Six Feet From Hell: Crisis by Joseph Coley

week in the apocalypse. “If I coulda done it without sacrificing Ronnie, I still would have. I've thought about it quite a bit over the years. What I've come up with is that I don’t think it would have mattered. If we had stayed, we woulda ran out of food eventually. If we left, well, you see how well that went.”
    Jamie chimed in. “For what it’s worth, I think we’ve done alright for ourselves. I don’t think we would have made it out of Tazewell to begin with if it hadn’t been for you, Joe.” Jamie grabbed the bottle and took a drink. He raised it in a toast. “To Andrew and Donnie.”
    “And Ronnie and Lori,” Joe replied.
    “And Chris and Ogre,” Rick added.
    And let’s pray this is the last time we have to drink to someone’s memory, Joe thought.
    * * *
    “I've checked every frequency on everything we’ve got. They just ain’t there.” Curtis had just downed his third cup of coffee in an hour; the caffeine jitters were starting to hit him. He had studied every screen, tweaked every radio, scanned every frequency, both UHF and VHF, to no avail. No one was answering him.
    “Maybe they decided to land in Lexington. If they did, it would explain what’s takin’ ‘em so long,” Wagner replied.
    “They would have radioed in or at least tried to. Lexington is about the far end of their fuel supply, so they wouldn’t have stayed long or they would be at bingo fuel after about ten minutes. Ogre wouldn’t risk running out of gas, he’s better than that.” Curtis was still fidgeting with the frequency dials as he tried desperately to hear something positive. He was beginning to suspect the worst.
    “So what’s your contingency plan?” Mike spoke up from the corner of the room.
    Curtis stopped for a moment and spun around. “Contingency plan?”
    Mike stood up and walked over to Curtis. “Yeah, contingency plan. You gotta have some kinda backup plan, right?”
    Curtis was fleetingly befuddled. He and the other men in the ZBRA units knew what to do when someone didn't come back from a mission. There was no sense losing three or four more men out looking for a couple of team members that were probably dead. Under no circumstances were they to go out looking for ZBRA members when they didn't come back.
    “Yeah we do. The contingency plan is to move on to the next closest unit or outpost. If for some reason they did crash or they’re otherwise unavailable, they would do the same. We just have to figure out where the closest one is and start heading to it,” Curtis replied.
    “So how long do we have to wait before we abandon ship?” Wagner asked, folding his arms and leaning back in his chair.
    “Twenty-four hours. Retroactive to the time they left. So we got until noon tomorrow, after that we head out in the LMTVs, load em up with everything that ain’t nailed down, and head to the closest outpost,” Curtis said, leaning back and putting his hands on his head.
    Mike’s brow furrowed. “Where is the closest outpost?”
    “It used to be Beckley, but they are toast, no thanks to you and your ‘Captain’ asshole. We might have to have a look at the map. If there ain’t one, then we may have a hell of a trip on our hands because we had another backup plan.” Curtis smiled as he thought about their second contingency plan.
    “And what might that be?” Mike asked.
    Curtis snickered. “Joe said that the worst-case-scenario plan was to go back to Tazewell, Virginia. That’s where he started from.”

CHAPTER 8
     
    The Captain sat atop his LAV-25, proud of himself. The light armored vehicle was his chariot, the single best vehicle that he had in his arsenal. It could lay down suppressive fire from the 25mm chain gun or the 7.62mm M240B light machine guns. It was a mean piece of equipment.
    He had just finished a sat-phone call with Bill over in Kentucky. Everything was going to plan – so far. The higher powers’ grand scheme was bigger than just taking out the opposition. A few ZBRA