Riker's Apocalypse (Book 1): The Promise Page 3

  Wily move, Gunny, thought Riker. Take the conflict outside where a streetfighter had the advantage. Could range around and grapple a bigger opponent in order to bring him down. Maybe even pick him up by the legs and deliver him head first to the cement. Let gravity and his own weight do him in. The boots to the head and neck would come next.

  “I’m not spoiling for a fight,” declared Riker. He flicked his gaze to the ground near Koss’s boots. Saw his desert-tan NRA gym bag sitting by one side of the doorway.

  Snuffy’s worldly possessions—two small gym bags and a fully stuffed olive-drab military duffel—sat opposite Riker’s lone bag.

  Seeing the briefest shift of attention on Riker’s part, Koss indicated that he’d taken the liberty of policing up Riker’s toothbrush and shower shoes and stuffing them into the bag prior to bringing it outside for him.

  Riker nodded. He scanned the faces left to right, pausing long enough to lock eyes with each of the three men. “Nothing to see here, gents. Best move along.”

  The men hung around until Koss shooed them away with threats of assigning them KP duty. Koss watched the trio shuffle off, then parked his gaze on Snuff. “You fellas need a referee?”

  Scowling, Snuff nodded toward the doorway. Said, “I survived Khe Sanh.”

  That was all Koss needed to hear. He turned and followed the three lookie-loos inside.

  Riker regarded the spry sixty-something for a long three-count without saying a word. Finally, he said, “There’s something in the bag I want to give you. Then I’ll be on my way.”

  A quizzical look replaced Snuff’s scowl. “What could you possibly give me?”

  “Freedom. I’ve been thinking about what you told me yesterday.”

  Snuff swallowed hard. His gaze ranged to the cars trickling by on the boulevard. He said, “My last wishes?”

  “Affirmative,” said Riker.

  Now looking directly at Riker with eyes misted over, Snuff went on, “Those were just the mumblings of an old leatherneck with a lifetime of regrets.”

  Riker scooped his bag up. Unzipped it and came out with some keys on a Ford fob and a worn slip of paper with official-looking seals and some kind of hologram on it. “My old F-150 is in the side lot. She ain’t much and her radio don’t work, but she runs like a champ. Take her and see your son and daughter. Pretty sure she’ll get you all the way to Chicago without anything breakin’ on you.”

  “Why in the name of Christ are you showing empathy toward an old jarhead? You’re Army. We’re like oil and water, you and me.”

  Riker said, “Although it happened to me much sooner in life, I’ve been where you are right now. Someone lent their hand when I was down. I’m just paying it forward … as corny as that may sound.”

  Snuff accepted the offered items. Choking back tears, he said, “Why?”

  “Don’t need it where I’m going. Don’t need the tools in the bed box, either. Key for the box is on the ring, too. If Koss will let you back in, you might see if the kid on the cot opposite mine can use them.”

  “Nunez needs a diversion,” agreed Snuff. “Anything to get his mind away from Helmand Province. I’ll do both. Hell, all three. I’m done with the bottle, too. Going to be clear-eyed when I get to Chiraq.”

  The men shared a laugh, then embraced, Army and the Corp enjoying a brief moment of harmony.

  Riker threw the retired gunnery sergeant a crisp salute, hitched the NRA bag over one shoulder, and wove between a pair of beat-up imports lining the curb. Without so much as a glance over his shoulder, he crossed the street diagonally to his left toward Williams Street which eventually merged with, of all things, Ted Turner Drive. From there the Greyhound bus terminal was a short ten-minute walk south by west.

  Chapter 4

  Not long after deciding Special Courier Butters would be the perfect fall guy for the specimen breach, Noble’s salivary glands went into overdrive. Mouth filling with bitter saliva and feeling the first tickle of bile rising in his throat, he put Chastity Jones’s paper, titled Cell Phone Radiofrequency Energy and Its Effect on the Human Body, aside and clamped a hand over his mouth.

  With the courier’s words, Like the plague? playing on a loop in his head, Noble rose shakily from the professor’s desk and staggered toward the eye-washing basin. He made it less than five feet, half of the way there, before the vomit surged up his throat and sprayed between his fingers. A torrent of bile and pumpkin spice latte painted the floor and walls surrounding the alcove containing the waist-high stainless steel sink.

  Heaving and sweating, Noble made it to the sink and emptied everything from his stomach—or so he thought—then reached up and knocked the receiver off the wall-mounted phone. Vision gone double, he reached for the keypad and managed to punch 9 the requisite two times.

  With long streamers of snot making the slow journey from his nose to the gray tiled floor, Noble kept his forehead pressed against the cool steel lip of the sink and brought the receiver up to his ear.

  After four rings that each seemed to drone on for half a lifetime, there was a click and a raspy smoker’s voice said, “Custodial department.”

  As if his intestines were stuck in a taffy stretcher, Noble felt a pain in his gut like he had never experienced. Though he wanted to speak into the mouthpiece, the pressure behind his eyes was making him see the floor and the mucous pooling there in Technicolor—pulsing and expanding and contracting—like some kind of an acid trip flashback. Then he felt his body spasm and again he heard the disembodied male voice say, “Custodial department … this is Hal.”

  Noble swiped away the spittle and snot and flicked it at the floor, where it hit with a sloppy, wet smack. Composing himself, he took a deep breath and managed to choke out four words: “Requesting cleanup in bio.”

  A floor down and on the opposite side of the six-story building from the biology labs, the barista who had made what would prove to be Charlie Noble’s final pumpkin spice latte was busy preparing yet another. And while the steam wand did its thing, frothing the milk in the metal cup that would top what seemed to Tara Riker like the thirtieth pain-in-the-ass specialty coffee of the morning, she cast her gaze up and watched the clouds scudding by through the glass panes making up the all-encompassing atrium.

  As the machine hissed and spit, the thirty-two-year-old watched students and teachers taking advantage of the weekend day file through the main doors and then board the pair of elevators directly across the lobby from her tiny kiosk. Once the milk in the cup was light and fluffy, she turned back to Dean Kurtz, looked him in the eye and, while coaxing the topping onto the latte with a metal spoon, asked in as cheerful a manner as the early hour allowed, “Cinnamon? Nutmeg? Or both?”

  The Dean swiped his card and exhaled sharply as he keyed in his PIN. “Nutmeg will suffice,” he said curtly, as if such an inconsequential decision was beneath him. Without putting a dime in Tara’s tip jar or even faking a half-smile, the miserable little man snatched up his drink and stalked off toward the nearby bank of elevators, briefcase in hand, presumably on his way to go do whatever it was that university Deans did at the butt crack of dawn.

  Watching the Dean’s wavy reflection in the stainless steel, Tara gave her espresso machine a thorough wipe-down, all the while envisioning the man as a kid pulling the wings off flies. Catching her own reflection, she realized that her sleeves were hiked up to mid-bicep, which left the majority of the black thorny runners and flowers tattooed from wrist to shoulder in plain view. Muttering an expletive and cursing the Dean’s rules-and-regs, she reluctantly pulled the sleeves down to conceal the forbidden ink.

  Staring out at the cars beginning to line up for the parking lot and knowing that her morning was just about to go from zero to sixty, a flash of yellow and the squeak of rusty bearings caught Tara’s attention. Focusing on the highly polished pane of glass to her fore, she saw reflected there an overall-clad custodian pushing a wheeled yellow bucket and mop into one of the elevators at her back.

  C
hapter 5

  Riker was rudely awakened when the Greyhound bus he’d boarded in Atlanta came to a complete and lurching stop. Opening his eyes a crack, he peeked at his neighbor’s watch, saw that it was twenty of eight, then closed them again.

  “Fucking dumbass drivers,” crowed the sixty-something woman with the timepiece. “Where do they get their licenses … out of a Gawd damn Cracker Jack box?”

  Through parted lids, Riker watched the woman, who smelled like he imagined a house full of cats might, stand up and walk her gaze a near three-sixty over the other passengers. Showing no regard for anyone on the bus with her, she started stabbing an arthritic finger at the driver, screaming shrilly, “If I wanted to see the entire Indiana countryside at a snail’s pace I’d have rented a clown car and driven myself.”

  Doubtful, thought Riker, trying to tune out the woman who was obviously enjoying playing to her captive audience. In fact, she had been bitching about one thing or another since boarding the bus at the Cincinnati depot. And though he wanted more than anything to open his window and show her the road face-first, he instead shifted his large frame to face the window and tried to get comfortable in the seat designed with the average-sized traveler in mind. Feeling the conjoined seats vibrate when the woman plopped down, he closed his eyes and visualized palm trees and softly crashing surf and basked in the momentary silence.

  Riker’s moment of bliss was cut short when the pneumatic hiss of air brakes engaging erased any chance of him falling back to sleep. Sweat dries, blood clots, and bones heal. Suck it up, buttercup. Acting on the words pounded into his gray matter by a frothing-at-the-mouth drill instructor years ago, he sat up straight and stretched his arms to full extension. Next, he rolled his shoulders and popped every vertebra in his neck, prompting the woman to start bitching about how certain sounds make her skin crawl. Join the club, thought Riker. Pretending the woman was that drill instructor barking in his face, he completely ignored her and stared out the window at the hectares of brown dirt stretching away to the distant horizon. He saw the raised railroad tracks the bus was sitting atop cutting between level parcels of fenced-in dirt, home to rows of scraggly vegetation, presumably cornfields left to go fallow for winter. He let his gaze follow the two parallel razor-straight lines of polished steel all the way east until they disappeared into a pewter smudge of clouds far off in the distance.

  The motor coach was still rocking slightly from the abrupt stop when the brakes hissed a second time and Riker felt it lurch forward again. Body swaying to-and-fro as the bus bumped sloppily over the tracks, Riker leaned forward, stole a look past his cat-lady captor, and spied a rundown four-pump filling station complete with the obligatory attached quickie mart, its red and white paint chipped and faded with age. Sitting on a sea of dull gray asphalt and ringed by a dozen late-model cars in various states of disrepair, the only thing new and shiny about the place was the red-and-black Texaco sign rising above its flat roof.

  Wondering why the bus had left the interstate, Riker watched the station slip from view, then returned his attention to the landscape scrolling by outside his window.

  As if the driver had been privy to Riker’s thoughts, the overhead speaker came alive with a hiss of white noise and she announced that a fatal accident on the interstate would require a detour and add an extra thirty minutes of travel time to the trip.

  While Cat Lady spewed another string of expletives, the driver went on in a cheerful voice about how sorry she was and that the delay would be noted on the arrival boards for anyone awaiting them at their final destination. Which was information that did very little to placate Riker, whose final destination was some distance from Muncie, south by west if his memory served. And that Greyhound didn’t see fit to service Middletown—a town of roughly two thousand—the insult added to that injury meant he faced a cramped taxi ride in the not-too-distant future.

  Resigned to the fact that reaching Middletown was another ninety minutes or so in the future, Riker closed his eyes and, with Cat Lady still going on, reluctantly revisited boot camp.

  Chapter 6

  Middletown University

  The bell dinged at the second floor. All alone in the elevator, Hal Crawford, acting head of MU’s custodial staff, waited patiently as the car slowed and settled with a slight bounce. Once the doors parted, he pushed the industrial-sized wheeled bucket out ahead of him. With gentle course corrections delivered via the mop handle gripped in calloused hands, he shoved off to the right. Hearing the ding and grating sounds of the elevator doors closing a dozen feet behind, he negotiated the ninety-degree right and set out on the long walk down the orange-carpeted hallway. Pushing the bucket carefully lest he slop the bleach water and risk the ugly carpet being replaced by something even more repulsive, Hal’s attention was drawn to the window and the queue of cars pulling into the secured parking a story below. By the time he reached the far end of the biology wing and was unclipping the key ring from his belt, the yellow-and-black-striped bar had opened and closed a dozen times, yet the line of cars snaking along the west side of the building had only grown longer.

  Working his fingers over the ring, Hal found the oversized passkey by feel, pushed it into the lock, and opened the door. As he backed into the darkened room, pulling the bucket after, simultaneously the bitter reek of vomit hit him full on and the automatic overhead lights flared to life.

  After recoiling from the stench, Hal covered his nose with his T-shirt, fished a rubber stop from his back pocket, and used it to trap the door partway open. Breathing through his mouth, he traversed the room, pushing the bucket before him. Nearing the professor’s desk, he wheeled the bucket expertly around a lake of yellow vomit and spotted the party responsible.

  Revealed in little slices—like degrees cut off a compass—he first saw the waffle-patterned lug soles on a pair of well-oiled leather hiking boots. One more half-step past the professor’s wide desk let him see that the person wore a white lab coat over brown corduroy pants and was kneeling before the emergency eye-wash sink. The puker’s head was parked inside the shadowy alcove. There was more vomit here than Hal had ever seen. It coated the floor and walls yellow, and tendrils of it were still making the lazy journey from the front of the sink to the gray floor tiles.

  Based on the man’s size, Hal knew at first glance it wasn’t Professor Fuentes. Much too big. His best guess was that he was looking at a student teaching assistant trying to ride out the mother of all hangovers.

  “You called me for this?” Hal said, a trace of indignation in his voice.

  The man was unresponsive.

  Hal upped the ante by moving closer and tapping the man on the back. Three jabs between the shoulder blades and still nothing.

  So Hal gripped the man’s shoulder and shook him gently.

  Zilch. Zip. Nada.

  Finally, at the top of his voice, Hal bellowed, “One too many Irish Car Bombs at Horse Feathers?” Which was a place Hal had never been, but knew from eavesdropping on student conversation was a popular after-class hangout.

  Bingo.

  The assistant moaned. The harsh sound, amplified by where his head was resting, lasted a couple of seconds, during which every hair on Hal’s arms stood to attention. The guttural growl continued as the man hauled himself up, then lessened in volume somewhat as he took a drunken step away from the sink.

  Hal hustled to the oak desk and pulled the sturdy wooden chair to the sink, the legs etching a pair of lines in the vomit.

  “You better sit, buddy,” he ordered.

  Now wavering on shaky legs, the slightly overweight fella turned and emitted a sound kind of like a cornered animal’s worried yelp. Which was wholly inappropriate considering the second Hal saw the man’s bared teeth and lifeless, glazed-over eyes, it was he who felt trapped.

  There was a split second where Hal entertained the idea of talking the younger man into splashing cold water on his pallid face and telling him to go home and sleep it off. But that thought was edged out a n
anosecond later when the primeval lizard part of Hal’s brain screamed fight or flight and, of course, flight won out. However, as synapses were firing impulses to get his arms and legs pumping, the leaden extremities weren’t processing the signals in any kind of organized manner.

  Instead of making a hasty retreat, Hal looked like a drunken break-dancer as he back-pedaled away from the growling student. Finally, a couple of things went right for Hal and he got his torso turned around, but still his feet and legs were a half-beat late in responding. Which didn’t matter, because the soles of his outdoor boots were no kind of answer to the saffron-yellow mix of bile and half-digested four-dollar coffee slickening the floor.

  In the end, Hal fell flat on his face and his momentum carried him through the morass in a slide that would have made Charlie Hustle proud. Still in flight mode and only two seconds removed from looking a monster from his nightmares straight in the face, Hal willed himself up on all fours. Feeling like a water bug on an oil slick, he got his hands and knees moving but only managed to get himself winded before, once again, pancaking to the floor.

  Excited by all of the motion and spurred on by deeply buried memories of the thrill of the hunt, the shell of a human who used to be Charlie Noble found a second gear and rapidly cut the short distance to its prey.

  Seeing the monster’s shadow—complete with outstretched arms and claw-like fingers—darkening the floor around him, Hal’s will to survive trumped his first reaction. Simultaneously he found purchase with the toe of his left boot, pushed off with his left hand and, in a strange display of muscle memory from his high school wrestling days, finished the move by whipping his head around to the left. And just like he had been taught two decades before by a coach whose name he failed to recall, those three actions, when combined, had him rolling away from the puddle and the overarching feeling of impending doom.