At the End of the World

by Charles E Gannon

  Steve was looking at his hands. “Still. The base was small. How much would be there to start with?”

  Prospero smiled. “You Yanks are obsessed with always having more than you need, so you shipped goods in quarterly and flew in additional supplies on every plane. Also, since the base was tasked to maintain readiness for providing logistical support to expeditionary forces—a lesson we learned from the Falklands War—there was always a stock of extras on hand to support combat operations.”

  I nodded. “All of which will look like a well-stocked department store to survivors of an apocalypse. But there’s one small problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “According to you, the place is crawling with zombies.”

  He nodded. “Which is why it’s too early for you to open negotiations with the council. If you are patient, you will be able to meet at least half of your needs without having to trade for them.”

  I shook my head. “How? By leveraging our charm and good looks?”

  “No, by leveraging what you really have to offer.”

  I still didn’t get what he was driving at. “You don’t even know what we’re carrying in our boat.”

  “I don’t have to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because your most important commodity is your ability to undertake actions that will restore hope to everyone on this miserable little island.”

  Actions? “Wait a minute; you said we could get what we need for free.”

  “No: I said that you could probably get most of what you need without having to pay with your own goods.”

  “So what deed is going to get us anything we want? Besides, how will the locals swing it? You just said this island is in short supply of everything.”

  “It is. But that will change once you’ve retaken the base.”

  Really, I should have seen it coming. Chloe had. She was already smiling and shaking her head by the time I was able to reply. “That’s—that’s nuts! There are just five of us.”

  “I’d be with you,” Prospero countered.

  Which I waved away. “There are dozens of people here who can probably shoot a gun. Why not them? If this is such a great idea, why haven’t they already made it happen?”

  “Because, Alvaro, they lack three things that you lot have in ample supply. The right weapons, plentiful ammunition, and sheer nerve.”

  Well, he was right about the first two—but: “Hey, how do you know what guns we have and how much ammo?”

  “I was on the pier when you came in. I heard Giselle tell the story of what happened at Husvik. Assuming that was not a fiction to preempt misbehavior by the locals, I am impressed. So were the locals.”

  “Yeah. Impressed enough that they ought to be ready to make us some sweet offers for military rifles and ammunition. So they can take care of their own problems themselves.”

  Prospero leaned back, glanced toward the west end of town, where the road wound south toward the base and, on the way, connected to a side road that went inland/east, all the way over to Cross Hill. A middle-aged woman was patrolling there with one of those Brit assault rifles hanging from her shoulder. “As you can see, we already have military rifles, although we could use a little more ammunition. But tell me, Giselle, did you detect the faintest hint of envy, of desire, when you let slip you had more than enough of both?”

  Jeeza was about to reply but stopped with her mouth open.

  “No,” Steve answered.

  “And you won’t,” Prospero affirmed with a nod. “You will not catch anything with that bait, not here.” He leaned forward. “It’s not equipment that is lacking here. It is the qualities that you lot have. Nerve. Determination. Experience. And solid training from a captain who sounds like he might have earned that title from a career as something other than the owner of a charter boat.”

  Rod blurted out what I was thinking. “Yeah? Well what about you? Why haven’t you led them back to the base? You’re military!”

  Prospero’s smile was as bitter as any he’d shown so far. “I am—was—a signals and sensor specialist, Rodney. We qualify on weapons—barely—but I have never been in a firefight. I have shot a few stalkers, but they were hunting me, not me them. And although this community suffers my occasional advice, they’d salute a tuna before they’d take orders from me.”

  “So, English,” asked Chloe quietly, “do you have a plan, or do we provide that, too?”

  Prospero turned quickly. “I rather thought you would be the one who would like this idea.”

  “Didn’t say I don’t. But if you think I’d be on board just because I’ve shot more than my share of wild creatures—human or otherwise—then you’d better think again.”

  I wanted to kiss her. Long and hard. Right there.

  Instead, I leaned into the space between them. “Just because we have killed doesn’t mean we want to make that a permanent activity. We’re not mercenaries.” I paused. “On the other hand…”

  I looked around the group. I saw a lot of indecision in Rod and Jeeza. Couldn’t read Steve; then again, who can? But Chloe? I’m not sure that she got the gene that enables indecision; she was all in.

  “…on the other hand, I’m not sure if it’s possible to keep our hands clean in this world. Maybe this is what the survivors have to do, if they want to stay alive. If they want to have a chance of rebuilding this world, somehow.”

  “So we become killers.” Now Jeeza sounded like she really might hurl.

  I can’t sugarcoat this. “Giselle, if the infected were willing to negotiate or receive sensitivity training, I’d be all over that option.” Even though the words were playful, I kept my tone serious; there was a fine line to walk, here. “But we have to face facts. We’ve got two choices: stay on a truly deserted island for the rest of our lives or be prepared to kill. At least until we make some safe places. Then, maybe, we can find that deserted island.”

  But in my heart, I knew I would never do that. This world is supposed to belong to thinking, feeling, hurting, hoping human beings, not rabid eating machines. And the globe’s few survivors couldn’t afford to make the same decision that Ascension’s councilors had: to wait it out. For all we knew, the infected might be able to breed. And if they could, then the only way we could retake this island (or any other) was by removing them from it. One at a time, if need be, but better in bunches. Big bunches.

  I cut to the conclusion. “Here’s the bottom line: if we want to take this planet back, we can’t do it by hiding.” I straightened. “So for me, the job starts here. And the job means killing the infected.

  “What’s more, if any of us can’t do that job, it means everyone else has to carry that load. And that’s not right. In time, it would tear the group apart. And staying together as a group is Job One. So, it’s all in or no go.” I looked around at the only four friends I had on the planet. “What do you say?”

  It was Steve who broke the silence. “I once read a scifi book about soldiers who jumped out of spaceships to fight aliens. A lot of the book was kinda confusing—there was a lot of talking—but one line was real clear: ‘everybody drops, everybody fights.’ That’s the only way they could depend on each other. They had to feel like they were—I dunno, like a clan, or a family. Sorta. Sorta like us.”

  Rod and Jeeza looked at each other a long time. They had questions in their eyes, but different ones. His eyes were asking, “Will you?” Hers were asking “Must we?” After the longest three seconds I’ve ever lived through, Jeeza looked away and nodded. “Yes. I will.”

  Once it was clear that we weren’t going to be torn apart by this decision, I wondered if anyone else left in the world even got to choose? In most places, you had to kill the infected and keep killing them until you got to safety. By that time, the whole “will I or won’t I kill?” question was kinda moot.

  Yeah, we were still spoiled kids—but that was changing.

  Fast.

  October 17

  Damn if Prospero wasn’t righ
t about the reaction of the councilors. At today’s meeting, they almost wrung their hands in gratitude and eagerness when we offered to step in and work as, well, exterminators.

  The only near-misstep was when Prospero and I both started explaining how they’d screwed up their projections of stalker die-off. But Jeeza saw it coming, and before the two sides could get into a pissing match over whose speculative zoology was correct, she gave us a withering “the customer is always right” look. Then she turned the sweetest smile upon the town leaders and pointed out that:

  a) in the event that some undefined (but surely minimal) number of the stalkers slipped into torpor to some undefined degree, then

  b) this would of course have made it impossible for the councilors to accurately gauge the time (and therefore supplies) that Georgetown had left before the infected finally turned on each other, and that, consequently,

  c) the same variation in stalker torpidity meant that the present die-off strategy presented a new and unforeseen risk to Georgetown’s survivors.

  How so? asked the wide-eyed town-fathers and -mothers.

  “Well,” she explained as if she was selling them a new bedroom set, “if some of the stalkers remain in torpor, then how can you ever be sure that all of them have been killed off by the others? How can you eliminate the possibility that a dormant stalker is hidden someplace the others miss? And that, being missed, it might then reactivate weeks or months after you believed the crisis was past? Because just one reawakened stalker could start a whole new wave of infection. Far better to hunt the stalkers actively now. And what better place to start than their single most dense area of concentration: the airbase?”

  “In fact,” Rod ad-libbed in an unfortunately high-pitched voice, “we’ve been working on strategies to bait the other stalkers off Green Mountain. That way, their total numbers would be so low that the rest could be eliminated with a few weeks of aggressive patrols and baited traps.”

  It was like selling a bunch of starving kids a crate of chocolate bars. They were willing to promise us fifty percent of everything that could be removed from the airbase. That was actually a lot less generous than it sounded, since they knew we didn’t have the lading capacity to take more than a fraction of that haul away with us. Until, that is, Steve pointed out that we would be happy to take that 50/50 deal if they provided in perpetuity warehousing of our share for an additional five percent. So a 45/55 split, with us having permanent storage for whatever we couldn’t sail away with.

  Everyone, including us, stared at Steve, who hadn’t said anything in the two-hour meeting. You could see the councilors’ deal-making gears spinning behind their eyes. If they accepted Steve’s modification, they’d wind up with far fewer goods than they expected and would have us as their only and much-wealthier trading partners, who might or might not be around when they needed us to extend them some “credit” from our stash. Of course, we could always give them the freedom to take what they needed “on account,” but they knew we’d reserve the exclusive right to determine “fair compensation” for every bit of it.

  In the long run, they countered with a “first pick” proposal. In short, we would only take away what we could carry, but we had first choice of everything we found.

  And so the deal was struck. And we went to get the equipment we’d need from the town and to scout the approaches to the base for the first part of our multi-phase plan.

  * * *

  Because Georgetown was so depopulated and we weren’t asking for food or water, there were spares of everything we asked for. Either that, or it didn’t exist.

  For instance, for our ride, we chose a Range Rover that the local police had tricked out to function as an anti-zombie vehicle during the first few weeks of the plague. We could see it from inside their headquarters building: all the glass in the passenger compartment had been removed and replaced with what looked like sections from shark-diving cages. Chain link fencing had been fastened between them and the body of the car, so grasping hands couldn’t get through. The wheel wells were covered with sheet metal, down to about five inches ground clearance. The front and back bumpers had been turned into a cross between weapons and cow-catchers; they were equal parts abatis and porcupine. We looked at each other and asked that the biggest spikes be removed: more likely that the infected would grab on to them than get torn to pieces. We also asked for another layer of the chain link fencing: not being able to shoot out the windows didn’t worry us. Because if we ever found ourselves that close to the infected, our only concern was to make sure they couldn’t touch us.

  Which was uppermost in everyone’s mind. There were no hazmat suits except at the airport, probably. But they’d have been nonstarters even if they were available. I’d rather try moving and fighting in a clown costume. All that protection won’t do you a damn bit of good if someone is actively chasing and tearing at you. Better you stay fast, agile, and harder to catch. Just like aikido.

  What I would have liked was biker leathers. Now that is something where you got a lot more protection in exchange for a small loss of flexibility. But this was Ascension Island; no biker gangs here. Nor were there any football helmets, or hockey equipment, or fireman’s coats. Actually, there was plenty of firefighting gear on Ascension but, again, it was out at the airfield. We did score some pretty heavy-duty boots, and not just the hiking variety. There were serious anglers among the locals, and some of their footwear is built plenty tough. Unused hiking gear was most useful for all the belts and straps that you could hang ammo pouches on. There was also a good amount of eye-protection available, as well.

  At the clinic, the other anti-infection precaution—surgical masks—had all been used up, but I considered that a blessing in disguise. Yes, wearing a surgical mask meant we were less likely to breathe in the virus or get infected spittle or blood in our mouths or noses. But I was pretty sure that it would prove more important to be able to shout and be understood; clear communication could prove key to organizing ourselves enough to maintain maximum distance between us and the infected. That was by far the best way to prevent contamination.

  We provided the weapons. With five FALs, a scoped .308, two genuine (as in, fully automatic) AK-47s, and three Rexio pump twelve-gauges, we not only had enough, but a decent mix of, firepower. Between the Taurus-built M9s and the Browning Hi-Powers, we also had enough backup pieces, particularly since we loaned the .44 to Prospero, who damn near went Dirty Harry on us, dry firing that wheel gun at imaginary zombies. And if they got closer than pistol-range? Well, the whaling machetes from Husvik were sturdy and effective. No reason to give them up now.

  Once we got to the end of our checklist, we found one of the best local fishermen, put in a special order for fresh catch, and then went to check out our ride and choose our ambush site.

  * * *

  Chloe stood in front of the off-white Range Rover Defender 110 with her hands on her hips. “Really? I’m the only one who knows how to drive a stick? And who knows how to shoot for real?” Without waiting for an answer—we guys were all trying to look somewhere else—she yanked open the driver’s door.

  And stared. The steering wheel was on the other side of the car. “Erm…and the pedals, are they, um, reversed too?”

  “No worries,” Jeeza said brightly, slipping around her. “I drove some in Jamaica, whenever my family went—” She stopped, her voice faltering after the word “family.” She was motionless for a moment, her hand on the side of the Range Rover’s doorframe. She blew out a long shuddering breath. “Yeah, I can drive the fucking truck. Get in.”

  * * *

  “You liking the view, Chloe?”

  She glanced down at me from her perch atop the Range Rover, smiling. The way a wolf might. “Oh, I’m liking this view just fine.”

  We were at the only intersection on the south road out of Georgetown. It was about half a mile beyond the outskirts. Go another half mile or so, and you were on a long slope down that went straight past the barracks of
the U.S. base. From there, you were on the same flatland as the airfield, which was a mile and a half farther on. On foot, it would have been a modest hike. In a vehicle, blink a few times and you’d miss most of the ride.

  Chloe was about level with what Prospero had touted as the best position around: a small hillock of volcanic rock—barely seven feet high—that was set back a few yards from the northwest corner of the intersection. But I was keeping an eye on that other road, the one that branched off due east and ascended toward Cross Hill. From there it wound south and east, toward the higher center and then the southern skirts of Green Mountain.

  “You know,” Prospero chuckled, “that’s not where the stalkers will be coming from. They’ll be running up at us from there.” He pointed down the gentle southern slope toward the base.

  “That’s the plan,” I agreed.

  But I wasn’t as happy about the lay of the land as Chloe was. I mean, I could see why she liked where we were going to set up. You could see along both roads, and from the top of the little hillock, the southern stretch of highway was—literally and figuratively—a straight shot. To the west, the side that the airfield and the base were on, the land fell away from the road except for the hill where the Air Force had built their GPS station and the target tracking radar that everyone called the Golf Ball. Because that’s just what it looked like. Except for the almost pyramidal hill that it was perched on, the rest of the ground on that side of the road was a flat fan of scrub and low, wind-bent trees that fell slowly down toward the sea. The brush wasn’t great for visibility, but anything approaching from that direction would spend more time out of cover than in it, unless they were crouching or, in some places, crawling.

  I looked over my shoulder again. The road to Cross Hill went through far more tricky terrain, with more and taller brush as it ascended to a modest plateau. An arm of that higher ground flanked the road all the way to intersection’s southwest corner. If a stalker followed along the crest of that elevated stretch, no one would see it until it profiled itself on the ten-foot rise that was less than thirty feet from our position.