter Sixty

Mancini heard heavy breathing and rapidly moving foot falls on the other end of the phone. He wondered what the hell was happening.

“Yo! Where are you, man?” Trey’s voice was tense and he breathed rapidly over the phone.

“What happened just then? Are you okay?” Mancini whispered.

“We just got our asses chased, man. I couldn’t talk for a moment. Those crazy goons are in the building. I think some of them are people who used to work right here. They’ve still got work clothes on and hard hats and shit. We’re running around all over this place trying to give them the slip, man. We need to get the hell out of here but all the exits are blocked.”

“I think I’m right outside the place,” Mancini said and went on to describe the front of the warehouse.

“Yeah, that’s the place, man,” Trey squawked, then realized he’d spoken too loudly. He continued in a hushed tone. “We got inside here through a walkway around back. The door was open but I closed it when we got in. If you can make it around there, we can try and get back over to the door. Can you cover us?”

Mancini
roughly counted how many infected bodies were out front. He ceased counting at thirty. “Are they still trying to get in around the back door?”

“Duh, yeah,” Trey sighed. “They chased us right across the parking lot and through the doorway. We were lucky the door was left open, man.”

Mancini inwardly groaned, realizing he was faced with an almost impossible task. He briefly considered retracing his steps, grabbing Jorge, hot-wiring the Thunderbird and continuing on with the exhausting journey to La Paz. The whole situation seemed a hopeless and never ending battle against increasingly overwhelming odds.

“Hang on in there and I’ll see what I can do.”
Mancini closed his phone and placed it back in his pocket.

The ammunition for both rifles and his handgun were rapidly diminishing and he knew as soon as he fired the first shot
, his position would be compromised. He had no obligatory loyalties with either Trey or Leticia and the easy thing to do was to walk away and leave them inside the warehouse. Opening the Thunderbird trunk to retrieve the cash wouldn’t be too much of a problem. A pry bar would be adequate for that particular job. Jorge could lead him to the address in La Paz, then he would be eliminated with a bullet to the head. The mess in La Paz could be cleaned up simply by burning the house or whatever the location was to the ground, with everybody and everything still inside it. Situation and problem over. Mancini could then return to LA and get back to some kind of normality.

But a voice in the back of his mind told him that wasn’t the right path to follow.
Easy solutions weren’t always the correct solutions.

“Okay, Trey,”
Mancini sighed to himself. “Let’s go get ourselves all killed.”

Mancini wished he had a knife or a spear with him or any kind of a weapon that made no sound. All the firearms he had with him made too much damn noise and he couldn’t possibly fight off all the infected while he made his way to the warehouse
’s back entrance. Mancini would almost certainly be forced to use stealth and guile if he was to achieve a successful conclusion to his mission. He crept from the shadows in a crouching position. As soon as he was in the open, he darted across the road to the covering shadow beneath a building’s canopy on the opposite side of the street.

Mancini waited a few seconds amongst the canopy shadow until his breathing slowed to normal. He was positioned at the front entrance to a café, directly to the left of the warehouse.
Holding the shotgun vertically to his chest, Mancini edged to the corner of the café’s front wall and peered around the angle. The warehouse was still engulfed by the infected but none of them had spotted his advance.

A line of low standing, spiky leaved shrubs grew along the opposite side of the access road
, leading to the rear of the warehouse. The plants were positioned around three feet apart and wouldn’t provide much cover but Mancini couldn’t see any other way he was going to sneak by the infected horde. He stood around ten feet from the first in the vertical line of plants.

Mancini gritted his teeth and hoped luck was on his side and he’d remain unseen. He stooped and slowly edged his way
closer to the tangle of spiky leaves. The soil around the plant felt damp and spongy when Mancini sank face down amongst it. The earthy scent burned in his nostrils as he lay still, glancing amongst the pointed leaves directly in front of him. So far so good, the infected hadn’t noticed him.

Repositioning the semi automatic so it sat squarely on his back, Mancini crawled through the soil at the rear of the line of plants, carefully avoiding the barbed leaves. He didn’t want to cause them to rustle and give away his position.

The line of shrubs came to an end at the edge of a small parking lot, positioned to the rear of the warehouse. Mancini glanced through the leaves of the last plant, checking for the back door. He saw a recess in the center of the back wall with a metal walkway leading upwards to what looked like a fire escape door. Several infected crawled up and down the walkway and at least a half dozen scraped their fingers down the fire door.

Mancini surveyed the ground space between him and the walkway. A few more infected roamed around the parking lot, aimlessly wandering between a few
abandoned vehicles. He’d manage to outrun them to the walkway but he wouldn’t have time to reach the door if he was snared up in some sort of hand to hand combat. The ghouls would be all over him within a few seconds.

Mancini scoured the outside of the building for another possible entry point but couldn’t see any easy way of access. Maybe if he had a few grenades and several hundred more rounds of ammunition he could have stormed the warehouse. But with limited firepower and a well guarded entrance, the task was going to be
exceedingly tricky. Mancini needed some kind of diversion to draw the infected away from the walkway and the fire escape door. He racked his brains and came up with a dicey solution. 

Chapter Sixty-One

Mancini slowly turned around and crawled back along the plant bed, the way he’d entered the parking lot. He didn’t want to retreat but knew he had to retrieve some items if he wanted to progress further with his mission.

The shadow beneath the café canopy swallowed Mancini up in blackness when he reached the corner of the building. He stealthily crossed over the road
, back to the bar doorway. The drunk was still unconscious in the doorway but his prized possession, which was the liquor bottle, lay on the sidewalk a few feet away.

Mancini checked the hobo was still breathing freely then scooped up the liquor bottle. He resisted the urge to take a swig and shoved it into the back of his waistband, alongside the Heckler and Koch handgun.
The drunken guy wore dark colored cargo pants and Mancini crouched down and tore away the pocket flap from the left leg. He tucked the cotton strip of material in the front of his waistband and made his way back to the row of shrubs beside the warehouse parking lot.

When Mancini was back in position behind the last plant in the line, he rose to a crouch and sunk into the shadows around the parking lot perimeter.
He slowly moved to the nearest vehicle, which looked like a Chevrolet parked at the far end of the lot. Crouching beside the car’s back door nearest the gas tank, Mancini lay the shotgun down beside his feet. He took out the liquor bottle and retrieved the torn pocket flap from the hobo’s pants. First, he unscrewed the bottle cap and tossed it over his shoulder. Then he poured a small shot of liquor over the pocket flap. Mancini quickly stuffed the cotton strip back in the neck of the bottle. He fished around in his pocket for his Zippo lighter.

The orange flame illuminated Mancini’s position and he knew he’d have to be quick now if the plan was going to be a success.
He held the Zippo flame to the cotton pocket flap until the alcohol caught fire in a sudden, whooshing flame.

Mancini shoved the lighter back in his pocket, scooped up the shotgun with his free hand and stood up.
He faced the Chevrolet’s back window leveling the shotgun and bracing himself while holding the flaming liquor bottle.

Already, the infected milling around the parking lot had spotted him and jerked suddenly into action. They began to run towards Mancini, attracted by the flame around the top of the bottle. Mancini fired the shotgun at the car’s window. The small round pellets from the cartridge tore their way through the air and obliterated the glass panel
in the side of the vehicle. The back window on the opposite side also smashed into nothing more than thousands of tiny chips.

Mancini hurled the flaming liquor bottle through the open window, aiming at the solid surface of the dash. The bottle struck the control panel with force and broke into several pieces. The liquor ignited and spread in an eruption of flame throughout the Chevrolet’s interior. Mancini heard growls and shrieks from the infected around the parking lot, the walkway and the fire escape. The two smashed windows
on either side of the car caused an oxygen flow, which helped fan the flames and accelerate the spread of the fire.

Mancini stepped back out the way of billowing black smoke
spewing from the broken windows. He ducked back into the shadows under the cover of the fire and smoke and stealthily made his way back to the last plant in the soil bed. Dropping down again behind the spiky leaves, Mancini studied the walkway and the fire escape door. Most of the infected hordes were attracted by the brightness of the burning car, the shotgun blast and the sound of smashing glass they’d heard a few seconds previously. They tumbled down the staircase in droves, falling over each other in attempt to be the first on the scene.

The infected crowding around the fire escape door
dispersed and followed those stumbling down the walkway. Mancini waited a few seconds with his cell phone in his hand until the walkway was clear. When the last infected person staggered from the walkway and took a few steps into the parking lot, Mancini hit the call button for Trey’s number. He answered on the first ring.

“What’s going down, big guy?”

“Are you at the back door? I’ve drawn them away from the walkway but you only have a few seconds before they come right back,” Mancini whispered.

The infected surrounded the burning Chevy, flapping at the flames with their hands while groaning and screeching.
Mancini knew they’d soon realize no humans were inside the car and head on back up the staircase.

“Ah, yeah, we’re almost there…”

Mancini heard a gunshot on the other end of the line. “Trey…what’s going on? Come on, get out of there.”

“One of those suckers in here got a little too close. I’m nearly out of ammo, man.”

“Just get to the door and I can provide you with some cover but you have to get out of there now,” Mancini growled. The line went dead and Mancini wasn’t sure if the signal had died or Trey had cut the call. He slid his phone into his pocket and waited. 

The flames grew larger inside the Chevrolet and the remaining windows popped and shattered
under the intense heat. The rush of air acted like a chimney and the fire roared higher, shooting out of every side of the car. Some of the infected who stood close by were engulfed in the flames and their hair and clothing were set ablaze.

Mancini kept his eye on the fire escape door, willing Trey and Leticia to hurry up and exit the building.

“Come on, Trey. Where the hell are you?” Mancini muttered.

He moved slightly to his left and the thorns on the spiky leaves brushed against his
cheek, causing a thin scratch. He dabbed his fingers against his face where he sensed a slight stinging sensation and felt a smear of blood. 

“Shit,” he hissed.
Mancini knew the infected people’s sense of smell was heightened and hoped they couldn’t sniff out fresh blood amongst the stench of the burning Chevy.

If Trey left it too long, Mancini would have to abandon the rescue mission and
continue on his way without them. He wondered if the fluids inside the engine compartment would heat up and cause an explosion. He knew the gas in the fuel pump and line, the air conditioning system, brake, battery and power steering fluids could cause a blast if heated to an extreme temperature.

The fire escape door opened a crack and Mancini saw somebody peeking out into the parking lot. The door swung open and Trey emerged with Leticia following closely behind. Trey held his handgun in his right hand and gripped Leticia’s wrist with his left. He glanced first at the brightness
radiating from the burning car, then in all directions, obviously looking for Mancini but aware of the imminent danger from the infected close by. Mancini couldn’t afford to compromise his hiding place, as he was too close to the infected throng. He scurried across the soil, making his way along the row of bushy plants.

Trey tentatively led the way out of the doorway, across the walkway
and started down the staircase. Mancini gazed back to the infected bunch surrounding the flaming car. Some of them sniffed the air as if they could sense a different element to the combination of burning plastic, rubber and metal. Mancini glanced back to the walkway and saw a figure emerge from the fire exit door behind Trey and Leticia. He realized they hadn’t seen the infected guy following them down the staircase.

Chapter Sixty-Two

Mancini wasn’t in a position to call out and warn Trey and Leticia of their pursuer. Trey was glancing in all direction except behind him. Maybe he thought the immediate danger lay right ahead of
them and the warehouse interior was no longer a concern. Mancini laid the shotgun in the soil next to him, then hurriedly pulled the semi automatic rifle around from his back to his shoulder. He aligned his aim down the scope and flicked on the laser sight. The scope whined in a high pitched tone and a thin, green laser beam cut through the darkness beyond Mancini’s position. 

Trey and Leticia paused at the foot of the staircase, glancing in all direction with worried expressions on their faces. Mancini calculated the distance between his weapon and the moving target.
Approximately twenty five yards he surmised. The infected guy stumbled down the steps with his arms raised and his mouth wide open. Mancini guessed he was going to leap on top of Trey or Leticia from the staircase. The car fire still burned intensely, casting the rear of the warehouse in an orange hue. Mancini felt the heat on the side of his face as he lined up the target. He moved the rifle slightly, so the green laser sight aligned with the infected guy’s forehead.

Mancini breathed gently through his nose and squeezed the trigger. The round tore through the air at high velocity, following the path of the green laser beam.
Trey heard a clanking sound on the walkway behind him and turned his head at exactly the same moment the rifle round penetrated the infected guy’s skull.

“What the fuck, man?” Trey squawked.

The infected guy’s head jerked backwards and the rifle round’s momentum caused his whole body to divert in the opposite direction to which he traveled. He hit the metal staircase hard on his back and slid down the remaining steps, leaving a bloody trail on the treads behind his head.

Alerted by the crack of the rifle shot, Leticia spun around in a circle, searching for the shooter.
Trey spotted the green laser beam and followed its path to the bushy plants across the driveway. He pointed towards the spiky foliage with his handgun in an instinctive defensive reaction.

The infected surrounding the burning vehicle became less interested in the flames spiraling into the night sky. They began to turn away from the inferno in small groups and gazed around the parking lot for another objective to focus on.

Mancini knew they didn’t have much time before Trey and Leticia were spotted. He hoped the brightness of the flames had temporarily hampered the infected people’s vision. Trey shuffled forward towards the plant bed, still aiming his firearm at the position where Mancini lay. Mancini couldn’t call out to the couple, fearing the infected would hear. He flicked off the laser sight and stood up, hoping Trey would immediately recognize him and not fire his handgun in a state of gung-ho surprise. Mancini raised the rifle above his head and prayed the glow from the burning Chevy would illuminate him sufficiently for Trey to see him clearly.  

Trey gasped and his finger edged back on the Heckler and Koch trigger but not sufficiently to discharge a round.
He saw a guy in the shadows behind the row of plants and held his fire.

“Mancini?”

Mancini glanced to the blazing Chevrolet to his left, slung the rifle around his shoulder and picked up the shotgun. He had to move immediately while they still had a short distance between them and the infected horde. Using the shotgun butt to brush aside the spiky leaves, he strode through the plant bed towards Trey and Leticia. The infected growled and sniffed the air, edging through the parking lot back towards the rear of the warehouse. Mancini aimed the shotgun towards the back end of the parking lot, where the infected began to bunch together into a solid crowd.

Trey lowered his firearm
and gestured with his head towards the street beyond the warehouse driveway.

“Let’s move,” Mancini muttered
, before breaking into a fast trot towards the street.

Trey nodded and headed after Mancini, tugging Leticia’s hand as he moved.
They heard the infected snarl and shriek behind them as they fled the parking lot. Mancini didn’t bother to look around or glance over his shoulder. He knew the infected gang was coming after them.

“This way,” Mancini grunted, as he veered right when they reached the street.

Trey and Leticia followed, their heads swiveling back to the warehouse.