Days Of Perdition: Voodoo Plague Book 6 Page 18

  Sometime later they sat across from each other, eating the food she had prepared. Roach hadn’t said anything to her since he’d shown her the kitchen, but she felt the weight of his eyes constantly watching her. Watching to make sure she didn’t do anything, but also watching her. He even watched her as he ate, rifle resting on the table with the muzzle pointed directly at her.

  She’d hoped to be sitting close to him. Wanted an opportunity to get her hands on the weapon. She knew if she could get a grip on the rifle she could most likely take it away from him, but he was alert and cautious. An opportunity never presented itself. She wanted to talk to him. Ask questions. Find out if John was really alive and in the area, or if somehow the mad man had found out who her husband was and just made up the story.

  But as much as she wanted answers to her questions Katie had been a very good case officer. She knew when to press, and when to let things take their natural course. There was no doubt that Roach was bat shit crazy, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t smart. She had to be smarter and pick her opportunities.

  She also knew he wanted her. Badly. Wanted to see her, touch her. What she didn’t understand was what was holding him back. If he decided to do anything to her, there was very little she could do to stop it as long as he was armed. Slowly chewing her food she considered playing to his desires. Flirting just a little. Maybe undoing a button on her shirt at the right moment. But she also knew that could backfire on her before she realized she had gone too far. There was no predicting the actions of a deranged man.

  On the other hand, playing a little seduction might get her close enough to him to get her hands on his rifle. Twist it in his grip; strike his throat with her elbow and balls with her knee to slow him. Turn the rifle and put a few rounds in him. She’d have to move fast and decisively when the time came. Hesitation would give him an advantage.

  It had been a long time since Katie had been through the training provided by the CIA, but she’d always been scrappy. She knew how to fight, and she knew that when the time to attack came she had to make the most of it. There wouldn’t be a second opportunity if she failed. “Attack with certainty that you intend to kill,” John had told her a couple of times when they’d worked out together. “Make sure you walk away from the encounter alive and everything else will work itself out.”

  She understood, and even though she’d never taken a life, Katie had no doubt she was capable. Somehow she’d made it from Arizona to Oklahoma without having to kill anyone. Well, at least that she knew of. She’d shot at a couple of people along the way but hadn’t stuck around to see what the results were. Maybe she was already a killer.

  “You don’t want to try that,” Roach said, startling her out of her thoughts.

  Realizing she had been staring at his rifle while thinking, Katie mentally berated herself for making such a rookie mistake. She knew better. Had been taught better. She looked up at Roach’s eyes and almost smiled, but shut that down. Not the right way to respond to him.

  “Try what?” She asked.

  “Whatever you were thinking about that involved my rifle.” He said, pushing his empty plate to the side.

  Katie glanced down at her half eaten meal, taking a bite to give herself time to think. She needed to distract Roach from the idea that she was thinking about his weapon.

  “Actually, I was thinking about my husband.” She said, looking him in the eye. “Were you lying to me, or is he really alive?”

  “Oh, he’s very much alive.” Roach smiled. “Running around sticking his nose into business he’s got no reason to get involved in. And you’ll be glad to know he’s replaced you.”

  “What do you mean, replaced me?” She asked.

  “You should see her,” Roach’s smile spread across his entire face. “Her name’s Rachel. Tall thing, like an Amazon. Younger than you with big, perfect tits and legs that go on to Sunday. They actually make a really good looking couple.”

  “A couple?” She asked, wondering where he was going with this.

  “Oh yes. I first met them in Tennessee. He brought her with him from Atlanta. You’re from Arizona, right? Did he spend a lot of time in Atlanta before the attacks? I’m just asking because they sure seemed familiar and comfortable with each other.” Roach succeeded in putting just the right tone of concern into his voice.

  Katie stared back at him, eyes damp. “Yes. Several times a month,” she finally said.

  “Well, I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe I’m wrong, but they sure seem like they’re together. Perhaps he thinks he made an upgrade, but I think he’s foolish. You’re much prettier than she is.”

  “He wouldn’t,” Katie said, tears now rolling down her face. “He couldn’t.”

  “I’m not saying he did,” Roach said, leaning across the table like he was concerned. “I’m just telling you what I’ve seen. Maybe there’s a perfectly good reason they’re still together after all this time, living in the same house on Tinker.”

  Katie looked back at him for a long time, the tears continuing to stream down her face. With a cry, she leapt to her feet and ran to the far side of the room and stood facing the wall, her whole body racked with sobs. Getting slowly to his feet, Roach walked across the room and stood behind her, watching her cry. Finally he stepped in and placed his hands on her shoulders to pull her into an embrace. To hold her perfect form next to his was the only thought on his mind.

  The instant Katie felt Roach’s hands on her shoulders she struck. Stepping back she threw a lightning fast elbow into his solar plexus, momentarily paralyzing his diaphragm. Spinning, she batted his arms aside and punched his larynx with bunched fingers, then twisted her hips as she raised her knee into his balls, grabbing the rifle as Roach started to fall to the floor.

  The rifle was attached to a sling that was around his shoulders and she had to follow him down to the floor to maintain her grip on the weapon. He tried to struggle with her, but she’d perfectly attacked the three most vulnerable areas on a man and between being unable to breathe and a pair of balls that felt like they had been ruptured, Roach had no strength.

  Katie dropped onto him with all her weight, one knee on his throat, the other landing squarely on his bruised solar plexus. What air remained in his lungs whistled out of his mouth.

  “Fuck you, asshole!” she hissed in Roach’s face as she quickly disengaged the sling from the rifle, leapt to her feet and took a step back. “You think I don’t know my husband better than that?”

  As her thumb found the rifle’s safety she froze at the sound of a shotgun being racked. Looking around she saw half a dozen men watching her, a large, older woman standing only a dozen feet away with a 12 gauge shotgun pointed at her body.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and put that gun down, sweetie. There’s no killing round here lessen I say so.” The woman said.

  33

  Lillian Nosler smiled when her youngest boy told her about the massive casino that was only a couple of miles ahead. She had been on the road with her family for several days, driven out of their home in Arkansas’ Ozark Mountains by herds of infected and suddenly aggressive animals. Razorbacks had killed two of her extended family, one niece and one nephew, late one afternoon. Then during the night female infected had begun arriving, first in small groups, but the volume quickly grew until they had to flee.

  Mama, as Lillian was known, led close to sixty people out of the hills that night. In her late sixties she was the Matriarch of her immediate family of seven boys, and being the oldest of a dozen blood and in-law siblings she had taken on the roll as head of the family. Her husband had drunk himself to death twenty years ago leaving Mama to fend for herself and her family.

  The Noslers had settled in Arkansas in the mid-1800s, claiming land deep in the Ozarks that wasn’t good for much of anything. It was too remote, rugged and heavily forested for city folks. In the late 1800s Noslers had started working in the mines in the area, extracting lead, and for several generations they lived and died in
the mines. Then in the 1980s the economy changed and the mines closed down.

  Needing a way to make money, Mama’s late husband had expanded his still and began producing illegal moonshine, which they sold in several small towns in the area. Her oldest boy, who liked to spend his weekends in Little Rock, came home one Sunday with a new idea to make money.

  They were too far back in the woods to worry about the cops stumbling across them, and soon they had a couple of small patches of marijuana under cultivation in the rich soil on the sunny side of a mountain. Once harvested, dried and taken to town, her boy returned with the biggest stack of cash any of them had ever seen. He’d sold every ounce he’d taken with him in less than twelve hours.

  The family pitched in and began clearing and cultivating more patches while her husband chose to spend his time with his still, often drunk well before noon. The more successful the pot business became, the more he drank. Late one evening he passed out. This was nothing unusual and Mama and her boys left him in the shed with the still to sleep it off. The next morning they found his body. He had died from alcohol poisoning.

  Pot business booming, the Noslers became suppliers for local gangs by the early 90s. They were making more money than they had ever imagined possible, and not knowing any better had started spending it. Cars, trucks, jewelry and every shiny bauble that caught their eye. For years they had stayed under the radar, driving decades old vehicles that were more rust than metal. Suddenly, every member of the family had a shiny new pick-up and someone in the Arkansas State Police that patrolled the area took notice.

  Questions were asked and it didn’t take long for the cops to discover that the Noslers were the source of the cheap marijuana that had flooded the streets of all the towns and cities in the region. A warrant was obtained and over fifty heavily armed police officers descended on the family’s land. Legal or not, they didn’t take kindly to an invading army of cops, many of them fighting back.

  With a veritable armory of brand new weapons purchased with their drug money they managed to hold out for over a week. By this time the FBI, DEA and ATF were all involved, swelling the law enforcement response to well over 300 men.

  When the dust cleared after their assault, 7 Noslers were dead and 15 injured. Everyone over the age of 18 was charged with a multitude of state and federal crimes, and with their drug profits seized by the government they were unable to afford lawyers. The public defenders that were assigned to them weren’t interested in fighting a losing battle and soon nearly every adult in the family was in prison. The children were placed into the foster care system and the giant fields of marijuana were torched.

  The family’s land and homes were seized by the government and sat empty for ten years until some of the Noslers with lesser charges began to be released from prison and returned. They paid no attention to the signs warning that the property had been confiscated, moving right back into their homes.

  Prison had been an education for the family. Survival was only possible through strength, and even though there were several family members incarcerated together at multiple facilities, there weren’t enough of them. That left them with few options, and most chose to join one of the prison gangs for protection.

  By the time the first of them started trickling back to the hills, many were committed to various gangs that were just as powerful on the outside as they were inside. The pot business was restarted, though on a much smaller scale that wouldn’t draw attention, and with their new contacts they quickly branched out into running guns and prostitutes throughout their part of the state.

  When Mama walked back onto her ancestral land, the family was again flush with illegal cash. Guns and drugs were profitable, but nothing compared with the money they could make off of girls, and the younger the better. They would use female family members to lure young homeless girls and runaways to one of several locations where they kept them as prisoners and forced them to work as prostitutes.

  Then one of Mama’s brothers, half drunk, suggested they start hosting fights amongst their customers. The winner would get his pick of the girls for free, and the family would control all the wagering on the fights, acting as the house.

  Soon there were several fights every Friday and Saturday night. They sold gallons of watered down moonshine and pounds of their pot to the men who stood in line to watch the fights and fuck the girls. Cash from the wagers on the fights rolled in and their biggest problem was how to launder that much money without the cops noticing.

  When they’d had to run from the infected, all but a handful of the girls had been left behind, locked in their rooms. Mama wasn’t concerned. She knew they could find more as they traveled. Her only concern was finding a safe place for her and her family where they could restart their business. From what she’d seen of the world, cash was no longer something she cared about. But food, weapons and ammunition would be worth more than their weight in gold.

  “Tell me ‘bout it,” she said to the boy who had given her the news about finding the casino.

  “Big fucking place, Mama. Doors is locked and I couldn’t get inside, but it looks abandoned. And it’s a goddamn fortress. All brick and shit. No way’s the infected gettin inside.” He was excited and tripping over his words as he talked.

  She had told him to lead the way, the heavily armed convoy of pickups falling in behind. They covered the two miles quickly, cresting a small rise in the terrain as they approached. In a shallow bowl in front of them sat the massive building, acres of striped blacktop parking lot surrounding it. Mama frowned when she saw the silhouette of a helicopter sitting on the roof, but didn’t call a halt.

  They pulled into the parking lot, driving around the building until they located a service entrance. The trucks were pulled into a circular defensive perimeter just like a wagon train in the old west. Fifty well armed men sat in the backs of the trucks, facing out; ready to fend off any infected that attacked.

  One of her younger nephews had received an education from a professional burglar while he was in prison. He could pick any lock in under a minute and Mama told him to get to work while she walked over to the boy that had found the building, slapping him hard across the face.

  “You forget to tell me ‘bout that helicopter, boy?” She snarled in his face.

  “I’m sorry, Mama. I didn’t mean to,” he flinched as she raised her hand, but decided not to slap him a second time. There were more than enough of them to deal with the handful of men that could fit on the aircraft.

  The lock on the service door clicked and her nephew pulled on the handle. The door opened a few inches before a heavy, chrome chain stopped it. He peered inside a moment, then reached through the narrow opening and began working on the padlock holding the chain in place. It took less time than the deadbolt to open then he was carefully feeding the chain through the inside handle, trying not to make any more noise than necessary. Finally he pulled the door fully open.

  “You six with me,” Mama said, waving at a group that was four of her own children and two nephews. “Rest of you stay here and keep watch.”

  As soon as they stepped into the building they all smelled the aroma of food cooking. They slowly moved through the service area, cautiously pushing out onto the casino floor. Less than fifty feet to their left a wood paneled door stood open a few inches and Mama could faintly hear the sound of voices. Walking to the door she paused and looked through the gap.

  A man and woman were sitting across from each other at a table, eating. The man was talking and the woman wasn’t taking whatever he was telling her very well. After a couple of minutes she leapt up and ran to hide her face against a wall. The man got up and followed, and with their backs to the door Mama and her group pushed into the room, unnoticed.

  The man walked up behind the sobbing woman and placed his hands on her shoulders. Mama was surprised when the woman instantly attacked, quickly putting him on the floor and taking his rifle. She was curious, and decided it was time to intervene before the
woman finished him off. Stepping forward, she racked the slide of her shotgun.

  34

  We pressed on in the darkness, driving through an area of the city where the power was out. Infected were a constant presence, but not in significant numbers. Yet. I remembered from a briefing Colonel Crawford had given to Admiral Packard that there were going to be over 200,000 people in Oklahoma City that weren’t expected to receive the vaccine in time to prevent them from turning.

  That briefing had been a little over 24 hours ago, and at that point the window of time to the appearance of a quarter of a million new threats was seven days at the most. As I thought about this I wondered if Katie had been immunized. She’d apparently been on the base, and I’d heard that everyone on base had been, so that gave me a little comfort.

  That also meant that Roach had been as well, but he presented enough danger to her without being infected that I didn’t derive any peace from that thought. But what was at the casino? Why had he taken her there? For that matter, why had he taken her at all?

  “Because he’s fucking crazy. That’s why.” Startled, I looked in the rear view and met Rachel’s eyes. I hadn’t realized I had spoken out loud.

  “How’s Martinez?” I asked, wanting to change the subject.

  The last thing I needed right now was for Rachel to decide we needed to discuss what finding Katie meant for us. I already knew the answer to that. I cared for Rachel very much, and if not for Katie could imagine being happy with her. But Katie wasn’t just my wife, she was my best friend.