No Easy Hope - 01 (33 page)

Justin got out of the truck and lowered the tailgate. Rick pulled to a stop behind him and got out of his truck. He walked up to me and clapped me on the shoulder.

“Man, that rifle you gave me is something else, I tell you what. I must have dropped two hundred creeps with this thing today.” He said, patting the HK. “Justin over there was like Annie freakin’ Oakley with that little pistol.”

Bill overheard the conversation and came over to stand beside me.

“Whoa, whoa, hold up a minute. What did you two get yourselves into today?” He asked.

“We’ll tell you all about it once we get inside. Both of us are hungry and thirsty, and we need to get all these supplies stowed before nightfall.” Justin replied.

Bill looked like he might argue for a moment, but relented.

“Fine, get a work detail together and get everything inside. I’ll have Earl check out these trucks here.”

Bill grabbed a case of bottled water and carried it back into the compound. Several other people came out and helped bring everything inside. Justin and Rick had scored a large amount of non-perishable food, sets of cookware and kitchen knives, clothes, shoes, toys for the compound’s children, a few dozen boxes of ammunition, and several more guns. Most of the weapons were pistols of varying calibers, but there were also a couple of AK-47s. I picked up one of the Russian assault rifles and inspected it. It was functional, and looked nearly brand new.

“Where the hell did you find these things?” I asked Justin.

“One of the houses we raided.” He replied. “Whoever owned the place must have been a drug dealer or something. These rifles were illegal as hell before the outbreak; they can shoot full auto. That’s not all though, check this out.”

Justin removed a few items from the top of a large wooden box with a lock on the front, and strained as he moved it to the tailgate. It made a loud rasping sound as it slid across the painted metal. Whatever was in it was very heavy. Justin looked at me and grinned.

“I think I remember seeing a pair of bolt cutters in your truck.” He said.

“I’m on it.”

I retrieved the tool and handed it to Justin. He placed the hardened pincers over the padlock and squeezed the handles together. After a few seconds of effort, the lock gave way and Justin removed it from the latch. He paused and looked over his shoulder at me for a moment.

“If this is what I think it is, then I am about to be a very happy boy.”

“Open it dude, let’s see what we got.” I said.

Justin opened the lid, and we both stared for a moment at what was in the case.

Inside were neatly stacked boxes of 7.62x39mm ammunition, each box containing twenty rounds. I took one of the boxes out to measure its depth, and counted the length and width of the other boxes in the crate. After a quick bit of mental math, I let out a low whistle.

“Looks like you’ve got about two thousand rounds here.” I said.

Justin nodded. “I believe it. This will definitely come in handy. High five.” He said, holding up one hand.

I slapped it, and went over to the gun locker to get a rolling cart. We loaded the crate on the cart and stashed most of the ammo in the locker. Justin also took a canvas bag from the back of his truck that contained twenty spare magazines. Justin and Rick divided them up and spent the better part of the next hour loading them. They were as excited as a couple of teenagers on prom night over their new weapons.

The rest of the community sorted the other supplies and distributed them where they were needed most. I marveled at Bill’s leadership. Not a single argument or disagreement broke out over who should get what. Bill simply directed the two women sorting the supplies where to take them, and nobody seemed to have a problem with it. I was beginning to understand why these people looked up to him the way they did. I was sitting with Justin and Rick in front of the gun case when Bill walked over to us carrying a folding chair. He sat down in it and fixed the two men with an expectant stare.

“So. Gentlemen. What happened.” He asked.

Justin turned to Rick and pointed a finger at him. Rick shook his head and pointed back at Justin. Justin shrugged, and turned back to Bill.

“After we left this morning, we headed north on 27 and made our way toward a housing development that we knew still had plenty of vehicles in it. The place used to be pretty nice before the outbreak, and a lot of the people living there tried to stay rather than run. We were halfway hoping to find some survivors there.”

Justin looked down for a moment and shook his head.

“Anyway, we’ve been planning to raid the place for a while now, but we couldn’t think of a good way to do it until today.”

Justin drew my Sig Mosquito from its holster and handed it to Bill.

“Eric let me borrow this neat little pistol here, and it gave me an idea.”

Bill looked over the little weapon, unscrewing the suppressor and peering through it.

“Impressive. You have some nice gear, Eric.”

I thanked him, and held out my hand for the pistol. Bill handed it to me, and Justin gave me my holster and spare magazines. I looked at Rick.

“You mind giving me my rifle back?” I asked, smiling.

Rick chuckled. “Damn, I was hoping you’d forget.”

He picked up the rifle and set it down next to me, along with the spare clips. I motioned for Justin to continue with his story.

“Most of the community is surrounded by a brick fence, but some parts of it aren’t. Those places have natural barriers, like steep wooded hills and such. The entrance to the community is an automatic rolling metal gate. The HOA used to give everybody who lived there a remote control to open it. When we found it a couple of months back, the gate was standing wide open. Rick and I shut it and locked it, figuring it would be better to keep the undead locked up in there rather than take a chance on them wandering out.”

“Good thinking.” Bill said.

“When we got there this morning, the gate was still locked, and I could see at least a couple of hundred creeps still walking around inside. There is a water tower on a hill not far from the community, so Rick and I climbed it to do a little recon. We counted seventy-five houses, and at least three or four hundred creeps. Between the two of us, we had three hundred rounds for the rifles, and a brick of ammo for the .22 pistol. We figured that as long as there were less than eight hundred creeps down there, we could take all of them out. The problem was getting to them. If we came through the front gate, we wouldn’t last ten seconds. We needed to get in nice and quiet and get on the roof of one of the houses. From there, we could just attract them to us and take them down one by one.”

“And if you didn’t, then you would be stuck on a roof and surrounded by the undead until you died of dehydration.” Bill said.

“Not necessarily,” I chimed in, “if the undead can’t see, smell, or hear you, then after a few hours they forget what they were after and wander off. They’re poor rotten brains don’t seem to have very much in the way of short term memory.”

Everyone stared at me for a moment.

“I did not know that.” Justin said. “I’ll have to keep that in mind.”

“Are you sure that’s true?” Bill asked.

“My friend Gabriel was pretty sure about it when he wrote that manual I gave you. I have no reason to doubt him.” I said.

“I really need to read that thing…” Bill muttered.

“Right, so anyway,” Justin continued, “we figured that with the silencers on our weapons, we could get where we needed to go without alerting too many of the infected. We made our way around to the eastern side of the neighborhood as quietly as we could until we spotted a steep section of hill that butted up to a break in the fence. We made our way to the hill and slipped down it into the neighborhood. No sooner do we get past the fence than do we see four creeps just a few feet away. I dropped them with the .22 before they had a chance to start groaning. That gun makes less noise than a mouse fart. We worked our way to one of the houses near the center of the neighborhood, killing a few more creeps along the way. We broke into the house and went upstairs to the second floor where two windows opened up onto the roof of the first floor. The spot was perfect. Rick and I sat down in the windowsills and yelled at the poor dumb fuckers until the whole neighborhood was stumbling over. When there were enough of them bunched up in front of us to make for easy shooting, we opened up with the rifles.

It took about ten minutes of shooting to use up all of the rifle cartridges. There was a small hill of undead in front of the porch that the others actually climbed onto. Their ugly little faces were just above the edge of the roof, and it made killing the rest of them that much easier. I took my time and picked my shots while Rick reloaded the spare clips for me. I had to stop every fifty rounds or so to let the pistol cool down, so it took me better than three hours to kill the rest of them.”

“You didn’t do that with the suppressor on, did you?” I asked.

“No, I took it off before then. No sense putting wear and tear on it unnecessarily.” Justin replied.

I nodded, and he continued with his story.

“All together, I figure we probably killed more than six hundred of the things. Once that was done, we climbed down and went out the back door to start searching the neighborhood. The first house we went to, we could hear a couple of creeps moaning behind the front door. We get up to the door, and the things spot us through the window and start beating at the glass. One of them breaks through and starts trying to crawl out the window. I put them down with the pistol, and we searched the house. We found those two trucks together in the garage. Must have been a ‘his and hers’ deal or something. The keys were on a table by the front door. We took the trucks around the neighborhood and loaded up the most useful stuff we could scavenge. A couple of the other houses still had some infected in them, but we put them down without any trouble. If you just stand outside the door and make noise, they come right to you. Makes it easy.

One of the houses we search, I’m upstairs raiding the kitchen and Rick calls up to me from the basement. I go down there, and Rick has the two AK’s and a big box of what could only be ammunition. We damn near threw our backs out loading that crate into the truck, but it was worth the effort.”

Justin reached down and patted the AK leaning against his chair affectionately.

“The best part of all this is, we only raided about a dozen houses. There are still plenty more to search.”

Justin leaned back with a satisfied smile on his face as he finished his story. Bill appeared lost in thought for a few moments before responding.

“That’s good news, guys. Once we finish with this business tomorrow, I want you to take me, Ethan and Earl out there to check the place out.”

“I know that look, Bill.” Rick said. “You got something cooking up in that head of yours?”

Bill gave an enigmatic smile. “Maybe I do, Rick. Maybe I do.”

“Well, this has all been very interesting,” I said, “but you two are going to be on the diversion team tomorrow. We need to get you up to speed on the plan.”

“Right you are.” Bill said. “Earl is checking the trucks as we speak. Assuming they’re in good enough shape to be of service tomorrow, the two of you will be riding in them through a horde of the infected. I suggest you sit down with Eric and hash out the details.”

I nodded to Bill as he got up and folded his chair. The old doctor ambled off toward his shack, and I motioned for Justin and Rick to follow me to Ethan’s shelter. I knocked on his door, and when Andrea answered, I told her that we needed to speak with Ethan. The big, bearded man came outside a moment later and joined us at a picnic table nearby. I had Ethan show them the route they would be following, and all of the alternate routes available to them. As we spoke it grew dark outside, and Rick had to light a few candles so that we could see the maps. When we finished with the briefing, I bid the other men a good night and walked over to Stacy’s little shelter. She was sitting out front in a plastic Adirondack chair and sipping from a mug of apple cider.

“Where did you get that?” I asked, pointing at the cider as I pulled up a chair and sat down next to her.

“I pilfered it from Justin and Rick’s haul today.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Really?”