by Ward III, C.
The designated hazmat team climbed out of the cab, looking ridiculous. Victor was going to rib them with a joke but decided he wasn’t interested in putting his hands on the creature. So instead, he kept his mouth shut and scanned the streets for movement.
The two men wore clear woodshop goggles, ponchos made of black industrial-size trash bags, yellow rubber cleaning gloves, and olive drab fishing waders. They used thick plastic zip ties to secure its arms behind its back, then rolled it into a double-layered floral bed sheet. For safe measure, they put a pillowcase over its head before lifting it into the back of the truck.
Victor whistled for his kids to fall back toward the truck. He opened the passenger door, motioning for them to get in. He jumped in the back with the hazmat team and sat on a wheel well, resting his rifle across his knee, the muzzle inches from the creature’s head. With a tap on the side of the truck, they headed toward the county jail.
PAYMENT PLAN
Chronicles of an Apocalyptic Hit Man
His neighbor’s house was just over the next large hill. He halted to scan the area using a night-vision device mounted forward of his rifle scope. Stopping to scan every ten steps, he was being overly vigilant in order to avoid stumbling into a squatting hibernating Gray again. The first—and last—time he’d bumped into a crouching Gray in the dark had been a near-death experience. That event awarded him a raging hangover after he’d washed away the experience with an entire bottle of Irish whiskey. Learning from the mistake, he now moved at a more cautious pace. It took him only an hour to make his way to this final waypoint, navigating the thick brush under the cloak of darkness. He planned on being in his hide site before the first signs of dawn.
He was certain of his location, but you could never be too sure. From under his MARPAT shirt, he pulled out a metal compass that was hanging around his neck. Lifting the compass lid, he aligned the radioactive glowing navigation dots, confirming he was still on the correct bearing.
By the time the eastern sky turned pink, Raymond was already secured inside a small hand-dug hide site that he’d used several times before. He’d been working on this, and several like it, for the past month. He’d covertly improved his kill boxes with sandbag-fortified walls and floors made of pallet planks. The ceiling was made of long thick logs that could support the weight of a large man such as himself, then camouflaged with a thick layer of dirt, grass, and leaves. From this hidden spot, halfway up a hill, he could observe his entire neighbor’s property with a wide-open field of fire.
Looking out a small gun port, Raymond stared through a pair of range-finding binoculars, scanning the house, looking for signs of activity. It didn’t take him long. It appeared that his neighbors had prematurely picked half the green beans and carrots out of their garden; they must have become desperately hungry to have harvested early. The front door of the darkened house opened shortly after, giving birth to a dirty-faced frail man with deep eye sockets. The old man looked left, then right, then quickly ran to the corner of his house, retrieving a rainwater-collecting bucket from under the gutter downspout. The old man waddled back inside the house, sloshing water out of the heavy bucket across the front porch along the way.
Raymond grinned. There were a hundred different ways he could come up with to rid himself of his useless neighbors. The yard around the house was wide open. He could place a time-fused, gas-filled jug on the roof, then sit back and watch the inferno, waiting for fast-moving targets to sprint across the lawn as the family fled their burning residence. That could give him the benefit of decent marksmanship practice, Raymond thought with a swell of sadistic amusement. Maybe the Muldoon family would be worth something after all. In the end, murdering this entire family would be far too easy, not even offering the satisfaction of a small, amusing challenge.
Breaking from his bloodbath fantasy, he focused on what he came here to do. In the window next to the front door, he spied the clearly displayed orange-and-black “Help Wanted” sign. This was his signal that the Muldoon family was in need of his services and had sufficient payment.
Raymond had a special prearranged agreement with all the surrounding neighbors: When abundant amounts of creepy creatures became copiously inconvenient for apocalyptic comfort, the neighbors employed Raymond to cull the herd to a tolerable level. For a nominal fee, of course.
Raymond sat the binos on the ledge of the firing port in his subterranean hide site. Reaching into his backpack, he pulled out a space age–looking air rifle equipped with a huge scope that had probably come off a high-powered sniper rifle. He scanned the house again for movement, hoping the neighbors would be careless enough to cause a commotion, drawing the Grays in on their own. Unfortunately, the Muldoon family was buttoned up tight. He wasn’t a fan of animal cruelty, but the second-best bait was the sound of a wounded animal. Like a coyote to a wounded rabbit, the sound made the Grays come running almost as fast as an exposed uninfected human would. He set the sights on the caged raccoon’s rear quarter, whispered an apology to the animal, and then pulled the trigger, causing an eruption of pained hisses, growls, and raccoon-laced profanity.
Raymond leaned the air rifle in the corner, trading it for a short-barreled DARPA XM-3 bolt-action rifle equipped with a 3–15X-powered scope and attached suppressor. This rifle originally came with an internal magazine, which he’d kept to collector specification until the day the lights went out, when he then upgraded the bottom metal to accept ten round detachable box magazines for faster reloading of his favorite rifle. He placed ten of those full-box magazines on the ledge in front of him now.
While using the binos to scan the surrounding tree line, waiting for the morning rush, his mind began to analyze what exactly he was doing out here in the great outdoors. Killing for payment. Nothing new, but this was different on many levels. If he had a business card to pass out, what would it read? The title “security” made him cringe. It was borderline mall cop or neighborhood watch, which, in all practicality, is what he was. The security title was insulting to his long professional resume of military service and high-threat diplomatic protection. Besides, neighborhood watch was voluntary; Raymond expected payment.
So maybe it made him a Soldier of Fortune, a mercenary for hire? He was a huge fan of Executive Outcomes, a private South African military company in the early 1990s who’d been hired by the countries of Angola and Sierra Leone. In both cases, Executive Outcomes had come rolling in with Special Forces soldiers, helicopter gunships, and artillery, squashing decades-old civil wars in a matter of days. Even though the outcome was in favor of regional peace, the United Nations quickly realized the risk of armies for hire by the highest bidder and penned the 2001 resolution forbidding the use of paid foreign soldiers, aka mercenaries.
Raymond had been a private security contractor for many years. Many of his coworkers thought of themselves as mercs, but they weren’t really, not by the legal definition. As a contractor, Raymond conducted defensive operations, not offensive. Even though he operated in hostile foreign countries, he was employed by his own government to protect US interests—a stark difference from being an old-school “Man Among Men” Rhodesian mercenary.
Assassins typically killed for money; maybe that could be on his business card:
Raymond K. Hessel
Assassination Services
That brought a smile to his green-and-brown-camo-painted face. Even though assassins did kill for coin, they also typically had political or religious motives. Raymond had neither of those.
He continued the time-killing quest of selecting the perfect job title until he spotted a half-naked Gray broke through the shadowed forest edge, sprinting on bare feet straight toward the suspended raccoon cage.
He could wait for the Gray to get directly below the rattling cage, which was suspended twelve feet off the ground from a large branch; that would make for an easy target. But he wanted to plug this hideous creature before more showed up. Taking on one Gray at a time was an easy task, but a larger group
of Grays could easily overwhelm him with ease, even with his impressive arsenal.
He’d figured out weeks ago that if you shoot a Gray in a pack with a silenced weapon, the others would instinctively flee from the unknown danger. But if you introduce a driving mechanism, such as a food source (hurt raccoon) or an untainted human, the Grays would continue to charge forward with no sense of self-preservation.
One technique to shoot moving targets was to locate the target, then watch it through the sights to determine a good time and place to engage. The “tracking” technique was better for open dynamic battlefield situations with room to move and using smaller weapons like carbines or pistols.
He lifted his rifle to his shoulder. Restrained by the miniature size of his hide site, he was forced to protrude the suppressor out of the shooting port slightly. He rested his scope reticle on a clearing halfway between the tree line and the raccoon bait, and he waited for the Gray’s image to enter the sight picture.
When using a precision rifle to engage moving targets, Raymond preferred the “ambushing” technique. He was set in a stable, stationary shooting position, waiting for the creature to enter his scope’s field of view, offering him a split second to react. Just before the scab-covered rib cage of the muscular nine-mile-per-hour sprinting Gray reached the vertical line of his crosshairs, he squeezed the trigger.
Instead of bisecting the center of the Gray with his reticle, he placed his crosshairs slightly in front of the moving target. This allowed the Gray to travel the additional distance forward the same exact time it took Raymond to pull the trigger, the firing pin to hit the primer, igniting the gun powder, accelerating a copper-jacketed bullet spiraling down and out the barrel, flying six hundred feet though the chilled morning air and into the sprinting Gray’s torso.
The lightweight short-barreled .308 rifle recoiled a bit more than modern heavy-target rifles. As he rocked back slightly, absorbing the energy, he slid the rifle bolt knob up and to the rear, then forward again as his body weight returned to his natural point of aim, awarding him with a magnificent view of the Gray rolling on the neighbor’s lawn, struggling to get back to its feet. He debated putting another 175-grain hollow point into its cranium to silence the howling creature, but he could easily see blackened fluid spraying from its ribs. It would drown in its own flooded lungs soon enough.
“Sorry, pal, I’m not going to treat that sucking chest wound for you today,” Raymond whispered.
One Gray down, many more to go. Looking at the rifle mags displayed before him, he wondered if he had brought enough ammo with him this time. Each week, he was killing more and more of these wild creatures. The Grays’ virus was obviously quickly compounding out of control. For the first time in his life, Raymond felt he was losing a battle—one, ironically, against an unarmed opponent.
There was a reason he was doing this work. Payment wasn’t it. He could kill these creatures much easier in the comfort of his own home. Killing Grays in his neighboring residences widened his safety circle, keeping the Grays farther away from his own personal sanctuary. And besides, he enjoyed watching his feeble neighbors, who had often stuck up their biased noses at his rough, tattooed appearance, now beg for his help. He made them pay a service fee of food, supplies, tools, anything of value in this new world. He needed none of it, of course, but suffering is the greatest teacher, and these folks needed a tough lesson in survival.
In the rational mind of Raymond, competition winners should never receive a prize, because winning is its own reward. However, losing shouldn’t be permissible; losers should be punished as the laws of nature intended. This analogy went double for those who could have succeeded but failed only because of laziness or lack of proper preparation. The final contest had already started when the lights went out and the ill-prepared began turning into gray demons.
Socialites like his neighbors had always been dependent, even demanding lower members of society take care of them while looking down on them at the same time. Members of EMS, fire fighters, law enforcement, military, gardeners, plumbers, electricians, etc. all sacrificed themselves for an ungrateful society of snobs. The tables had finally turned.
To drive that point home, instead of clearing out the surrounding wooded areas at a safer distance, he always baited, then killed the Grays on his neighbors’ front yards, piling their corpses as high as he could. A morbid monument of death reminding them all how fragile they were in this new, dangerous world and how much they needed rough men like himself.
At the end of the day, as the evening sun finally faded to the west, he was down to his last rifle magazine sitting on a floor covered in brass shell casings. Each empty shell casing symbolized the death of an American whom he had once sworn to defend. Although these things were no longer Americans—they were evil mutant Grays. A direct hostile threat to America, which he was determined to fight. Today he had set a new one-day killing record, with absolutely no remorse.
Raymond exited his earthy hide, walked slowly toward the large oak tree, and then lowered the raccoon cage. He released the tormented animal back into the wild, feeling sorry for it as it limped away slowly from being shot several times in the ass with the air rifle throughout the day.
By the time he made his way to the neighbor’s house, the sun was completely gone over the horizon leaving just a hint of civil twilight, which signified in about twenty minutes the sky would be completely dark. Raymond stepped onto the porch and reached down to retrieve the bucket that held his service payment. Carrots and green beans. Figures—he should have known that morning. He would have preferred some fresh pork or beef to go with his own produce surplus, but he’d take it because, regardless if he needed the food or not, his services were not free.
Ed and Shaun had been away from town for over a week. They had covered an unknown number of miles looking for any worthy game, which would allow them to make a mercy extraction call to get out of the field. They had depleted their rations in the first few days and were now surviving on foraged roots, edible weeds, bugs, and one tough opossum. They were hungry, but they also knew their town was equally as hungry.
Having little luck hunting, they decided to allocate more time as Lake City Ambassadors in hopes of finding generous citizens or uninhabited houses that could be rummaged through. So far, they had found no houses occupied and zero supplies. Between hunger, exhaustion, and constant fear of the growing Gray threat, they were at their wits’ end, ready to quit and call for a ride back into town.
Ed and Shaun had agreed that when they called in tonight’s sundown situation report, they’d ask for advice from the town council with hopes of getting pulled out of the field. They’d traveled about another mile without any signs whatsoever—animal, human, or otherwise. The sun was getting closer to the western tree line, signaling that it was time to start looking for a securable shelter.
A change in course was made to get them closer to the main road, where more houses could be found. As they were contemplating crossing a rapidly flowing wide river, Ed spotted their golden ticket. Not wanting to miss the opportunity and without any warning to his hunting partner, Ed quickly unslung his .300 WinMag scoped hunting rifle. With his hands shaking from excitement, he placed the bouncing crosshairs on the large black bear’s head. At only 175 yards, there was no need to hold over for bullet drop.
Shaun had been looking in the opposite direction when the deafening blast caused him to jump in surprise, and he fell backward into a thorny bush, screaming expletives. “What the hell was that?” he finally exclaimed.
Ed reached down to rescue his entangled partner with a helping hand and a huge smile. “Look, I got him! Quick, let’s cross this river and dress that thing out before dark. We still need to find shelter ASAP!”
They stripped down to their underwear, then placed their dry clothes in a double-layered waterproofing bag inside their backpacks. To add buoyancy to their packs, they quickly drank their water and put the empty bottles inside as well. They used their belt
s to strap their rifles across the top of their makeshift buoys, which kept the rifles safely out of the water. Ed and Shaun held on tight and kicked themselves across the deep river.
The rapid current took them a few hundred feet downstream from their prize. After reaching the other side, they helped each other out of the river, dried off, quickly got dressed, and then hiked back upstream. The black bear was lying at the base of steep wooded steps leading uphill to a small nearby house. It seemed that their luck had finally taken an upturn.
They took turns keeping watch while the other cleaned, skinned, and quartered the bear. The rifle blast that took down the beast had been loud and attention grabbing. As Shaun stood watch, he expected Grays to stream down the riverbank at any moment and engulf them in gnashing teeth and clawing fingernails. Shaun made the tactical decision to start their house-contact procedure before hauling the meat up the stairs. He wanted to be safe from the encroaching darkness.
They stood a good distance away from the porch, tossing small rocks at the front door. No smoke from the chimney. No movement from the curtains. No signs of recent activity. If anyone was home, surely they’d heard the rifle shot. They expected this house was empty like all the others. They normally would wait at least fifteen minutes before inspecting windows and doors for an easy entry, but it was getting uncomfortably dark fast.
Ed stepped onto the covered porch to look through the windows and try the front door. Shaun went around the side of the small two-story house with attached garage to check the back. As Ed reached to jiggle the front-door handle, he heard whack and the sound of something heavy hitting the ground from around the house. “Shaun? Shaun?” he whispered. “Was that you?”
No answer. He unholstered his pistol as he quietly tiptoed up to the corner of the covered porch. Through the darkness, he could barely see Shaun’s backpack and rifle on the ground. His heart began to race as he stepped down off the porch, noticing fresh drag marks across the graveled driveway. “Shaun? Where are you, man?” he whispered urgently into the darkness.
