Z-Burbia 7: Sisters of the Apocalypse Read online

  "Follow us," Marjorie says again and gives David one nasty look as she pushes by him. She waves at me over her shoulder. "Come on. Gunshots are bringing the Zs. We'll be surrounded in minutes."

  "You got a lot of Zs in this town," I say as I hurry up next to her.

  I let David get behind me, but I'm keeping an eye on him. I almost want him to make a move so I can put a bullet in his head. Almost. It'd be a lot of wasted energy. But then again, bullet in David's head. Hard choice.

  "Doyles bring in the Zs and use them," Marjorie says.

  "That's kinda what I heard," I say. "So why ain't you part of the Inezes?"

  "They're useless," she says. David snorts, but she doesn't argue with him. "No ammunition and no hope to keep away from the Doyles. We stay hidden, so the Doyles leave us alone."

  "But they know you're here, right?" I ask. "Eventually they'll get to you. Crazies always do."

  "Yeah," Marjorie says. That's all she says. Just a yeah.

  We make it a block and I swear my arm is gonna fall off. I want to ditch the duffel, but that can't happen. Marjorie takes us down a small alley and knocks on a metal garage door. It bangs loud in the night and the sound echoes everywhere.

  "Sorry," Marjorie says.

  "Why you saying sorry to me?" I ask.

  Then David makes his move. Goddammit. Fucking crazies. Just when I think maybe I've met someone that ain't totally batshit nuts, I get double crossed and set up.

  He swipes at me with a machete. Where the fuck did the asshole get a machete? Did he have it all this time? Was he hiding it up his ass?

  It ain't hard to dodge his swipe. He's an idiot that don't know how to fight worth a shit. I duck low and put a bullet in his belly then holster my pistol and pull both blades as I drop the duffel bag. That's what Marjorie was waiting for.

  The metal garage door slides open and she grabs my bag then ducks inside the garage as four men come out at me. They ain't much, mostly rags on skeletons, but they have that crazy look in their eyes that the ones that are really out there get. These men like to kill just because it's all that's left that makes them feel more alive than the Zs.

  I get that. Been there. Not there anymore. I only kill because stupid shitfucker crazies keep pushing me.

  Even being gutshot, David is crazy enough to swipe at me again. So I lop his arm off. The machete clangs on the ground and he starts screaming as he grabs his stump. Blood is spraying everywhere and it gets all over me. Great. Fucking David. I hate this guy.

  The four men rush me. No firearms, just heavy chains and lead pipes. They should have brought firearms.

  I slice open one belly and spin on my knees as I slice open a second belly. Hot guts spill out into the alley and I move out of the way. I already have David blood on me, I don't need more gunk on me.

  The two gutted guys fall fast and I come up and stab a third in the thigh. I twist hard and yank even harder. His whole leg turns into a waterfall of blood and he's bled out and dead before he hits the concrete. The fourth guy swings his heavy chain at me, but I let it hit my forearm and wrap it tight. I yank the chain and the asshole on the other end is pulled right into my blade. I push up and he gasps as the blade pierces his heart.

  I pull my blade free and wipe it on his dirty clothes as he falls onto his dead friends' bodies. They have nothing of use to me on them, so I leave the corpses in the alley and head for the garage. I don't run inside, not with a stupid Marjorie having my duffel full of weapons. She could take my head right off.

  So I creep close and duck my head inside quick before pulling it back out. Zs moan from the street and I turn to see a shitload of them coming my way. Gunshots and fresh blood. That's how you bring the Zs.

  No time to waste.

  I'd dive roll into the garage with my .45s out, but I can't really dive roll with a Barrett and a gear pack on my back. So I stay low and crouch walk my way in. My eyes adjust to the dark and all I see are old cars and other shit everywhere. It really is a garage. Like a mechanic's place. Parts and tools and shit. Off in the corner, I see what Marjorie was talking about. A trike. There actually is one.

  The bullet hits the wall right next to my head and I jump up and sprint for cover behind one of the broken cars. Two more shots hit the floor where I was running. Marjorie can shoot. Or someone can.

  "Knock it off!" I yell. "You're wasting my ammo! I'm gonna need that!"

  "Ain't yours no more!" Marjorie yells. "Ours now! Leave or I'll kill you!"

  There's the scuff of a footstep off to my left and I turn and fire. A man crumples as his chest blows wide open. Not as wide as if I'd used the Barrett, but he's only about five feet away and a .45 slug will do a lot of damage at five feet.

  "Call your people off, toss me my bag, and I'll let you live!" I yell.

  Another footstep and I fire again. A woman starts screaming and falls out from behind an old, rusty barrel. I shoot her between the eyes to shut her up.

  "Who are you really with?" Marjorie yells. "You part of some outside force coming to take this town from the Doyles? That it? You invading us?"

  "What the fuck are you talking about?" I yell. "Who the fuck would want to invade this town?"

  God, people are dumb.

  "I am taking back my duffel bag!" I yell. "You can stay alive when it happens or you can die! Your fucking choice!"

  "You one of the Heavies?" Marjorie yells. "Is that who's coming to take this town? You people finally gonna make your move on the Doyles?"

  I have no idea what she's talking about and I don't fucking care. There's a wrench on the floor by the front tire. I pick it up and chuck it across the garage. It clangs on the wall and Marjorie opens fire. Fucking moron. She can shoot, but she can't think.

  I stand and fire, emptying the magazine where I think she's hiding. The rifle fire stops and there's a loud grunt then a soft thud. I can hear Zs out in the alley and I know I only have a couple minutes to make my escape.

  I pop out the spent magazine and slap in a new one. I have both .45s out and pointed at where Marjorie is slumped and bleeding. A shadow moves in the corner behind her and I kill it. Don't know if it's a man shadow or woman shadow, but it's now a dead shadow.

  "Anyone else want to fucking die?" I yell. "Then go ahead and keep making moves on me!"

  No one answers. No one moves.

  Marjorie is still breathing, but not for long. Her eyes find mine and I shake my head as I crouch and fetch my duffel bag back. She's lying on one of the M-4s, so I leave it. I think it's Audrey's, but not sure. She'll be pissed, but I don't feel like rolling a dying Marjorie off it. It'll just get blood on the other guns when I toss it in the duffel bag.

  "Fuck you," I say and put her out of her misery with a hard stomp to her skull. Her neck snaps and her eyes go empty. I hear a gasp from the shadows, but that's it. No one comes for me.

  I heft the duffel and run to the trike. Might as well get something out of this bullshit. The trike has a rusty wire basket on the back. I think it's rust. Maybe blood. Can't tell. Don't care. I throw the duffel, Barrett, and gear pack into the basket then roll the trike to the garage door.

  Shit ton of Zs outside munching on the corpses of David and his idiot friends. They don't even notice me as I wheel the trike by them. The Zs, that is. They don't notice me. I guess David and his idiot friends don't either because they're dead, but I was talking about the Zs.

  A lot more out in the street and they see me as I hook my leg over the trike and hop on. I haven't ridden a bike in a long time, but it's like they say and it all comes back to me. It ain't easy with all the weight in the basket, but it ain't as hard as it would be with two wheels. I like this trike.

  My .45s are in their holsters, but I have my blades out, gripped tight against the handlebars of the trike as I pedal towards a horde of Zs. Nothing else I can do. They're between me and the direction I need to go to get to the breeding farm. I think. The Doyle trucks and our Humvees are long gone. Ain't no thing, they'll be easy to track. But
I got to get past these Zs first.

  The trike is moving pretty fast when I hit the horde. I expect the Zs to try to knock me off, but they just reach out with stiff arms. I chop those off. Hey, if Zs are gonna reach out like that then they deserve to get their arms chopped off. Stupid Zs.

  I keep pedaling, pushing the trike through the horde as I slash and chop, slash and chop. A Z falls in front of me and I push hard with me feet, sending the trike up over its body. That's fun. I almost lose my balance and get toppled over when the rear wheels come down, but I keep it all together.

  The Z-horde is thick and I know I can't keep pushing the trike through. So I do what I should have done at first, but didn't think about it because I was too busy remembering how to ride a bike. I pull two grenades from my belt, pull the pins with my teeth, and lob them into the horde. That shit is loud. Real fucking loud. My ears are ringing by the time the Z parts stop raining down.

  What's left of the horde just starts wandering off as I get back to pedaling. I'm coated in Z guts and gunk, so they don't give a shit about me no more. To them, I'm just some stinky trike rollin' on down the street. Fresh meat don't smell like I smell.

  I'm way off the Doyles' trail. Way off. It takes me most of the night to find any hint of where they might have gone. I don't know if they thought they were being followed or not, but they did a good job of hiding their route out of town. I pedal into at least three more heavy hordes before I'm able to get on the right road.

  The sun starts coming up in the east by the time I think I have them. The sky is a bright pink and purple, but early morning purple, not evening purple. There's a difference. With those colors at my back, I turn off a broken road and onto what's just barely more than a dirt trail. Fresh tire tracks in the dirt. Easy to spot now that I have some light and I'm not trying to dodge Z-hordes.

  I pull the trike over to the side of the dirt road. Wide open ahead of me. If they have spotters then I'm already spotted. No sign of any breeding farm, but there is a rise in the road about a half mile away that blocks my view. I bet they have that farm tucked between a couple of hills, all nice and snug and safe and easy to protect.

  Not sure if they stand a chance protecting it from me, but then I guess they didn't expect me or my sisters to show up. Who did they expect? The Heavies? Those guys don't sound good. They never do.

  The place is wide open. Ain't nowhere to hide the trike or the duffel and gear pack. But I can't rightly roll on up to their front gate and wave. They see me coming, they're gonna put a bullet between my eyes. I look about and see a ditch a few yards off. It ain't a big ditch, but it's big enough.

  I hate what I have to do, but circumstances ain't ideal. And I'm tired as hell.

  The trike won't fit in the ditch, but I will. I roll the trike halfway down the dirt trail and leave it lying on its side. If some Doyles come by, they'll be looking at the trike in the road, not at the ditch they pass with me in it.

  I jog back to the ditch, hope no one has been watching me, and jump down in. I wrap myself around the duffel and gear pack then pull some dead scrub brush over me and close my eyes.

  I need some sleep so I have energy to do what needs doing.

  Chapter Eleven

  It's hot as fuck in the ditch. I don't so much sleep as lie there and sweat. Still, not running and fighting lets my muscles recover a little while my brain goes over every scenario it can think up. It can think up a lot and I grumble at my brain. Stupid brain.

  Doesn't matter what it thinks up, there are only two options when I get to the breeding farm. Either there's a way to sneak in or there isn't. If there is then I go all stealth and kill as many Doyles as possible then find my sisters. Once they are armed then we kill a whole bunch more Doyles and free the ladies held prisoner. That's one option.

  The other option is there is no way to sneak in. The farm could be heavily guarded or there's just no cover for me to sneak up on it. That's very possible. Especially if the Doyles have some enemies out here. They'd want all approachable angles to be clean lines of sight. If they aren't total morons. I'm hoping they are, but odds says there are a couple smart ones in the bunch.

  So what the fuck do I do if I can't sneak up on them? That's the problem my brain locks onto while I lie in the ditch with sweat pooling between my ass cheeks. What do I do? I have a few ideas, most of them include blowing shit up and causing a distraction while I pick Doyles off with the Barrett. But that don't free the sisters. They could be chained up by now or stuck in cages or whatever happens to women on a breeding farm.

  I ain't heard no explosions or men screaming their lungs out, so I know the Doyles haven't tried to force themselves on the sisters yet. Yet. But they are bound to.

  My throat is dry as fuck, but I save my water for later. I just lie there and let my clothes get damper and damper with my sweat as I try to figure out stuff that I have no way of figuring out without more intel. The more I think about it, the more I realize we may have fucked up. We didn't plan anything out, just went for it. Gave ourselves up thinking we could beat the Doyles whenever we want.

  But what if the reason I ain't hearing screaming Doyles or an exploding farm is because they killed my sisters right off? Great, now I have that idea rolling around my brain. Too many shitfucking unknowns.

  The sun is high in the sky when I say fuck it and grab the gear. Sleep isn't coming and waiting for night may not make a damn bit of difference. I need information. I need to do some recon on the Doyles' breeding farm. I need to find out what is happening to my sisters.

  I got sand in my craw, but I ignore it as I gear up and start the long, slow crawl to the farm. On my belly, I go hand over hand, my ass barely sticking up enough to keep me moving. I shove the duffel in front of me and grunt under the weight of the gear pack and the Barrett. It takes me thirty minutes to go maybe a quarter mile. Maybe.

  Four stretches like that and I'm over the slight rise and crawling across more empty desert before I catch sight of the farm. It's not tucked between any hills, just out in the open for everyone to see. I ease out a pair of binoculars and take a gander.

  Shit.

  Big fence. Double fence. Chain link with razor wire angled outward and inward. The Doyles don't want folks escaping or trying to get in. They also don't want people sneaking up on them because they have guards patrolling the fence line every twenty yards. And the guards don't look sleepy or bored. They're on alert. No idea if they're on alert because they think someone is coming for my sisters or if they're always like that. The way the guards are doing their jobs, I say they are always like that. Definitely got some military folks in their ranks. It all looks too orderly to be just crazies running the show.

  But the guards and the fence ain't the big problems. It's the gun nests and watchtowers. Eight watchtowers. One at each corner of the farm and one in the middle of each fence. Plus a guard station at their big rolling gate. Two riflemen up in each watchtower with heavy-duty scopes. Six guards on the gate. Then you have the gun nests. They're dug into the earth with only a slit of black shadow showing above a bunch of sand bags. And the barrel of a big machine gun. That's showing too.

  My guess is they have a gun nest on each side of the farm. At least two Doyles in each nest, one to fire and one to feed the belt ammo into the machine gun. That's bad news.

  We did not think this through very well.

  So what's my play? I'm lying in the dirt with a bunch of dead scrub brush and twigs woven into my back so no one can see my pack or the Barrett. I have a duffel bag full of weapons in front of me, coated in dirt and dust so it's hard for anyone to see me or it for anything other than a big lump of dirt. I've been watching the Doyles for twenty minutes and no alarms have gone up.

  That is the good news. The only good news.

  It takes me another thirty minutes to study what's inside the fence. Eight rows of eight tents. Big tents, like for weddings and shit. Not that I've been to a wedding. Maybe I have. I don't know. But the tents look like the ones used
at outdoor weddings I've seen in magazines. What? I look at old magazines. I like the pictures of the world pre-Z.

  Sixty-four tents. No other buildings. Some of those tents have to be where they keep the ladies. Some have to be where the Doyles sleep. Some have to be for supplies and for medical reasons when the ladies give birth. One of those tents has to be where the commander is.

  Oh, yeah, they have a commander. I don't care if they're all called Doyle, you don't have a set up like this breeding farm and decide shit by everyone raising their hands. Someone is in charge, and by the looks of things, that person is a hard ass. I need to find that hard ass. Cut off the head of the snake and the body starts to flail about.

  Speaking of snakes, I hear a rustle next to me and a big, fat rattler slithers by. He don't pay no mind to me. I'm just a big heat signature in a desert filled with more heat. Not that he gets too close. He's within striking distance, but far enough away that he can escape if I make a move for him. Snakes is more afraid of us than we are of them. That's the simple, natural truth.

  More afraid of us than we are of them…

  What are the Doyles afraid of? What gets them scared and feeling all weak in the knees? That's what I need to figure out if I'm going to beat them. Because a straight-ahead assault ain't going to do it. And considering how tightly locked down they got their farm, a sneak attack won't even work. They're waiting for that.

  What do they fear?

  Wait… Wrong question. The real question is why the fuck do they have so much security around this farm? The Inezes weren't strong enough to take them on. Those crazies I killed in the garage were just a rag tag group of idiots surviving on scraps. No threat there. So what is the threat they are worried about?

  The Heavies? The group that stupid (and dead) Marjorie mentioned? Is that the other force in the area? Maybe. Maybe not. Even if they are, so what? How do I use that to help get my sisters out of the farm? Oh, and get the preggers ladies out too. That's why we're in this mess. The preggers ladies be needing some saving.