Other than the Middle East, Chad had never seen a land so desolate. This part of Wyoming gave the desert a bad name. Were it not for the oil and natural gas being pumped out of the ground, Wamsutter’s primary export might be sand.
As the sun came up, Chad started making sense of the mayor’s rambling. He used the pre-dawn darkness to crawl to the top of a small rise in the barren, rolling hills where he could look down on the distribution center with his father-in-law’s crappy binoculars.
Chad had taken one of the barricade boys with him, sending Pacheco back to get Audrey and his little girl. The mayor had agreed to put them up in the Holiday Inn while Chad figured out the assault.
Scattered around the outside of the distribution center, Chad counted thirty semis, five cop cars, fifteen passenger vehicles and at least five hundred semi-trailers. Without a doubt, the place contained a lot of interesting bling. In the zombie Apocalypse, this would be known as a “high value target.”
Chad regretted his request of twenty men. He had spoken too soon. He might need a couple of hundred just to cover the size of the place. It was huge. Shaped like a fat letter “L,” the distribution center had almost a million square feet under roof. And who knew what the inside actually looked like? Essentially, Chad thought, it would be like assaulting a small town, except with a roof over the entire thing.
He didn’t spot any defensive positions. He’d only seen one man step through the doors, probably a trucker, to get some fresh air and smoke a cigarette. The trucker hadn’t been armed.
Chad tried to imagine what they were doing inside. There had to be at least five law enforcement guys from Rock Springs in there, since there were five cruisers outside. He thought there was maybe one guy per semi and one guy per passenger vehicle. That added up to about sixty men; maybe eight or ten of those might be women. He didn’t want to make too much of his guess but, based on the smoker not having a rifle, they might not have enough guns to arm all sixty men.
It was a wild guess, Chad reminded himself. Rock Springs, no doubt, had plenty of guns, and they might have packed one of those cop cars with rifles to arm everyone inside. Based on the level of defense, it looked like a light presence, as though Rock Springs was claiming dibsies on the place, but not much more.
Chad turned to the boy from Rawlins lying next to him in the dirt. “Have you guys hit this place yet?”
“Nope. Mayor Spears had words with the mayor of Rock Springs over it, but that’s all.”
“Hang out right here and don’t shoot.” Chad told the boy. “I’m going inside to check things out.”
As Chad worked his way down to the massive parking lot, he thought about the distribution center from a defensive point of view. It would be nearly impossible to cover all the ways into the building. There had to be two hundred outside doors, not counting the big roll-up cargo bays.
If it had been Chad, he would have put early warning pickets on the roof. That would have made it a lot harder for him to get inside to recon the place.
But a defensive perimeter was tougher to maintain than people thought. After about ninety minutes of guard duty, most men became combat-ineffective. Maybe the ADHD generation was to blame, but one couldn’t expect a military trained guard to remain combat-effective past an hour and a half. Without two men on guard at each post, there would be no way to ensure one guy wasn’t sleeping. With civilian guards, it would be even harder.
Maybe the cops had already tried to maintain a perimeter and they had given up. More likely, they had pulled back to some central location in the warehouse and were sitting around playing cards, not expecting an armed incursion.
Even at low levels of readiness, sixty armed men weren’t going down without a fight. Chad would have to come up with something clever.
Armed with an M4 they had purloined, Chad peeked in one of the doors. A steel door, way out on the end of the fat “L,” had been left unlocked. The industrial door didn’t actually have a manual lock. It appeared to lock automatically by magnetic solenoid. Since the grid power was out, the doors must have defaulted to locking open. Chad couldn’t imagine why. Maybe Walmart’s legal department was more worried about not locking people inside in an emergency than they were worried about locking thieves out.
Chad slipped inside, closing the door softly. Inside, everything was dead dark, and it took a minute for his eyes to adjust.
As he began to make out shapes, nothing made sense. He had expected to find big racks stacked with pallets, like a Costco on steroids. Instead, all he saw was level after level of rolling conveyor belt, winding through the warehouse like ribbon pasta, intersecting here and there with junctions under robot arms as tall as backhoes. The place smelled like putrid fruit mixed with rotting meat.
The layout reminded Chad of illustrations of the “Cities of Tomorrow” that he saw in his Grandpa’s old Popular Science magazines, as though some ambitious city planner had stacked a dozen miniature gleaming California freeways on top of one another in mid-air.
The more he saw, the more he deduced that he had walked into an ultra-modern sorting and shipping facility. Many of the boxes were open, filled with fruit, rotting seafood and Saran-wrapped meat and vegetables. Apparently, the robotic arms would grab boxes and add them to pallets. Then, robotic pallet jacks would run the pallets out to semi-trailers at the bay doors.
All of the bay doors were closed, though, and it looked like the place had halted instantly when the power went out. There was no way this much machinery could run off generators.
It wasn’t clear to Chad how to walk through the jumble of conveyors, so he stuck to the outside wall. At least staying to the outside, he would only have a one-hundred-eighty-degree threat area. If he walked through the middle of the jumbled processing floor, he would have to pay attention to a three-hundred-sixty-degree area with hundreds of blind spots.
Chad stalked down the entire arm of the “L” without seeing or hearing a soul. By the time he reached the bottom corner, he figured it out; this arm of the building was dedicated to shipping and receiving perishables. After more than a week without power, it was obvious why nobody guarded the area; it smelled like the south end of a northbound hog.
As he turned the corner on the other arm of the building, Chad heard voices. This other half of the distribution center made a little more sense. Like the other arm, there were tracks, trolleys and robots going every which way. But here, the place was packed with three-story racks holding pallets and boxes.
The nasty smell began to abate, so Chad figured this for the dry storage area. All these boxes probably held canned food, cereals and other dry goods. After ten days playing Road Warrior, the warehouse looked like post-Apocalyptic Fort Knox. Anyone holding the distribution center would be rich like Rockefeller. If Chad didn’t have friends waiting for him in Salt Lake, he might consider holding onto this place for himself.
Based on the voices—laughing and joking—Chad could tell the inhabitants weren’t on high alert. He thought about it for a second. Based on the parking lot, he guessed that people would be cycling in and out from Rock Springs, doing guard duty, then heading home. Maybe the truckers were camping here full time, but the citizens and police officers would likely rotate between the town and the distribution center. If he was right about that, a stranger in their midst might not raise an alarm.
Chad noticed a Carharts coat hanging on one of the robot arms. He slung his rifle around to his back and cinched down his two-point sling, pulling the rifle tight against his lower back. With the bulky coat, he might get away with concealing both his rifle and his handgun.