Rend, p.2
Rend, page 2
Back in the guard shack, his radio blared with unanswered demands from the company command post about the gunfire and for Security Checkpoint #17 to report his status.
ONE
19 May, 0836 hrs local
Nash Community College
Rocky Mount, North Carolina
Asher gently steered his truck into to the parking space at the community college. This was the last day of finals week and he’d be done for the semester. Then he had a summer of relaxing and hanging out with the few friends that he’d made since he retired in North Carolina after thirty-one years of service with the US Government. He spent fourteen of those years in the Navy before politics had forced him out.
He’d wanted to stay in the DEVGRU community for his entire career, but the Department of the Navy wanted to promote him to Master Chief and move him to a desk job for a few years of what they termed “broadening.” He’d seen the same thing happen to SpecOps guys in other branches, so it wasn’t just a Navy problem; it was a flaw in the military’s entire way of thinking when it came to Special Operations. It made no sense to pull an operator from the Special Warfare arena into a regular Navy position that any Master Chief Petty Officer could hold, but the idea was to “re-cage” the lion that they’d created in order to keep the community from totally abandoning the Navy’s corporate way of thinking. After a few years on staff, sailors could return to their old units with a rekindled passion for the company line.
It’s total bullshit, he thought. All it did was force people like Asher Hawke, once known as Kestrel in the community, out of the Navy and into other realms of the government. He didn’t have any plans to retire at twenty anyways, so he used his extensive contacts to get a position in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Special Activities Division and within a few months, the SOG accepted him into their organization. The Special Operations Group, or SOG, was one of the CIA’s direct-action teams and he’d happily spent the remaining time almost constantly deployed around the world. Six years ago, he’d been on the raid that wiped the Brotherhood of Niyyat off the face of the earth forever. He spent another year traipsing around the Karakoram Mountain Range, sometimes in Afghanistan, sometimes in Pakistan, often wandering into Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and China. It just depended on where the Company needed his boys to go.
By then he’d seen enough killing and transferred back to the states for some time to reset his head. He spent the last four years as an instructor at the Company’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) course. It was a good assignment for his twilight tour and afforded him plenty of time to visit a psychologist at first, who then referred him on to a psychiatrist who could provide him meds for his PTSD. The Company paid for the best care of their people and by the time he was fully retired, his imbalances had leveled out well enough that he was able to get off the drugs.
After a couple of months, he stopped seeing the psychiatrist and went back to his original shrink that had helped him for years. In fact, he was in school now based on her recommendation. It was a good move for him since he never had the opportunity to take any college courses while he was in the military, certainly not after he began working at the Agency. To save a little money, he enrolled in the Nash Community College in Rocky Mount, North Carolina where he moved after retirement. After he got the pre-requisite courses out of the way, he planned to transfer over to North Carolina Wesleyan College to seek a degree.
His adrenaline-seeking issues had worn themselves out by the time that he moved to the SERE school and he considered himself a fully functional member of society now. He was able to get into discussions with the instructors at the college without bursting from his seat and strangling the living shit out of the liberal fucks whose views of the world were skewed because they’d never left academia. It was definitely an improvement over the years of his youth.
He didn’t really have a job that mattered anymore and that suited him just fine. Asher worked pseudo-part time in an outdoor recreation store, but that was mainly because he wanted to keep up on all the latest gear instead of a need for money. Even with two disastrous marriages under his belt, the nearly twenty-five cumulative years that he’d spent in deployed environments where he couldn’t buy anything ensured that he had a full bank account. Besides, he had a steady monthly retirement check coming from Uncle Sugar that covered all of his expenses.
Yeah, I’ve got it pretty good, he thought as he turned the key in the ignition and shut off the truck. The only thing that he was missing in his life was a woman but given his history with them, he wasn’t entirely sure if he wanted to take that step yet. He would love the opportunity to spoil a lady right, but every relationship he’d ever been in had ended badly. As he sat in the driver’s seat staring at the cold rain through his windshield he wondered if things would be different now. Lately he’d felt the pull to get a dog. If he was honest with himself, he wanted a pet to fill the void created by the lack of human companionship.
Was he ready to start dating? His therapist said he was, but he still felt a little uncomfortable at the thought of someone knowing every detail of his life. He’d done some crazy things and even though he was a hundred times better than he was four or five years ago, he still had some baggage upstairs that he didn’t want to unload on some poor, unsuspecting woman who was just trying to get to know him.
For the moment, though, he had a biology final. He chuckled to himself at the thought of the look on that skinny little know-it-all professor’s face if he were to go into detail about the different ways to hurt people. How to break bones without leaving bruises, kill a person with one blow to the trachea, or how to infect an entire village with the Norovirus with just one little vial of liquid. The man would pale at Asher’s knowledge of how to combine different household chemicals to make a poisonous gas, a makeshift bomb, a tasteless toxin and an incapacitating skin irritant. Oh well, everything can’t be as fun as the good old days, he mused.
He had five minutes to get across the campus to his class so he’d have to hump it. Even though he was in amazing shape, he was still nearly fifty years old, which meant he’d be hard-pressed to make it to the lecture hall. Plus, he’d have to take a piss before and after the test. Dammit, he hated getting older! Damned prostate.
*****
22 May, 0341 hrs local
The Wall, No Man’s Land
Worton, Maryland
The blacked-out Land Rover pulled through the grass and angled alongside The Wall. The vehicle drove in darkness until it reached the point where a vertical red line, painted on the cinder block, marked the location the driver sought. He put the vehicle in park and turned off the engine.
“What the fuck do we do now?” the passenger asked.
“We fuckin’ wait, that’s what we fuckin’ do. We get paid to bring them here and somebody will take ‘em off our hands. Capisce?”
“Yeah, I fuckin’ get it already. Geez. What the fuck crawled up your ass and had kittens?” the passenger asked.
“You are so fuckin’ dumb,” the driver slammed his hand in exasperation on the steering wheel. “It’s ‘what crawled up your ass and died’ you moron. Of all the dummies I coulda been stuck wit and the boss gave me you. Just color in your book or somethin’.”
“It’s not a coloring book. It’s a paint by number. These things are very artsy and high class. I’m gonna put them up all over my apartment and the bitches are gonna love it!”
“You’re such a dumbass Tommy. I can’t believe—Hey, did you see that?”
“Yeah, I did. What’s a quick flash from a flashlight mean?”
“That’s the signal you numbskull. Keep an eye on the prisoners, I’m gonna go out and meet the guy.”
The large driver got out of the car and the axles groaned in relief. Even though the temperatures were in the high-seventies, he wore a black leather jacket and a collared shirt that had similar patterns to what men in his line of work would have worn in the Seventies. He almost blended into the darkness of The Wall, but the watcher knew what to look for and his eyes followed the man all the way from the Land Rover to where he was supposed to stop.
The watcher observed for a moment more and then briskly walked across the old trail and shook hands with the fat Italian. “Did you see any headlights or anything for the last five miles, Marc?” he asked.
“No, Jonesy. It’s just as abandoned and fuckin’ creepy as it always is out here.”
“Do you have the packages then?” Jonesy asked.
“Of course I do,” the mobster said indignantly. “I was told to bring them here and not to ask any fucking questions. Same as we’ve always done.”
“Good. There are four correct?” the watcher asked.
“Yeah,” Marc replied. He glanced over his shoulder where his companion was pulling zip-tied prisoners from deep in the back of the SUV toward the rear so it would be easier to transfer them. “Plus, the boss is tired of having Tommy around and he wants him gone too.”
“What is this shit, Marc? Now my count is five?”
“Yeah, the boss said he wasn’t gonna pay you for Tommy though. Either you take him in or I’m just supposed to shoot him and leave the body here.”
The watcher’s face contorted in anger but his bushy mustache hid the sneer on his lips. “You can’t shoot someone and then leave them here!” he hissed. “The Army would find them and then Tony Marchione’s little dumping scheme would be over.”
“Yeah, well, we know that you ain’t only workin’ for the Marchiones. So your entire operation would be in jeopardy,” the big man grunted. “It’s just another body to take inside and stash somewhere. Not a big deal considering how much business we’ve given you over the years.”
The heavily muscled watcher thought about it for a moment and replied, “Fine. Load the four up on my Gator and give me my money. Then we’ll collect up your friend and I’ll get rid of him too.”
“You know, the boss loves a team player. You might be gettin’ a whole fruitcake for Christmas this year… Bring your tractor over to the car and we’ll do the swap.”
Jonesy turned around and disappeared into the wood line. He’d been doing this gig for several New Jersey and New York crime families for almost three years. It was steady income, but was becoming increasingly dangerous as the Army stationed more troops around The Wall. Maybe I’ll increase my rate, he thought. He had it planned out that in about two more years, and at the current frequency of jobs, he would retire someplace warm. Definitely an island not connected to the mainland in case this thing ever went bad.
He sat down heavily on the seat of his specially modified utility vehicle. Over the years, he’d been able to make the damn thing nearly soundless, which was a huge help for his job. He knew that the military didn’t usually patrol this section of The Wall but they did rely heavily on satellite imagery, so he had a man on payroll who worked over at NSA and gave him specific times for the satellite flyovers. As an added precaution, he’d also used heat-dampening padding over the entire Gator vehicle to help reduce the heat signature. He’d been told that upon cursory examination, it resembled a small deer from space.
He also knew that the reason this particular area wasn’t patrolled often was because of the overlap of the Navy’s jurisdiction on the upper Chesapeake and the Army’s responsibilities on the land. When they built The Wall, tensions were extremely high about the potential escape of any remaining zombies. A Navy riverine patrol boat had fired into a squad of soldiers who were just doing their jobs and killed them all. The watcher had been a part of that unit so he knew about the unofficial agreement between the two services to maintain a half-mile buffer between land and water activities. Once he got out of the Army, it was easy to see the potential to exploit that gap in coverage and his little business was born.
The Families liked the service that he provided for them. In the past, the Families had to dispose of the people that they’d killed and the evidence usually ended up pointing back at them in one way or another. The bodies were almost always discovered and the advances in forensic science made it increasingly difficult to anonymously murder anyone anymore. As more and more of the heads of the families got arrested, they realized the potential in what Jonesy offered them. They handed him a relatively unharmed captive, which cut down drastically on the crime scene evidence available for the police, and then he deposited them inside The Wall. Once they were over the top, they were as good as dead. It was untraceable and the things inside waited for him to throw the Family’s victims over the wall. They were like trained animals and hid until a body dropped down and then they struck. It was a fascinating and disgusting spectacle at the same time.
He was stationed on the Eastern Shore during his last year in the Army. The government lied to the public about the zombies being gone. They were still around, probably millions of them, locked behind The Wall. They’d been able to contain them with a ring of soldiers completely circling the city during the summer of the breakout, but there was no way that they could kill them all. Given what he’d seen during the war here, he still didn’t understand how they’d cleared Indianapolis. Something about different types of zombies and whatnot, but all he knew was that there was the potential for the situation to get bad quickly if those things ever escaped. That’s why he wanted to live on an island in the Caribbean.
The little Gator pulled up beside the mobster’s SUV and the two men lifted four hooded and tied bodies onto his cart. One of them was a shapely young blonde woman in a nightgown. Maybe I’ll have to spend some extra time with her before she goes over, Jonesy mused as he pawed at her breasts to “check” for a phone or any other means of communication that she may have had on her when they took her. Once the four unconscious bundles were stacked like cordwood in the back he turned expectantly toward the fat man.
“Well?” he asked. He made a motion with his hand that indicated the need to hurry up. “Come on. We’ve been in one spot too long, I need to move!”
“Alright, let me get your money,” the SUV’s driver replied and opened the back door of the vehicle.
Tommy sauntered over to where Jonesy stood with his hands on his hips. “So, what do you do with them?” Tommy asked.
“Oh, I couldn’t tell you that. Then I’d be out of a job.” Jonesy’s eyes focused on Marc, who walked up behind Tommy. “But you’ll see for yourself what happens in a few minutes.”
“Huh—ugh…” Tommy gave a grunt as five hundred thousand volts of electricity coursed through his body and he collapsed. The big man straddled his former partner and pressed the Taser against his neck once more to ensure that he was out. Then he used construction-grade zip strips to secure his hands and feet.
“Sorry, I don’t have a bag for his head.”
“That’s okay. We just need to gag him somehow so he can’t scream and give away my location if he wakes up.” The big man thought about it for a moment and then pulled Tommy’s shoe off and tossed it in the back of the Gator. Then he pulled off the former mobster’s knee-length sock and wrapped it around the unconscious man’s head. Jonesy adjusted the fabric so it was in the man’s mouth and the driver cinched it tight with a few expert twists. He picked Tommy up like a rag doll and tossed him in the back on top of the others.
“Here’s your twenty thousand,” Marc stated as he handed a heavy paper sack full of cash to the watcher. “See you next time, Jonesy.”
Jonesy watched as the SUV tilted noticeably to the left when the driver sat down and started the car. He drove slowly down across the grass back toward the old highway where he’d eventually link up with one of the few roads that was still open this close to The Wall. Jonesy stayed where he was until red taillights blossomed into the night a little over half of a mile away, indicating that the big man had removed the covers and was now headed back to Jersey.
He whistled softly to himself as the Gator glided silently to his preferred dumping site and he depressed the brake. Within minutes, he had his ladder set up and he heaved the first captive onto his shoulder. Years of doing this job a few times a week had taken his already naturally strong body and developed him into a powerful climber. He scaled the ladder effortlessly and set the unconscious form on the top of the wall.
He’d decided long ago that if anyone ever gave a shit and investigated the city, it would be extremely suspicious if they found hundreds, possibly thousands, of zombies trussed up like a Christmas goose so he always uncovered their heads and cut away the ties around their hands and feet. Usually the captives were so drugged up that it didn’t matter, but once or twice a person had woken up and he was forced to send them over with only their feet free. He laughed silently at the thought of those zombies wandering the city for eternity with their hands tied behind them.
With two snips from his wire cutters, the zip ties fell away near his tractor and he shoved the body over to the inside of The Wall. Moans filled the night as the creatures stumbled from where they’d been waiting for their next victim. He watched momentarily while the creatures fell upon the prostrate man. Several of them that hadn’t made it to the front looked up expectantly at him since they knew he seldom only brought one person.
“Shit, those things give me the creeps,” he muttered to himself as he climbed back down the ladder slowly. Tommy was the next to go and he was already starting to stir so Jonesy reached into the front seat and gave him a whack with a small tire tool. He went limp instantly and then his slight frame was up on Jonesy’s shoulder, who then carried him up to the top and tossed him to the crowd below.
Once all of the men were disposed of, he collected up the zip strips and uncovered the woman’s face. He was startled when he realized that he’d seen her in movies and on magazine covers at the grocery store. The beautiful young actress must have pissed off Tony Marchione somehow, but he couldn’t understand how. He briefly considered keeping her for himself but quickly discarded the idea. He’d be able to flaunt his wealth once he retired and would have his pick of any of the island girls. Of course, that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy himself for the moment he mused as his hands dropped down to unbuckle the large “Once a Soldier, Always a Soldier” belt buckle that he wore with pride.
