Black Ops Read online

  “I have a feeling that’s why they took their raids further out,” Top said. “Less likely to inspire visitors bent on revenge.”

  “I can’t imagine many people have found this place,” Bunny said. “Even with a slim lead, it took us almost a day.”

  “But we’re experts,” Top said. “My old ass just has a feel for it.”

  Bunny rolled his eyes and Top laughed again.

  “There’s the checkpoint, though,” said Bunny. “They must have told someone. Maybe they sent teams out to invite some people.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t know. Can’t be anyone who’s already pissed off at them. Has to be someone, though, because that checkpoint looks new. Maybe they spread the word to select groups. All it would take is a few of their people going from survival camp to survival camp dropping rumors to control the way the news spread. It wouldn’t be a stampede. People would come here in dribs and drabs.”

  “Why would they do that?” asked Top, then suggested the answer to his own question. “Maybe they don’t have much of the vaccine. Or maybe it takes a while to produce. Control the news and they can distribute at a speed that works with their production.”

  They thought about that.

  “That makes sense,” said Bunny slowly, “but it doesn’t fit with the raids. Why take kids? Why take anyone? Why not send medical teams out to spread the vaccine? Why be bad guys when they’re trying to be good guys?”

  Top looked at him. “Oh, hell, son, you want me to recite the number of times a group in power decided who deserves to get a resource?”

  Bunny said nothing.

  Below them the thick steel door began to slide slowly upward. Once it reached about five feet, several armed men ducked under and filed out to form two lines on either side.

  “Six,” Bunny counted.

  The soldiers stood and waited, chattering as the door continued rolling upward.

  “They’re waiting on something,” Top said.

  Bunny clicked his mouth and motioned to the left where a cloud of dust and sand had risen on a dirt road that led right to the compound entrance. As he and Top both focused their binocs on that point, a tan GMC troop carrier with matching camouflage fabric cover over its bed rolled into view. Two armed soldiers were in the front, but as it rolled up and waited for the door to clear its top, they saw only civilians in the back, each of them wearing a brightly colored red, white or blue band around his or her wrist.

  “Where are they going?” Bunny wondered aloud as the truck pulled forward into the compound and the door immediately began sliding downward again.

  “I don’t know, but we need to find a way in there,” Top said.

  “So where’d the people come from?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out,” Top replied, kneeing his horse and steering it toward a nearby trail that led down off the rise into the valley and paralleled the road the truck had taken. “Come on, Farm Boy.”

  Bunny released his binocs, letting them slide down to hang against his chest as he absentmindedly rubbed his sore ass. “Great, more riding.” As he grabbed the reins, he added, “Hooah,” but it was almost a whisper.

  —11—

  The Soldier and the Samurai

  They rode the bicycles all the way to the outskirts of Tucson.

  Tom Imura was in his twenties, fit and lean and, as Ledger saw it, composed of whipcord and iron.

  Ledger was north of fifty and none of his years had been easy ones. He’d long ago lost count of the number of bones he’d broken – either in the dojo or, more often, in combat – or the stitches. Or the surgeries, for that matter. He felt like an ancient mass of scar tissue and screaming nerve endings. After the first hundred miles he was sure the bike seat was made from iron and covered in spikes. His ass hurt. His balls hurt. His molecules hurt. After the second hundred miles of the four hundred and seventy mile journey, he had developed a tendency to yap like a cross dog at anything Tom said. Even when the young man offered words of support or compassion.

  They were somewhere on I-10 East when Tom said, “You’re not too old for this.”

  “I didn’t say a fucking thing,” growled Ledger.

  “You were going to.”

  “The fuck I was.”

  “You were,” insisted Tom, his voice calm, his face showing no sign of the strain of the long ride. “You’ve been saying it roughly every thirty miles.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “And you say it every time we have to get off and walk uphill.”

  “You’re out of your frigging mind.”

  “And you say it every time we—”

  “You realize that I’m heavily armed and have no compunction about shooting people,” said Ledger.

  “I’m not wrong, though,” said Tom.

  “Sure. And that’ll look great on your tombstone.”

  They rode for a mile in silence.

  “And besides,” said Ledger, “fuck you.”

  “Point taken.”

  They rode on.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Tom after a while, “but this was your idea.”

  “Two in the back of the head, so help me God. I’ll leave you by the side of the road.”

  Tom broke out laughing and the sound of it bounced across the desert and rebounded off ancient rocks and vanished into the hot sky. Ledger cursed him, his hygiene, his forebears, and accused him of fornication with livestock. Tom laughed harder.

  It took a while for Ledger’s scowl to crack. Longer still for his lips to twitch. But when he started to laugh he laughed a good long time.

  They pedaled along past abandoned cars and old bones, past the crushed hull of a 767 airliner, past dozens of wandering zoms. They laughed off and on for a long time. When the laughter fell away, one or the other of them would cut a sideways look and they’d be off again.

  —12—

  Top and Bunny

  Top led the way along the trail, both turning their bodies to avoid identity by any surveillance equipment. They’d tucked all guns except for the sidearms behind their saddlebags so they looked like just two men riding across the desert – not that unusual to necessarily draw much interest.

  The trail wound through rocks, scrub, and scattered cacti parallel to the road but about fifty yards out. Soon they’d followed it around a bend where they couldn’t see the lab compound’s imposing steel entrance door. The cloud of dust from the truck had faded, though Bunny thought he could still make it out in the distance.

  They rode in silence, both alert and ready, Bunny’s hand resting on the top of his saddlebag so as to look casual yet ready to reach for his rifle at any moment. They began hearing voices ahead, almost like a crowd.

  “You hear that?” Bunny asked Top.

  Top nodded. “Some kind of gathering.”

  “For what?”

  “Could be where they got those people.”

  “Did you notice those wrist bands? They were all red.”

  Top grunted. “Yeah, whatever that means.”

  And then they rounded another bend and found themselves facing five armed men with AK-47s aimed right at their hearts or foreheads. The trail here had wound much closer to the road, and a white van like they’d seen during the raid at Sun Valley sat parked at the curb behind the men.

  “Halt!” one of them ordered loudly, eyes narrowing. The other men simply glared at the newcomers.

  Top and Bunny both slowly raised their hands, faces taking on their best innocent looks.

  “Somethin’ the matter, gentlemen?” Top asked, turning on his old-Georgia drawl.

  The man who’d given orders nodded and the other four rushed the horses, two grabbing for Top and Bunny’s sidearms, while the others searched their saddlebags.

  “Whoa! Look what we have here!” a y
oung soldier barely out of his teens pulled out Bunny’s sniper rifle and two boxes of ammo.

  “Here, too!” the one searching Top’s saddlebag called and produced Top’s rifle as well.

  “Armed to the teeth. Who are you and where are you going?” the leader demanded. Older than the others, his hair was cut short in a military crew, and grey at the edges, his face creased from age and exposure, his eyes fierce but tired – a man who’d seen too much.

  Top and Bunny exchanged a look. “We’re just trying to survive,” Bunny said then. “Lot of damn dead folks out here looking for a quick lunch. A guy’s got to protect himself out here – you know that.”

  “Kind of the reason we’re still on this side of being dead,” Top added.

  “Uh huh, just two innocent guys,” the leader grinned. “Tie their hands and get them off those horses,” he added, motioning to his men.

  Top and Bunny were yanked down hard, falling to their knees in clouds of dust as the men yanked their hands back and produced black zip ties. The leader and two others kept their weapons trained on the two strangers as the young blond and another soldier bound Top and Bunny’s hands behind them.

  “Look. We’re just passin’ through,” Top said, voice sincere. “Why are you doing this?”

  “We don’t have much use for strangers,” the leader said, then locked eyes with his men. “General Black will want to see them. They don’t look like innocent civilians and we can’t take chances.”

  “Yes, sir,” the men responded almost in unison, then pulled Top and Bunny to their feet and led them toward the van.

  The leader motioned to the blond and another younger man. “You two bring the horses to the checkpoint.”

  “Yes, sir,” the youths replied and turned back to Top and Bunny’s mounts.

  “What do we do?” Bunny asked through gritted teeth as the men hauled open the back doors of the van. Then one unlocked a metal bench and lifted the lid, depositing their knives and guns inside before locking it again.

  “Just let this play out a bit,” Top whispered back. “We need more intel.”

  The men shoved them now and they stumbled forward, climbing into the van.

  Keep your cool, Top’s eyes said.

  But Bunny didn’t like this one bit. Even if there was nothing he could do but follow Top’s advice.

  —13—

  The Soldier and the Samurai

  They saw the sentry before the sentry saw them.

  Ledger and Tom rolled to a stop at the top of a slope that ran down into Oro Valley. In the far distance there was a soft cloud of gray that hovered perpetually over what had once been Tucson. Down the valley there was some kind of complex built against or, more like, into a wall of a mountain. He saw vehicles parked down there and they looked to be in good shape. Tom saw them, too. Before either of them could comment a tan armored personnel carrier came rumbling out of an entrance in the rock wall. It turned and headed farther down the valley. Tom grabbed Ledger’s arm.

  “Did you see that?”

  “I saw it, kid,” murmured Ledger.

  “But how? The EMPs…”

  Ledger studied the mountain and nodded to himself. “There must be a hardened facility down there. We had them all over. They built them underground and inside mountains during the Cold War to make sure they would survive a Russian attack. Then they repurposed them for all kinds of black budget R and D projects. I’ll bet this was a bioweapons lab of some kind. There were six or eight of them that were so far off the radar than even I didn’t know about them, and it was my damn job to know about them.”

  “How’s that possible?” asked Tom, watching the APC vanish inside a trail of brown dust.

  “Fuck, kid, there were so many cells operating inside the Department of Defense that half the time no one knew what all was going on. Legitimate stuff and other shit that was definitely not supposed to be happening, at least as far as congress and the taxpayers were concerned, but which seemed to somehow always get funding. This has all the makings.”

  “Okay,” said Tom slowly, “but what does it mean?”

  “It means they might actually have a working lab,” said Ledger. “With power and operational computer systems. Holy polka-dotted fuck.”

  “Does that mean this vaccine is legit?”

  Ledger thought about that for a moment. “To be determined. Something’s hinky. Look down there.”

  He pointed and Tom used his binoculars to study a spot at the base of the slope where there was a makeshift guard post constructed of a pair of dead cars positioned on either side of the highway and a boom made from a length of white PVC pipe. Two men were working the checkpoint and they were busy with a line of people who stood in a wandering line. Ledger and Tom sat on the road in the shade of a billboard that told everyone who passed that Waffle House was offering two breakfasts for the price of one. Someone had taken the time out of surviving the apocalypse to draw a pretty good version of a zombie head atop the illustration of a short stack of pancakes. The soldier and the samurai were nearly invisible in the dense shadows thrown by the sign. Their bikes lay out of sight in the weeds and both men studied the checkpoint with binoculars.

  “Those guards are not military,” observed Ledger. “But… that might not mean much. Things fell to shit, so they might be working for whoever’s in the mountain, doing grunt work.”

  “The guards are taking supplies from the people in line,” said Tom.

  Ledger studied the transactions at the gate. “Doesn’t look too nefarious. No one’s flashing weapons. Look at the people farther back in line, they already have stuff out and bundled up. I think it’s a barter of some kind.”

  “What for what? A road tax?”

  “Maybe. Or payment for treatment.”

  Tom grunted and they continued to watch. Each group stopped at the checkpoint and offered something to the guards. A wrapped bundle of what looked like canned goods, a bottle of water or a can of kerosene, skinned rabbits, and other goods. One guard took the items and placed them in a big John Deere wheelbarrow and the other tied a piece of colored cloth around the wrist of each person.

  “You seeing the colors?” asked Tom. “Red, white, and blue?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Most of the kids are getting blue. None of the men, though.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Most of the men are getting red. And a few men and women are getting white.”

  “Uh huh.”

  Tom lowered his glasses and looked at Ledger. “What do you think it means?”

  “Too orderly to be random color choices,” mused Ledger. “But they’re being specific about it. Can’t tell from this far away, though. We’ll need to get up close to gather intel.” He stood slowly, hissing at the aches in his hips and tailbone from the many days on the bike.

  Tom rose, too. “Makes me wonder what kind of colors they’d give us.”

  Ledger squinted down the hill. “Uh huh,” he said.

  They hid most of their gear behind the billboard and covered the bikes with tumbleweed and bunches of grass. After some careful consideration of what they could afford to part with, they walked down the hill.

  There were a dozen people ahead of them and Ledger struck up a casual conversation with an elderly couple who had a small child with them. Not their grandchild, it turned out, but an orphan they’d taken under their wing. The three of them were all that was left of a refugee camp in Fort Grant.

  “What happened to the fort?” asked Tom.

  The old man, whose name was Barney, gave them a bleak look.

  “The dead?” asked Ledger.

  Barney shook his head. “Nah, we held them off pretty good. Once we figured out how to kill them, we built the fort up even stronger and everyone learned how to top them. We’d have teams go out wrapped in folded over mattress covers and
work gloves with thick plastic glued to the outsides. Teams of three. Two would use heavy-duty rakes to kind of stall the eaters and the third person would bash ‘em in the head. Rinse and repeat, you know? The eaters never learn from what’s happening to others of their kind.”

  “Good tactic,” said Ledger, nodding approval.

  “It worked,” said Barney. “But times got hard, you know? Winter’s a bitch and farming’s not the easiest thing to do when you have to protect a couple thousand acres from wandering eaters. We ran through the supplies the raiders found in houses and stores and the like. Had some damn lean times, but then the first crops came up last spring and we were good to go.”

  “But…?” asked Ledger, letting it hang.

  “But then people started getting sick,” said Millie, Barney’s wife. “All sorts of stuff. Infections from cuts. Bacteria in the water. And then the flu came around and we lost half the town in four weeks.”

  “Jesus,” murmured Tom.

  “Got worse,” said Barney. “After the flu we got hit with all sorts of stuff. Tuberculosis, syphilis, mumps, you name it. None of us knew how to manufacture the drugs.”

  Millie shook her head slowly. “We survived the end of the world, we survived the eaters, we fought off raiding parties, we got through dust storms, and we survived two awful winters and then diseases that weren’t even much of a thing before the End came back and wiped us out. Barney and me got out with ten others, including little Polly here.” He gave the little girl’s hair a gentle caress. “But now it’s just the three of us. We heard about Dr Pisani and we came out here. You know… hoping.”

  It was a sad story but a familiar one, and sadder for all that. Ledger felt old and used up hearing it.

  “What exactly have you heard?” asked Tom.

  The next few people in line behind the old couple turned and were listening to the conversation.

  “Well,” said Barney, “it’s a cure, isn’t it?”

  Everyone nodded.