Kyle let the weapon down enough so the man could lower his head. The old man slowly continued reaching his arm down and rolled his shirt up, with a grunt, exposing a bloody bandage that covered nearly the full side of his body. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Took this shrapnel when we tried to make our run past it.”
“That could have come from anywhere,” Kyle retorted.
“Like I said, I don’t care if you believe me. I had to stay behind to nurse this wound, but my friends will be back soon enough. They’ll know just what to do with a big bastard like you.” Making eye contact with Kyle, he licked his lips.
“I really like some gristle in my steak.”
With his brow furrowed, and without hesitation, Kyle reached forward and cracked the old man on the other side of his skull, dropping him out cold against the floor of the fort. He was still breathing, but I could see blood pooling up and dripping down between the cracks.
The air in the room remained silent as we all stood there, listening to the creatures below. Their horrible cries seeped through the floorboards of the fort. We needed to get the hell out of there. The creatures thirsting for our flesh were bad enough. Now we had Old Man Creepy Fuck licking his lips at the same thought.
Snapping us all to attention, Jarvis slammed his hands down on the wooden table in front of him and picked the microphone back up. “King’s Landing… King’s Landing… This is Iron Eagle… Over.”
Chhhhsshsh. Chhhsshsh.
Chapter 25
Throwing caution to the wind is a liberating thing if you’ve been sneaking around… especially when your life is literally on the line.
Pacing around the room, I kept glancing toward the window as the sound of Jarvis’s efforts echoed through the thin walls of the place. Through the static, my mind was spinning at the bomb the old man had just dropped on us. Was he full of shit, just screwing with our fatigued minds, or was there really a New America… and a giant wall keeping us from getting there. It seemed too crazy, too elaborate to possibly be true. Still, some pieces fit.
“Do you hear that?” Aidan whispered from the far side of the room. Transfixed by the look on his face, we collectively fell silent, listening attentively for any inkling of audible sound that lay beyond the hypnotizing hum of the radio static.
“Shit!” Kyle ground out.
My heart dropped as the roar of a distant truck engine emerged. None of us said a word, nearly petrified by the sound. Moving only my eyes to Kyle, he shrugged his shoulders ever so slightly before all of us quickly sprang forward, darting around, grabbing what little we could. All of us except for Jarvis, that is. He continued to stand over the radio, talking to dead air in vain.
I could feel my pulse rising as the engine continued to roar louder over the cries of the dead. We needed to get the hell out of there before the truck got back, or we’d have a hell of a fight on our hands.
In that instant, the static from the radio came to life. “Iron Eagle, Iron Eagle… We read you… Over.”
Jarvis popped up, standing straight as a wooden ruler, with the microphone in his hand. The rest of us stopped in our tracks, huddling around him with some distant sense of relief.
“Yes, we’re here, King’s Landing. Glad to hear you, boys,” Jarvis whispered into the microphone.
My momentary relief was put to a halt as I heard the engine go mute. Dashing over toward the window, I wildly looked through the forest, trying to pinpoint where the truck had parked.
“Where the hell are you?” A woman’s voice screamed out through the speaker. It sounded a lot like Mia.
“We’re near a park, Fire Mountain Park. We’re in some trouble out here. However, there is no time to come get us. You need to go on without our help. We’ve got a truck and will be back to you as soon as possible… Over.”
“Bullshit. We’re hovering around the park now… Over.”
I may have been the only one, but I let out a sigh of relief as I yanked hard on the straps to the backpack lying over my shoulders.
Kyle’s hands landed on the table with a thud. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I pulled a search party together when we lost contact. Whole place is burnt to shit. We could see the smoke for miles. Looks like you guys have been busy. I repeat, where are you? Over.”
A number of car doors opened and shut, drawing my attention to the bottom of a tree just fifty or so yards away.
“They’re getting close. We gotta wrap this up,” Aidan said with a prepubescent crack in his voice.
Ignoring him, Jarvis continued to speak into the microphone. “You shouldn’t have come after us.” Pausing for a moment to think, and lowering his head, he finally said, “There is a downed airplane on a peak just outside the burnt area of the forest. There should be enough room to land your chopper. If we’re not there in thirty minutes, you need to leave without us.”
“We’re not going anywhere without you!” the woman’s voice shot back.
Kyle snatched the microphone and jerked it to his face. “Mia, this shit storm is too dangerous. You’re more important than—than me. I need you to promise that you’ll leave and get back to Avalon.”
“Don’t puss out on me now, Kyle! We’re here, so now you just need to get to us.”
She always had a subtle way of speaking with the guy.
A rifle shot rang out loudly making my heart thud painfully hard in my chest. I poked my head through the window just in time to see a Z hit the ground as ten men started to climb the first tree.
“Promise me, Mia. Promise you’ll head back if we can’t make it to you!”
A cracked, but determined, “No way… Over,” came through the radio just before it went silent. Jarvis started to flip the switches back to where they’d been before we got there. Kyle was mumbling something about her being uncompromising and bullheaded, as Jarvis motioned for us to move toward the secondary zip-line leading out the other side of the fortress.
We were cutting it too tight, and we all knew it.
Moving down the curved staircase, each step seemed to cry out in pain as our boots hit the planks. Reaching the bottom, my eyes were drawn to the crucified Jesus. A fleeting thought passed through my mind. This place was anything but holy. Continuing around the pews, I noticed Aidan darting to one of the makeshift windows on the far side of the room. His eyes were fixed on the forest floor, and he was grinding his hand around the handle of his weapon.
The rest of us ran past him and out the wooden door that stood directly across from the one by which we had initially entered. It led to the deck that circled the fort. We found ourselves crouched down, breathing heavily as we peered at a second rope bridge leading in the opposite direction from the other zip line that we’d entered the fortress upon.
If you were in a chopper flying above, I imagined that it would look as if the fortress was a poorly shaped circle that had two lines running out both east and west of its center.
“This is it. The trucks are down there,” Jarvis said in between a few heavy pants while lifting a hand in the direction of the zip-line we were facing.
“You’re right. We’ll have to slip quietly over the bridge without them putting eyes on us, but it doesn’t look like they’ll have a solid line of sight from their position,” Kyle chimed in.
Glancing to the edge of this second set of zip lines that served as the Stripes alternate route, and our current path of escape, I realized Kyle was right. At the very least, the fortress itself mostly stood between the two zips, meaning they couldn’t see us from their position as long as we managed to keep our heads down, and we wouldn’t be able to see the Stripes from ours without lifting them up.