Judgment Day -03 Read online

  She reminded herself that there were people all over the world eating far worse things to stay alive, but it only consoled her until the next spaghetti burp. Someday, she thought, I’m going to have that fried chicken again.

  She stepped around a three-foot-high boulder, looking for a place to relieve herself. Before she could zero in on the right spot, a deep rumbling sounded from the interstate below. She instinctively sought cover, ducking behind the large rock. When she peeked over the top, she saw a long line of motorcycles weaving in and out of the stalled traffic, heading south in the northbound lane—directly toward Tanner.

  She started to stand and run for the Escalade but realized that she would never make it in time. With her heart pounding, she squatted back down and slid the rifle off her shoulder.

  The sound of motorcycle engines vibrated the air like lions warning off would-be predators. Tanner knew what was coming even before spotting the long procession of bikers winding their way through the endless gridlock of cars.

  He leaned out the window and searched for Samantha. She was nowhere in sight. Had she already seen them? Hopefully, she had at least heard them and would exercise a little common sense by staying put until they passed. Unfortunately, Samantha Glass and common sense were words rarely used in the same sentence.

  Tanner opened his door and stepped out of the Escalade. He left the shotgun on the seat, but slid the .44 Magnum into the back of his waistband. Neither weapon would be enough to overcome a gang like the one that approached, but if it came down to it, the pistol might provide a slight deterrence. Sometimes being a hard target was enough. He stepped around to the front of the Escalade and leaned back against the grille, making it impossible for anyone to see the huge pistol pressing against the small of his back.

  The motorcyclists split left and right, approaching him from both sides. There were at least twenty of them, and each one appeared to be armed. They spread out, stopped, and began revving their engines to create a mindless cacophony of angry noise.

  Despite the overtly threatening action, Tanner was grateful for the deafening sound. There was no doubt that Samantha now knew of their presence. For his part, he stood casually leaning against the car while scanning for their leader. The man was easy enough to find, wearing a distinctive black helmet designed to look like the alien hunter from Predator, complete with built-in nylon dreadlocks.

  Tanner had been around men like these for much of his life, and he knew that his best chance of surviving the encounter was to play it cool. He fully expected that they would test him, and if he showed weakness, they would kill him for sport.

  After a few seconds, Predator raised one hand into the air, and the entire gang killed their engines in unison. Several of the riders, including the leader, pulled off their helmets and dismounted. Predator was a tall man with a thick black mustache that wrapped around to merge with long bushy sideburns.

  “Whatcha doin’, big man?” he asked, showing off a silver front tooth.

  “Just finished having my lunch,” Tanner said with a yawn.

  “Out here?” the man asked, waving his arms. “On my highway?”

  Tanner shrugged. “What can I say? This is where I was at lunchtime.”

  Predator leaned around to peer into the Escalade.

  “Anyone else in there?”

  “Nope. I’m what you’d call a loner.”

  He motioned for a couple of his men to take a look. They circled around and looked in through the side windows. When they were satisfied, they both shook their heads.

  “I can see from the tat on your arm that you did some time,” said Predator. “What were you in for? Purse snatching?”

  Several bikers laughed and pushed against one another like high school jocks.

  “How’d you guess?” Tanner said with a smile.

  Predator squinted his eyes, studying him.

  “You know... I was going to ask if you wanted to join my merry band. But I’m beginning to think that you’d just be a pain in my ass. Am I right?”

  Tanner nodded. “Afraid so.”

  “Then we got ourselves a bit of a dilemma.”

  Tanner didn’t like the sound of that. Any time a thug felt the need to use the word dilemma, dollars to donuts he was planning on killing you.

  “No dilemma,” said Tanner. “We both go on our way, no worse for the wear.”

  Predator made an almost imperceptible nod, and one of the bikers suddenly lunged forward, stabbing a small stiletto at Tanner’s gut.

  Tanner sidestepped, caught the man’s wrist, and twisted it hard. The ulna snapped with an audible snick, and the man dropped the knife. Tanner leaned forward and hit him with a half-fist to his Adam’s apple, sending him stumbling back with blood bubbling from his mouth.

  Two other men moved in on him. One carried a pipe wrench, and the other a long red cattle prod. Tanner stepped forward and kicked the first man in the groin, lifting him off the ground and sending his eyes rolling up in his head. He immediately doubled over and toppled sideways on the pavement, groaning.

  The second man stabbed forward with the cattle prod. Tanner knocked it away and punched him hard on the jaw. Teeth separated from gums, flying across the hood of the Escalade. He too fell to the ground, moaning and cupping his bloody mouth.

  Tanner whipped the .44 Magnum out from behind his back and leveled it at Predator. A dozen or more bikers scrambled to raise their own firearms.

  “They’ll kill you if you pull that trigger,” Predator said. His face was beginning to lose its color.

  “I’m sure. But that won’t help them reattach your head.”

  Predator glanced left and right at his men. It was the type of impasse that was difficult to see how to get past. Before anyone could offer a way forward, the man with the cattle prod rolled over and stuck it to Tanner’s calf. One hundred thousand volts of electricity shocked his system, causing every muscle in his body to spasm. The pistol fell from Tanner’s grip, clattering to the ground, as his legs buckled under him.

  Nearly a hundred yards away, Samantha watched the situation unfold. Tanner was impossibly outnumbered. Even he couldn’t possibly hope to fight all of the bikers. When he finally fell to the ground, shaking and twitching, she knew that it was over. She was alone, now and forever. Until she got eaten by the dogs, anyway.

  To her surprise, the men didn’t immediately shoot him. Instead, they danced around, laughing, and repeatedly poking him with some kind of red stick. Each time they jabbed him, his body jerked and flopped on the asphalt. When they finally tired of their sadistic fun, they tied thick white cords around his wrists and ankles, and attached the other ends to the back of four motorcycles. Samantha watched, horrified, as they climbed on the bikes and slowly stretched him out straight, like a prisoner being put to the rack. When he was finally spread-eagled, the crowd of bikers cheered, raising their weapons into the air.

  “No, no, no,” Samantha muttered, lifting her rifle and resting on top of the boulder. It was up to her now. She knew that.

  She looked down the gun sight, lining up the rear peep hole with the front reticle before sweeping the crosshairs over the crowd. The men on the motorcycles began to pull harder, slowly lifting Tanner’s body off the ground as the cords drew taut. He struggled to pull free, but the lack of slack in the restraints made it impossible for him to get any sort of leverage.

  Samantha took a deep breath and let the sights settle on one of the bikers who was stretching out Tanner. The man was revving his motorcycle, looking back over his shoulder, laughing. She heard Tanner’s voice in her head.

  Any day now, darlin’.

  She let out half of the breath and squeezed the trigger. The gun emitted a sharp pop, but neither the report nor the slight slap against her shoulder even registered. The man brought his hands to his chest and toppled sideways off his bike.

  She cycled the bolt, swung left, and sighted on the second biker. Squeeze. A second pop. A second
man down, this time clutching his stomach as he dropped to his knees.

  Bikers began diving behind cars. Others started their engines and raced away. Most stood dumbfounded, unable to hear the rifle pops over the roar of the motorcycles. The two remaining bikers who had been pulling Tanner began to drag him across the asphalt, like horses pulling a runaway stagecoach.

  Samantha cycled the bolt and shifted her aim to the third man. He was moving, but she used the rock as a pivot point, never letting the reticle drift behind her target. Squeeze. Another pop. The man jerked, then lost his balance and fell back off the bike, slapping his head against the pavement. More bikers dove for cover, finally understanding that they were taking fire.

  Nearly free, Tanner sat up and began tugging on the final remaining tether, pitting his might against that of the motorcycle.

  Samantha cycled the bolt and squeezed again. The final bullet caught the last biker in the middle of his back about the same time that the cord snapped. Instead of falling off the motorcycle, the rider leaned forward and gunned the engine, racing down the interstate.

  Shouts rang out, panicked bikers pointing off in seemingly random directions. Tanner scrambled to his feet, hopped the side railing, and ran for the edge of the forest that paralleled the interstate. Still unsure of how many people were shooting at them, no one dared to try and stop him.

  As Samantha ducked back behind the boulder, two things occurred to her. The first was that she had just four shot people. And the second was that she no longer had to pee.

  CHAPTER

  6

  Mason’s mind was racing as he swerved around cars and the occasional dead body lying on Highway 17. He now had both a name and a destination. Nakai was apparently to blame for the murders, and Lexington was where they planned to drop their cargo. If Mason had anything to say about it, they were never going to make that delivery.

  The plan was simple enough. He would get ahead of them and set a trap of some sort. Once he had them stopped, he would figure out a way to overcome what were some pretty serious odds against him. How he would accomplish such a feat wasn’t important at the moment. Right now, all that mattered was disrupting their plans. With chaos, he thought, comes opportunity.

  Highway 17 paralleled I-95 all the way up to Savannah. The roads crossed at two points, either of which Mason could use to get back on the interstate and set his trap. The first crossing was only about ten miles ahead, not far enough to ensure that he wouldn’t encounter Nakai and his men before he was ready.

  The second was twenty miles beyond that, at the town of Richmond Hill, a place made famous in the 1930s and ’40s when Henry Ford built a huge plantation there. The community, which only measured a few miles on a side, was skirted by the Ogeechee River on one side and I-95 on the other. And while it wasn’t in their Chamber of Commerce brochure, Richmond Hill struck Mason as an ideal spot to ambush a gang of murderous mercenaries.

  When he was about halfway to Richmond Hill, Mason came across a long row of RVs and tents set up along the opposite side of the highway. His first thought was that the inhabitants were probably a group of survivors like those he had met back in Sugar Grove. Carl Tipton and his family had been moving westward in search of a viable community in which to settle down. Perhaps these people had decided to stop looking, choosing instead to set up one of their own.

  Mason slowed his truck as he approached the first RV. A gaunt man stood in the shadow of an outstretched awning, a rifle hanging from his shoulder. He watched Mason warily but didn’t ready the weapon. Not wanting to risk driving by the entire convoy without knowing their intentions, Mason pulled to the shoulder on the opposite side of the interstate.

  Careful not to seem too threatening, he climbed out of his truck slow and easy. Bowie hopped down next to him, and immediately sniffed the air. Even Mason could smell the odor of something cooking. Given his recent run in with a family of cannibals, however, he was reluctant to draw any conclusions about what might be on the grill.

  The rifleman across the street called out over his shoulder, and within a few seconds, others began peeking out from their tents. Surprisingly, no one moved out into the sunlight. Mason raised a hand and waved—a simple gesture used for centuries to indicate that one’s hand was free of weapons.

  Three men finally stepped from the lead RV, immediately opening black umbrellas over their heads. They huddled together and started across the road toward him. Fortunately, none of them appeared to be carrying a weapon.

  Bowie growled at the strange sight of three men carrying umbrellas on a sunny spring day. Mason leaned down and patted him.

  “Be good. We don’t need any more enemies. Besides, if you’re nice, they might feed you something.”

  Bowie looked up and blinked, his growl changing to a soft whine.

  Mason patiently waited for the three men to approach. He didn’t want to be out in the open, nor did he want to move too far from the rifle sitting ready in the cab of his truck. As they got closer, he could see that the men’s faces were dotted with the remnants of dried scabs. They must be survivors of the Superpox-99 virus. He stood a little straighter, letting his hand hang ready by his Supergrade.

  The group consisted of an old man and his two grown sons, both of whom strongly resembled their father. All of them squinted, trying to protect their eyes from the daylight. As they got closer, Mason saw that the men’s eyes were almost completely black, their pupils expanded to their natural limits. The edges of their eyelids were also stained, as if they had been caught in the rain after putting on a heavy coat of mascara.

  Mason nodded to them, watching their hands for any sudden movement.

  Detecting his concern, the old man smiled.

  “We’re not looking for any trouble, mister.” He spoke with a slow southern drawl, a dialect that had been perfected across generations to put people at ease.

  Mason thought about it for a moment and then extended his hand.

  The old man seemed surprised by the gesture.

  “Aren’t you afraid of catching the pox?”

  “I’ve been told by people I trust that, by the time the pox scabs, it’s no longer contagious.”

  The man quickly shifted the umbrella to his left hand and shook Mason’s hand with the other.

  “I believe that to be true as well. Still, it’s been a long time since we’ve been treated with that kind of respect.” His voice broke, and he wiped at what looked like a drop of ink pooling in the corner of his eye.

  Mason looked away for a moment, allowing the man to collect himself.

  “I’m Robert Sterling, retired district judge for the city of Charleston, South Carolina. God rest her soul. These are my boys, Dean and Colton.”

  “Deputy Marshal Mason Raines. Good to meet you folks.”

  Judge Sterling’s mouth turned up in a smile.

  “Deputy Marshal? How about that. It’s been a while since we’ve seen any lawmen.”

  Colton, the younger of the two, said, “The last lawman we saw was a city cop from Savannah. He wasn’t as... as enlightened as you are.”

  “How’s that?” asked Mason.

  “He tried to put me down because of my condition.”

  Mason nodded. He had seen his fair share of hatred for those infected, some of it deserved, and some of it not.

  “Are you out on business, Marshal?” asked the judge.

  Mason took a moment to consider the question.

  “I suppose I am.”

  “Pursuing bad men?”

  “The worst.”

  He nodded. “From the look in your eye, I can see they’ve crossed the wrong man.”

  Mason pressed his lips together but said nothing. Bowie gave a little whine as if reminding his master to introduce him.

  Judge Sterling squatted down and petted the dog.

  “What’s your name, big fella?”

  “That’s Bowie.”

  Both Dean and Colton stepp
ed over and gave Bowie some petting as well. For his part, Bowie returned the affection with sloppy licks to each man’s face.

  “Are you hungry, Marshal?” the judge asked, standing back up. “We’re grilling a deer that one of the men shot last night. You’re welcome to your fill.”

  Bowie looked up at the judge with a sense of urgency.