Red Hammer: Voodoo Plague Book 4 Read online

  The garage was dim, the only source of light a set of grimy windows set in the single roll up door. It stunk of grease and motor oil. Rachel cast around for anything she could use to brace the door, drawing her pistol when she heard one of the windows in the office shatter. On the far side of the room she saw a short handled shovel and dashed across to grab it. She had just picked it up when the door from the office rattled in its frame as one of the females began crashing into it.

  Rachel was three steps away from the door when it burst open under the assault of the infected. The female that had broken through stumbled into the garage and Dog slammed into her, taking her to the ground. The other two were right behind her, appearing in the doorway, and Madison and Lindsey both screamed in panic. Both heads swiveled in their direction and they ignored Rachel in favor of the children.

  Raising the pistol, Rachel fired three shots, the first two missing but the third destroying one of the female’s heads. She tracked the second one, but didn’t pull the trigger for fear of hitting Madison who was shrinking away from the grasping hands of the infected. Lindsey stepped protectively in front of her little sister, but was knocked aside as the female lunged and grabbed onto Madison’s arm. Holstering her pistol, Rachel raised the shovel over her head and charged.

  “Get away from her, you bitch!” She screamed as she stepped in and swung with every bit of strength, fear and frustration she possessed. The edge of the metal head of the shovel impacted the crown of the female’s head, crushing deep into her skull and sending her crashing to the floor.

  Panting, Rachel looked around to make sure they were safe, then dropped the shovel and dashed to Madison, folding her up in her arms. The small girl was crying and wrapped her arms around Rachel’s neck. Holding her arm out, Rachel gathered Lindsey in and held both of them as they cried. Dog had killed the female he had fought and quickly sniffed the other two to make sure they were dead, then sat down facing the open door with his back pressed against Rachel.

  The girls quickly regained a degree of composure and after giving Dog a quick hug, Rachel stood and drew her pistol. She didn’t want to walk through the door back into the office. It was one of the last things in the world she wanted to do, but she needed to know if the sound of the fight had drawn other infected that were about to attack. Breathing in short, shallow pants, Rachel walked to the door on the balls of her feet, pistol held in two hands in front of her just like John had taught her. Reaching the door she held her breath, carefully peeking around the frame to get a view of the office.

  Nothing moved, so she kept inching forward until she was standing in the doorway, weapon up and aimed at the front of the office where a pile of shattered safety glass lay on the floor. Dog came and stood with her, sniffing the air. Rachel didn’t see anything moving, but when Dog growled quietly she knew he was smelling more infected. How he could tell the difference between ones that were approaching and the dead ones behind him in the garage, she had no idea, but wasn’t about to fail to trust his warning.

  “We have to go,” Rachel said to the girls, glancing back at them to make sure they were ready. “Madison, tie your shoes so you can run without tripping.” Madison looked down at her feet and back up at Rachel with a confused expression on her face.

  “I’ll do it.” Lindsey volunteered, kneeling on the dirty floor to tie her sister’s shoes. “But why don’t we just take my daddy’s car so we don’t have to run?”

  Rachel turned and looked at her with her mouth hanging open. A car. She hadn’t even thought that these people would need a car. Living all the way out here, of course they would. And the parents had been taken in their captor’s trucks, so the car should still be sitting here. Getting a taste of how John felt sometimes when he overlooked the obvious, Rachel smiled at Lindsey. “Where is it, honey?”

  “In back, behind our house. The keys are right there.” She pointed at a split ring with two big silver keys on it hanging from a nail that had been partially pounded into the wall. Rachel grabbed them and stuffed them in her pocket, resuming her two handed grip on the pistol. “Lead the way, Lindsey.”

  Holding her sister’s hand, Lindsey went to a sturdy steel door in the rear wall of the garage and pointed. Leaving Dog to watch the front, Rachel joined her and undid the heavy deadbolt that secured it. Keeping the pistol up and ready she turned the knob and gently pulled it open. No infected were waiting for them so she stepped through, the girls on her heels, calling Dog to follow. Lindsey kept her grip on Madison and they moved quickly through knee high weeds, crossing a narrow gravel driveway that led to a small, rickety shack. Walking around the house, Rachel was momentarily dismayed to see the vehicle that sat under a large shade tree.

  The car was an ancient and battered Ford LTD. Rachel didn’t even recognize it, having been a small child when Ford ceased production of the model. There was more rust than paint and the rear bumper was missing, but the glass was all intact and clean, all four tires looking to be in decent shape and fully aired up. Quickly unlocking the door, Rachel put the girls in the back seat then she and Dog piled into the front. The engine started easily and settled into a smooth idle. A glance at the dash showed a full tank of gas. Breathing a small sigh of relief, Rachel shifted into drive and headed down the gravel driveway to the road.

  16

  Rachel nosed the big Ford around the gas station, letting it idle down the gravel drive. To her left she could see a couple of males stumbling along, zeroing in on the rumble of the big V8 engine and crunch of the tires on the gravel. Stopping at the edge of the pavement, she looked around but didn’t see any other infected.

  “Lindsey, do you know how to get to a big highway, like the Interstate?” Rachel asked the older girl, hoping she had paid attention when her parents drove.

  “Turn right.” Madison answered, sounding absolutely certain with her directions. Smiling, Rachel turned the wheel and accelerated onto the asphalt. Having never owned an American car, Rachel was surprised at how well the old sedan still drove. She couldn’t help but continue to smile as she pushed the car up to 50 miles an hour, the throaty rumble making her feel powerful, unlike the buzzy four cylinder Japanese engine in her hybrid.

  The road was perfectly flat and straight as an arrow except when it occasionally made two routine, consecutive, opposite direction ninety degree turns to adjust for the corner of a new rice paddy. After the second set of turns she had to keep her speed down to steer around infected males that were stumbling across the pavement, alerted to her presence by the rumbling exhaust.

  The girls were quiet as she drove and Dog stuck his head out the open window, enjoying the wind. Rachel was starting to relax a notch, growing more confident with the power of the car under her control. After a few more miles they reached a three way intersection, the road they were on continuing straight ahead, a larger road heading ninety degrees to her left. Braking to a stop, Rachel looked at the faded signs posted on a pipe that leaned drunkenly in the weeds. Straight ahead was West Memphis, five miles away. To their left, the new road was state highway 18. There was no indication where it led, but Rachel was sure she didn’t want to go anywhere near Memphis, or West Memphis, or anything Memphis. She turned left.

  “You should have gone straight.” Lindsey spoke up from the back seat.

  “We’re not going anywhere near Memphis, honey. It’s full of monsters.” Rachel said, meeting Lindsey’s eyes in the rear view mirror. The girl stared back at her for a moment before nodding and looking out the side window.

  The new road was slightly wider, having an actual yellow line painted down the middle of it, but soft dirt came right to the edge of the pavement on either side and the asphalt was barely wide enough to turn the big car around if needed. Driving off onto the shoulder was almost a certain recipe for getting stuck. Rachel’s tension level raised a couple of degrees as she thought about this, her foot backing off the accelerator until their speed slowed to 30.

  Rachel slowed for an upcoming ninety degree jog in
the road, glancing over at the open window Dog was enjoying. She thought about reaching across and rolling it up, but decided it wasn’t necessary. Nothing was coming through that window with Dog sitting in the passenger seat. Negotiating the right hand turn, Rachel drove for a hundred yards before having to turn ninety degrees back to the left. Her view in the direction of the turn was blocked by a tall dike like she had walked along the previous night. She didn’t see the roadblock until she was already most of the way through the turn.

  A large pickup and SUV, painted brown with gold stars on their doors sat across the road. Both vehicles were labeled as Crittenden County Sheriff. Four men dressed in jeans and white T-shirts leaned on the vehicle’s fenders, pistols on their belts and rifles in their hands. A month ago the sight of law enforcement might have made Rachel cringe and look at her speedometer, worried she was about to get a ticket. Now, she was immediately suspicious and slammed on the brakes, bringing the car to a halt thirty yards from the men. She shifted into reverse, but kept her foot on the brake when two of them raised their rifles and aimed them at her.

  From the back seat the two little girls started crying and Dog growled, staring at their ambushers through the windshield. Rachel debated flooring the throttle and trying to steer around the bend in reverse. Could she do it without putting the car into the ditch or getting stuck in the soft dirt of the shoulder? Would the men really start shooting, and if they did were they good enough to hit her? But if they didn’t hit her, they might hit Dog or the children.

  One of the men who hadn’t raised his rifle stepped forward and lifted a small, powered megaphone to his mouth. He claimed he was with the Sheriff’s Department and ordered Rachel to turn the car off and step out with her hands over her head.

  “Girls, get down on the floor. Now!” Rachel said without turning her head.

  She heard them scrambling behind her, flicked her eyes to the mirror to make sure they were down, then took her foot off the brake and floored the accelerator. The engine bellowed and the rear tires screamed as the heavy car shot backwards. The men were caught off guard for a moment. They could tell the driver of the vehicle was a woman and the last thing they expected was for her to run. Women were supposed to cry and beg, but eventually do what they were told to do. They weren’t supposed to go screeching away in a cloud of tire smoke.

  The first bullet punched through the windshield as Rachel was turning the wheel to steer the car around the bend in the road. It blasted through just below the rearview mirror and on through the back window. That was the only bullet that hit glass before they disappeared behind the protection of the dike. The car was going fast and Rachel fought the wheel, trying to straighten them out, but every time she corrected their direction of travel, she over corrected.

  By the time she thought to take her foot off the gas, it was too late and the car went into a spin, ending up with both rear tires and one of the front ones in the soft dirt on the left shoulder. They were facing back the way they had come and Rachel shifted into drive and pressed on the throttle. The car moved a few inches before the rear tires dug deep into the dirt. In seconds the rear wheels were buried all the way to the axle.

  17

  Master Sergeant Jackson sat in a web sling, behind the pilots of a Black Hawk, staring out the open side door at miles and miles of nothing but rice paddies. Two Rangers sat farther back, lost in their own thoughts as the big helicopter pounded through the humid air. A door gunner was strapped in behind a minigun, an Army Private sitting to his side, ready to provide any support he might need.

  They had been searching for Rachel and Dog for hours. Jackson had promised the Major that he would personally take charge of the search, and he was keeping that promise. He doubted they would be found alive, if they were even found, but he knew the mission the Major was on and looking for lost friends was the least he could do.

  The search had gone back up and down the river several times, high passes for a broader view of the area and low, slow passes looking for bodies washed up on the shore. Someone had suggested to Jackson that they had probably been washed all the way to Louisiana by now, but he had grown up in this part of the country and knew that wasn’t how the river behaved. The Mississippi twisted and turned like a snake, and in every twist there were sandbars that formed when the river current slowed for the bend and dropped the soil it had carried down from upstream.

  All kinds of debris, including bodies, washed up and grounded on the sand on a regular basis. In fact, without constant steering by a knowledgeable pilot, the river wasn’t nearly as easy to navigate as most people thought. A boat or barge without power might be carried downstream for a short distance, but it would quickly end up on the shore or a sandbar. This knowledge was the only reason Jackson held out even the faintest hope of finding Rachel and Dog.

  They hadn’t bothered to search the eastern shore of the river. For miles in either direction from Memphis, thousands of infected lined the shoreline. If they had washed up within wading distance of them, well, Jackson didn’t want to think about what had happened to them. After thoroughly searching the river and western shore as far as 80 miles south of the bridge where they’d gone in the water, he’d directed the air assets to start moving inland on the western side of the Mississippi. Currently, the Black Hawk he was riding in was flying a search pattern a few miles to the south of their temporary base at the West Memphis airport. Two more Black Hawks divided up the area farther south, all of them slowly working their way west.

  “Master Sergeant, we’ve got some activity on our forward camera.” The pilot called over the intercom. Jackson snapped out of his reverie and turned to look at the high resolution screen mounted in the cockpit.

  They were currently flying at 1,000 feet and with the flat terrain had a good line of sight in all directions. Two miles ahead of them, and a little to the south, the cameras were zoomed in on a narrow strip of blacktop that bent around an earthen dike. A large, four door sedan was stopped in the road a short distance from two police vehicles that were parked diagonally to each other, creating a roadblock. As Jackson watched he could clearly see two of the men he assumed were police officers raise their weapons and point them at the vehicle. A moment later it shot backwards, fishtailed around a bend before losing control and spinning off the pavement. Jackson wasn’t sure, but thought the officers had been firing at the car as it started backwards.

  The co-pilot adjusted the camera and zoomed some more onto the car. A moment later the driver’s door popped open and a woman with long hair leapt out and yanked the rear door open. Jackson’s pulse started pounding when he saw the woman, but as good as the resolution was, it wasn’t good enough for him to tell if it was Rachel. Back door open, the woman hustled two children out of the back seat, seemed to be yelling to someone inside the car, scooped the smaller girl up in her arms and started running out into a flooded rice paddy. When the dog jumped out the passenger window and started following them, Jackson nearly let out a whoop of excitement.

  “The guys from the road block are pursuing.” The pilot said, looking at another screen fed by a different camera that was still focused on the roadblock.

  “The woman, dog and children are our search targets. Consider everyone else hostiles!” Jackson had to make an effort not to shout into the intercom.

  The pilot responded instantly, lowering the nose of the helicopter and feeding in full power. The Black Hawk surged forward, losing altitude until they were only fifty feet in the air, screaming along in excess of the aircraft’s published top speed of 180 miles an hour. Jackson watched the monitor as they quickly closed the distance, glancing around briefly to satisfy himself the two Rangers and door gunner were ready. Turning back to the monitor he could see Rachel was running as fast as she could through the flooded field with a child in her arms. Another child ran in front of her, Dog bounding along at her side.

  The men in pursuit were sixty yards behind, having covered the distance to the abandoned car quickly, but also
being hampered by the water as they pursued into the paddy. The helicopter was still nearly a mile out, and apparently not yet detected by anyone on the ground. One of the men came to a stop and raised his rifle in Rachel’s direction. They were approaching from an oblique angle and the pilot didn’t hesitate to shoot. The hellfire missile roared off the left pylon, and almost instantly accelerated to 1,000 miles per hour, covering the distance to the parked police vehicles before the man could pull the trigger on his rifle.

  Both vehicles erupted in a massive explosion, everyone on the ground stopping and turning to see what had happened. As the fire burned, the pilot flared to bleed off speed and roared into a nose down hover 20 feet above the ground. The helicopter was protectively positioned between the four men and where Rachel and Dog stood with the children. Jackson didn’t need the cameras and monitors to see the shocked looks on their faces. It’s not every day you find yourself face to face with a fully armed Black Hawk.

  18

  I opened my eyes to see Martinez standing over me, hand outstretched towards my shoulder.

  “We’re just crossing out of Mexico into Arizona.” She said before turning away and resuming her seat. I groaned softly, stretching my back and shoulders, then sat up and looked around. The two AF Sergeants still slept, and catching Martinez’s eye I tilted my head in their direction. She scooted across the deck and nudged them awake with the toe of her boot.

  I checked in with the pilot and asked him to let me know when we were over the Phoenix area. I might not have been able to stop, but this new bomber had some pretty advanced imaging equipment on board and I wanted to spot my house and see if I could get any idea of what might have happened to Katie. Depending on what I saw, I might be heading to Arizona once the mission was completed in Los Alamos.