Grunt Traitor (13 page)

Phil angled right to miss a shed, but it meant we hit a swing set square on, sending it up and over the truck in a clamoring of twisted metal.

We hit Desert Willow and swung left to the first intersection, and right onto Gardenia.

Sandi yelled to be heard. “You know we’re heading square into GNA territory, right?”

Somehow Phil had managed to light another cigarette. As he took the next turn on two wheels, he said, “Not much choice.” He jerked his head back the way we’d come. “With Big Ego behind us, I figured anything not in his direction was the right choice. I remember when they used to crucify members who tried to leave.”

Steve pointed to a break in the trees to the right. “Through there.”

Phil swerved into it. The truck bucked as it jumped the curb. Glancing towards Dupree, I think he’d decided it was best to keep his eyes closed through the entire chase. Probably a good idea on his part.

Sandi pointed to a pack of wild dogs, all with ascocarps protruding from their shoulders and heads. “Spikers!”

A mix of breeds from mutt to German shepherd to Chihuahua, they were already running to intersect us. The smaller dogs fell behind, but the larger ones, including the shepherd and a pair of Brittany Spaniels, were able to reach us before we passed, leaping towards us like kamikaze canines. All but one were stopped by the metal. A brindle greyhound hit the side of the mesh near where Dupree sat, clawed at it for a moment, then fell away.

“What was that?” Dupree said, his head whipping back and forth.

“Spiker dogs trying to eat you through the cage,” I said.

He turned and stared, eyes wide. Then he scrambled to grab his helmet from the bag at his hip. With shaking hands, he put it on.

“What are you doing?”

He pointed to the spot the dog had hit. “Spores.”

Sandi shook her head. “We’re going too fast for that. You only have to worry about them once we stop, or if we get into the alien vine.”

Phil shouted, “Hold on!”

I grabbed for the sides of the cage and watched with horror as we slammed into a corner of a Spanish-style stucco house. The impact shook me all the way to my teeth. The wheels were still spinning as they tried to find traction, grinding us against the side of the house.

Several of the spikers were still on our tail.

To the left came a shirtless woman whose head looked as if it had been burned: hair almost completely gone; black skin over bright red wounds. Fungal growths dotted her shoulders and neck, looking like distended nipples. She wore a pair of soiled panties and nothing else.

I raised my rifle, which put my aim just to the left of Dupree’s head. He regarded me and I gestured him aside. As soon as he moved, I put a round through the rifle. It struck the metal around the mesh and ricocheted, causing me to jump. I aimed again, this time getting the round through the mesh. It struck her center mass in the chest, sending her rolling onto the ground.

I heard a buzzing sound about the same time Phil managed to get the truck free. It shot forward, throwing me off balance. I reached out and caught Sandi’s breast, which earned me a punch in the sternum. I gave her an apologetic smile as I let go and transferred my grip to the truck.

Behind us came two motorcycles. Submachine guns were affixed to their fuel tanks. The riders wore full suits of racing armor with shin guards, knee guards, quad guards, articulated arm guards, and a full torso guard. They had red and white helmets that matched their armor. The prominent GNA on the front of their torsos said it all.

They opened fire as Phil jerked the wheel and punched the accelerator. We hit North Pasadena Avenue and slung south. The road was clogged with abandoned cars, so Phil was forced to careen onto several front lawns just to keep from crashing.

Sandi slid to the rear of the truck and fired her MAC-10 through the mesh, causing the riders to swerve to avoid getting hit.

Meanwhile the interior of Dupree’s helmet was misted, the same sort of moisture you’d get on the inside of a car’s windows if there wasn’t any ventilation.
Oh Hell!
I clawed my way to him and fought to remove the helmet. He wasn’t moving. The damned fool had put the helmet on and not the oxygen. What had he been thinking?

I found the connector and peeled the helmet from his head. As the truck bounced and jostled, I tried feeling for a breath. Nothing. I grabbed the back of his head and brought it to me just enough so I could make sure that he was breathing. I laid him down on the bed of the truck. That’s when I noticed the blood coming from his left thigh. He’d been shot. I checked the wound and noted with relief that the femoral artery was undamaged. Had it been hit, poor Dupree would have already been dead. As it stood, the wound was barely bleeding.

Sandi fired off another burst of shots.

One of the bikers went down, ass over tea kettle.

The second biker fired twice more, then tore away, heading back the way he’d come. I guess without support from his partner, he wasn’t willing to continue.

Hooray for our side.

Sandi pulled herself to the front of the back. “Let’s get to Safehouse 3.”

For the next twenty minutes, Phil drove the truck like an Indianapolis 500 professional race car driver. Twice fungees tried to block the way. Both times he swerved and clipped them, sending them tumbling like ragdolls into adjacent buildings. The number of spikers increased dramatically as we headed west.

We finally stopped at a small church wedged between Foothills Boulevard and the 210. The sign read
Indonesian Evangelical Church
. A gnarled Asian man held open a garage door. We roared inside, then he slammed it down and put several metal rods through the floor to secure it.

Dupree had come to a few minutes earlier, but he was deathly pale. I put a bandage over his leg wound. When they opened the rear of our cage, I helped him out. We soon found ourselves in the congregation hall, which had been set up with a meeting area near where the pulpit had once been, and cots where the congregation would have normally gathered.

While Sandi and the others secured the vehicle, I found a spare cot and got Dupree settled onto it. “What the hell were you thinking, putting the helmet on without checking for oxygen flow?”

He grinned weakly. “I forgot about the oxygen.” He closed his eyes and winced. “Getting shot hurts, you know?”

“I know. It’s why you try and avoid it at all costs.”

“Where are we?”

“In some church. They called it a safehouse.” I glanced around at the metal reinforced door and the barred windows and the men with rifles sitting round. “Looks pretty safe to me.”

I turned back to Dupree, but his eyes were closed. His chest was rising and falling steadily, so that was a good sign. He might as well sleep while he could.

We’ve been cataloguing as many survival groups as we can. We have more than seven thousand in our database alone. Some are good but most are bad. If you can make it on your own, try to do that. Even the good groups have a bloody past which they could just as quickly return to if times got tough all of a sudden. Keep the information flowing, people. And remember, be careful out there.

Conspiracy Theory Talk Radio,

Night Stalker Monologue #1344

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I
T WAS MY
bullet they found in his leg. Must have come from the ricochet. They were able to give him a unit of blood and had him on a drip just to bring back his fluids. As it turned out, the safehouse was run by Mother as one of her outstations. They were getting ready to abandon it to the creeping alien vine, much to the lamentations of Pastor Mercurio, the Indonesian leader of the long-gone congregation. Even now preparations were being made to move this part-forward operating base, part-MASH unit to somewhere in the foothills. Their only problem was trying to keep free of GNA.

“It’s more than a cult to them,” Sandi told me. “It’s more than a religion. They’re fanatics.”

I kept my thoughts to myself. Mother and Sebring both had cults of personality and they both wanted for them and their members to survive. They seemed different sides of the same coin to me, although Mother occupied the definitely nicer side—or so it seemed, for now.

Now we sat around a table. Phil and Steve cleaned weapons. Mercurio wouldn’t let them smoke in the church, so they were constantly going outside. I sat beside Sandi, and next to her was an ex-male stripper named Adam who had a face that looked somewhere between Richard Gere’s in
American Gigolo
and a meth addict. He’d been showing Sandi a map of the infected areas that he was updating daily.

“It’s crossed the 605,” he said in a small voice. He pointed to several spots. “Right here it’s all the way to Irwindale Road. We have no idea how it grew fast enough to reach there while the rest of it is still a mile back.” He shrugged. “It’s not like we even know how to stop it.”

“See the Sante Fe Dam Nature Preserve?” Sandi said, pointing at the map. “The damned vines probably relished the soil. So much easier to grow in than concrete.”

“I suppose so. That guy over there going to be able to tell us how to kill it?” he asked, his eyes darting towards where Dupree lay, softly snoring.

“We hope so. He’s OMBRA’s best and brightest.” She flashed me a smile. “And this guy, the guy who shot him, is his bodyguard.”

Adam sawed his jaws back and forth as he examined me. “Not much of a bodyguard, is he?”

I stared at him flatly. “No. Not much.”

He jerked away as if I’d hit him. Good.

Sandi placed a hand over his. “How many more days?”

“Three, I think, maybe four.” He licked his lips. “It’s not just the alien vine, it’s what comes out of it. There’s some sort of bird that lives inside. We have yet to see one close up, but we think it’s alien, as well.”

“Maybe it’s the pollinator,” I murmured. Then when I saw them staring at me, I shared what Dupree had told me earlier.

“It’s good that you came along when you did,” Sandi said to me.

I shrugged. “Like Adam said, I’m just a bodyguard and not very good at that.” I suddenly flashed to Michelle begging me to kill her. I shook my head and changed the subject. “You said Sebring was there for
us
.”

She patted Adam on the shoulder and he simpered away to one of the cots. “He had to be. There’s no reason for him to be so far away from his center of control. You must have something he wants.”

“Not me. Must be Dupree. But even that’s strange. Why would he need a scientist?”

“He’s as desperate as any of us to stop the spread of the alien vine. It’s going to kill us all eventually if we don’t figure a way to stop it.”

“So he tries to steal a scientist?”

“It makes a sort of sense.”

I shook my head. I wasn’t buying it. “We’re missing something.”

We were getting nowhere fast. Our plan was to leave at first light. I checked on Dupree, then worked with Steve to fix the hole the bullet had made in his hazmat suit. We spent a fruitless hour trying everything from melting rubber to applying a patch, but the suit’s material withstood the best we could throw at it. Finally it was decided that Steve would stay back and give Dupree his suit. He wasn’t happy about it, nor was Sandi happy about taking a weapon out of the expedition, but without Dupree, there would be no expedition to begin with.

By the time we were done and had the vehicle prepped and ready, it was going on ten PM. Dupree had woken once. He’d spent an hour jotting down notes, then we’d given him some food and sent him back to dreamland.

I soon found myself drifting through an ethereal landscape of Tony Scott movies. One minute I was Denzel Washington playing the redemptive Creasy in
Man on Fire
, and the next I was Maverick, the hotshot pilot in
Top Gun
who was brought to earth by the death of his best friend. Then, for what seemed like an eternity, I was stuck in Michael Rapaport’s living room in
True Romance
, smoking joints with Brad Pitt and all he could talk about was about having sex with Angelina Jolie. It was the sort of thing where I knew it was a dream, but was unable to change it. I let it take me for a ride as Pitt droned on and on, getting increasingly more detailed and imaginative, until I was suddenly on a submarine, staring into the mad eyes of Gene Hackman. I knew that somewhere aboard ship Denzel was arguing with a crewman about the relevance of Jack Kirby’s Silver Surfer over Stan Lee’s version while he planned a mutiny to take the
Crimson Tide
away from Gene Hackman.

My fucking dreams were always like this. Was this what it meant to be a child of the ’nineties?

“Belay that order,” Hackman said.

I turned to see who he was talking to. There was no one behind me, so it was apparently me. I turned back only to have his face now an inch from my own, so close I could see the pores on his nose.

“I said to belay that order.”

“Yes, sir,” I began, then corrected myself. “Aye aye, Captain.”