“Armed to the teeth. Who are you and where are you going?” the leader demanded. Older than the others, his hair was cut short in a military crew, and grey at the edges, his face creased from age and exposure, his eyes fierce but tired — a man who’d seen too much.
Top and Bunny exchanged a look. “We’re just trying to survive,” Bunny said then. “Lot of damn dead folks out here looking for a quick lunch. A guy’s got to protect himself out here — you know that.”
“Kind of the reason we’re still on this side of being dead,” Top added.
“Uh huh, just two innocent guys,” the leader grinned. “Tie their hands and get them off those horses,” he added, motioning to his men.
Top and Bunny were yanked down hard, falling to their knees in clouds of dust as the men yanked their hands back and produced black zip ties. The leader and two others kept their weapons trained on the two strangers as the young blond and another soldier bound Top and Bunny’s hands behind them.
“Look. We’re just passin’ through,” Top said, voice sincere. “Why are you doing this?”
“We don’t have much use for strangers,” the leader said, then locked eyes with his men. “General Black will want to see them. They don’t look like innocent civilians and we can’t take chances.”
“Yes, sir,” the men responded almost in unison, then pulled Top and Bunny to their feet and led them toward the van.
The leader motioned to the blond and another younger man. “You two bring the horses to the checkpoint.”
“Yes, sir,” the youths replied and turned back to Top and Bunny’s mounts.
“What do we do?” Bunny asked through gritted teeth as the men hauled open the back doors of the van. Then one unlocked a metal bench and lifted the lid, depositing their knives and guns inside before locking it again.
“Just let this play out a bit,” Top whispered back. “We need more intel.”
The men shoved them now and they stumbled forward, climbing into the van.
Keep your cool, Top’s eyes said.
But Bunny didn’t like this one bit. Even if there was nothing he could do but follow Top’s advice.
—13—
The Soldier and the Samurai
They saw the sentry before the sentry saw them.
Ledger and Tom rolled to a stop at the top of a slope that ran down into Oro Valley. In the far distance there was a soft cloud of gray that hovered perpetually over what had once been Tucson. Down the valley there was some kind of complex built against or, more like, into a wall of a mountain. He saw vehicles parked down there and they looked to be in good shape. Tom saw them, too. Before either of them could comment a tan armored personnel carrier came rumbling out of an entrance in the rock wall. It turned and headed farther down the valley. Tom grabbed Ledger’s arm.
“Did you see that?”
“I saw it, kid,” murmured Ledger.
“But how? The EMPs…”
Ledger studied the mountain and nodded to himself. “There must be a hardened facility down there. We had them all over. They built them underground and inside mountains during the Cold War to make sure they would survive a Russian attack. Then they repurposed them for all kinds of black budget R and D projects. I’ll bet this was a bioweapons lab of some kind. There were six or eight of them that were so far off the radar than even I didn’t know about them, and it was my damn job to know about them.”
“How’s that possible?” asked Tom, watching the APC vanish inside a trail of brown dust.
“Fuck, kid, there were so many cells operating inside the Department of Defense that half the time no one knew what all was going on. Legitimate stuff and other shit that was definitely not supposed to be happening, at least as far as congress and the taxpayers were concerned, but which seemed to somehow always get funding. This has all the makings.”
“Okay,” said Tom slowly, “but what does it mean?”
“It means they might actually have a working lab,” said Ledger. “With power and operational computer systems. Holy polka-dotted fuck.”
“Does that mean this vaccine is legit?”
Ledger thought about that for a moment. “To be determined. Something’s hinky. Look down there.”
He pointed and Tom used his binoculars to study a spot at the base of the slope where there was a makeshift guard post constructed of a pair of dead cars positioned on either side of the highway and a boom made from a length of white PVC pipe. Two men were working the checkpoint and they were busy with a line of people who stood in a wandering line. Ledger and Tom sat on the road in the shade of a billboard that told everyone who passed that Waffle House was offering two breakfasts for the price of one. Someone had taken the time out of surviving the apocalypse to draw a pretty good version of a zombie head atop the illustration of a short stack of pancakes. The soldier and the samurai were nearly invisible in the dense shadows thrown by the sign. Their bikes lay out of sight in the weeds and both men studied the checkpoint with binoculars.
“Those guards are not military,” observed Ledger. “But… that might not mean much. Things fell to shit, so they might be working for whoever’s in the mountain, doing grunt work.”
“The guards are taking supplies from the people in line,” said Tom.
Ledger studied the transactions at the gate. “Doesn’t look too nefarious. No one’s flashing weapons. Look at the people farther back in line, they already have stuff out and bundled up. I think it’s a barter of some kind.”
“What for what? A road tax?”
“Maybe. Or payment for treatment.”
Tom grunted and they continued to watch. Each group stopped at the checkpoint and offered something to the guards. A wrapped bundle of what looked like canned goods, a bottle of water or a can of kerosene, skinned rabbits, and other goods. One guard took the items and placed them in a big John Deere wheelbarrow and the other tied a piece of colored cloth around the wrist of each person.
“You seeing the colors?” asked Tom. “Red, white, and blue?”
“Uh huh.”
“Most of the kids are getting blue. None of the men, though.”
“Uh huh.”
“Most of the men are getting red. And a few men and women are getting white.”
“Uh huh.”
Tom lowered his glasses and looked at Ledger. “What do you think it means?”
“Too orderly to be random color choices,” mused Ledger. “But they’re being specific about it. Can’t tell from this far away, though. We’ll need to get up close to gather intel.” He stood slowly, hissing at the aches in his hips and tailbone from the many days on the bike.
Tom rose, too. “Makes me wonder what kind of colors they’d give us.”
Ledger squinted down the hill. “Uh huh,” he said.
They hid most of their gear behind the billboard and covered the bikes with tumbleweed and bunches of grass. After some careful consideration of what they could afford to part with, they walked down the hill.
There were a dozen people ahead of them and Ledger struck up a casual conversation with an elderly couple who had a small child with them. Not their grandchild, it turned out, but an orphan they’d taken under their wing. The three of them were all that was left of a refugee camp in Fort Grant.
“What happened to the fort?” asked Tom.
The old man, whose name was Barney, gave them a bleak look.
“The dead?” asked Ledger.
Barney shook his head. “Nah, we held them off pretty good. Once we figured out how to kill them, we built the fort up even stronger and everyone learned how to top them. We’d have teams go out wrapped in folded over mattress covers and work gloves with thick plastic glued to the outsides. Teams of three. Two would use heavy-duty rakes to kind of stall the eaters and the third person would bash ‘em in the head. Rinse and repeat, you know? The eaters never learn from what’s happening to others of their kind.”