Southlands

by D. J. Molles

  At the backdoor, Claire knocked, then stood there, burning and itching to hide. But she listened. When she heard the soft footsteps approach the backdoor, she whispered: “Elsie! It’s me!”

  The shades on the back of the door drew back an inch, and one of Elsie Foster’s eyes peered out at Claire.

  Relief flooded her.

  They hadn’t taken her yet.

  Elsie unlatched the door and pulled it open.

  Claire slipped in, and the second the door shut behind her, she grabbed Elsie by the shoulders and said, “Sullivan talked. You need to get the out of here, Elsie. They’re coming for you.”

  ***

  Carl sped through Fort Bragg.

  Mitch was already in his armor, driving the pickup truck and swearing under his breath as they punched heedlessly through the darkened streets. “I had her. I fucking had her.”

  “You didn’t know,” was all Carl could say.

  In the back, Rudy, Morrow, and Logan were strapping up. Carl had time to grab his rifle and his radio, but nothing else.

  He keyed the radio. “Gilliard to command.”

  He twisted and looked in the back while he waited for them to answer.

  Rudy, Morrow, and Logan were buckling the straps of their helmets and calmly checking their gear. Carl had no armor, but he also had no time. He would just have to operate accordingly.

  “This is command,” the radio mumbled. “Go ahead, Sergeant Gilliard.”

  Carl frowned at the radio, not recognizing the voice. “Where’s Lieutenant Derrick?” he transmitted.

  “Lieutenant Derrick hasn’t arrived on post yet. This is Corporal Townsend.”

  Carl swore under his breath, then keyed the radio again. “Corporal, are you alone in the Watch Commander’s office?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I want you to transmit to any active patrols you can get word out to. Number one, me and my team are hitting a target residence, located at…” Carl consulted the scrawl he’d penned onto his wrist. “…One-Two-Five London Drive. Number two, I want you to tell the patrols to be on the lookout for Elsie Foster and Claire Staley. If either are seen, they are to be detained immediately. Green light on use of force. How copy?”

  The corporal came back, sounding unsure of himself. “Solid copy.”

  Carl waited for him to ask whose authority the green light was under, but the corporal didn’t ask.

  Instead, Carl said, “Nothing further. Out.” He placed the radio in the cup holder of the truck and looked at his team as they turned north onto Chute Street and hauled past the former North Post Main Exchange. Chute Street would become London Drive in another block.

  “Mitch, park us short of one-two-five. If we take fire on approach, we’ll pull back and set up a perimeter as best we can. I’ll take A-side from the truck, you guys move through the woods to take B, C, and D. Otherwise, we hit it quietly as possible, snatch Elsie and whoever is in that place with her, and get her out. If there’s too many people, we’ll hold them tight and call for additional. Everyone clear?”

  They all nodded and mumbled various affirmatives.

  Carl turned back to look out the windshield, thinking, Should’ve just snatched her ass when we had the chance…

  They crossed over Butner Road, barely slowing down to clear the intersection.

  Elsie’s house was the second one on the right.

  Mitch killed the headlights and coasted them to a quick stop in front of the first house.

  “No lights in the house,” Carl observed, with a sinking feeling in his gut as he threw his door open and let it close as gently as his urgency would allow. He took his radio with him and stuck it in his back pocket.

  They formed up into a loose stack as they approached the front of the house, moving diagonally across the weedy lawn. Carl took up the rear, right behind Mitch and Logan. Rudy took point, and Morrow hovered close by to breach.

  Their rifles scanned over windows. Doors. Corners. But there wasn’t a peep from the house.

  “I’ll cover the back,” Carl whispered, and split off around the side of the house to cover the back door. Everything was still and dark. He took the corner, then backed off a few paces, keeping himself under cover but peering around the house to see the back door.

  The porch light was on. That might be a good sign.

  If that bitch came out the back door, he’d give her exactly one chance to hit the dirt before he waylaid her. And if she was armed…

  The crash of the front door being kicked in shattered the quiet.

  Weaponlights bloomed on the interior of the house, sweeping past windows.

  Carl held his rifle on the back door, waiting.

  He heard the muffled movements of his team inside, but no gunshots. No shouts. No running feet. He kept waiting for the sound of loud commands as they took Elsie to the ground and zip-cuffed her hands. The longer the silence stretched, the more Carl’s heart sank.

  For two minutes he stood there on the corner of the house, feeling worse and worse.

  And then Mitch’s voice, as disconsolate as it could be over the radio in his back pocket: “Carl, the place is empty. She’s gone.”

  THIRTEEN

  ─▬▬▬─

  INTELLIGENCE

  The landscape flew by Sam in an alien green.

  The cool night air buffeted in his ears. The weather was still in that strange limbo of spring where the days could be summery, and the nights downright chilly. His hands became cold as they clutched the handles of the M2. There was just the roar of the wind, and the engines, and the strange sight of everything in night vision green through his right eye, and black through his left.

  The drivers wore NVGs as well, so there were no lights. Not even the dull red glow of brake lights or running lights. They were blacked out as they navigated the pitted and pot holed and washed out sections of forgotten and unused American highway, leading towards the Cross Creek Mall.

  Sam’s ass was beginning to hurt and he shifted around frequently. The “seat” of the turret was nothing more than a wide nylon strap that went across the circular opening. He kept trying to adjust his weight, his feet looking for a new point of purchase, which they would generally find, accidentally, on the top of the radio between the two front seats.

  For the third time, Corporal Billings shoved Sam’s boots off the radio. “Ryder, I’m fuckin’ serious. Next time I’m gonna chop your goddamned foot off.”

  Flustered, Sam ducked his head down, projecting his voice into the vehicle through the turret hole. “Sorry, corporal. This strap…”

  “Well, don’t sit on the fucking strap then. Stand up.”

  Sam stood up. The strap now hovered around his lower back. He wasn’t tall, so he had to crane his neck to see up over the M2. On the plus side, it was easier to swivel the turret now.

  “You don’t wanna use that strap anyways,” Jones called cheerily from down below. “Shuts off your circulation. It’ll give you dead legs. Then you can’t run from the primals.”

  “Alright,” Billings called in his usual parental tone. “We’re two mikes out. Allen, what’s the position?”

  Sam went back to staring out at the alien landscape. Green in one eye. Black in the other. But he imagined the nervous wildlife officer consulting the screen of the GPS unit that was leading them into Fayetteville.

  “Uh,” came Allen’s quieter voice. “No change. Maybe three hundred yards east of Skibo Road. Right on the northern edge of the mall.”

  “Is it inside the mall?” Billings asked.

  Allen didn’t immediately answer. Sam pictured him frowning and giving an unconfident shrug. “Waypoint’s accurate up to ten meters. So if it’s inside, it’s not far in.”

  There was some general grumbling that Sam couldn’t make out.

  “I think it took it off,” Chris, the driver, weighed in.

  “Yeah?” Billings sighed. “That what you think?”

  Jones made a raspberry noise. “They ain’t that
smart.”

  “They got into the Safe Zone,” Chris said, defensively. “They’re smart enough.”

  “So they found an opening. That was our fault, not having that shit welded shut. It’s not like they cracked a safe or anything.”

  “We shall see,” Billings advised, sagely.

  “Maybe they fuckin’ ate him,” Jones said.

  No one responded, which Jones took to mean he should expound on this new theory.

  “You know? If they’re so goddamned smart, Chris, maybe they saw that one fuck was wearin’ a transmitter and they killed him and ate him for being a rat.”

  Chris sounded indignant. “So, they’re not smart enough to take off the fucking collar, but all of the sudden they’re gonna start patting each other down for wires like the mob?”

  “Yeah, man.”

  “You’re an asshole, Jones.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Alright,” Billings refereed again. “One mike out. Let’s pretend to be soldiers. Eyes peeled. No surprises.”

  No one said anything else. There was general shuffling around as the occupants of the Humvee addressed themselves to their open windows, the muzzles of their rifles sticking out.

  They’d taken Bragg Boulevard out of the Safe Zone and were turning onto Swain Street, which would connect them to Skibo Road. All around them was the defunct remains of a city that had given it a good go three years ago, but had ultimately been ravaged, and its corpse picked over by two years of scavenging.

  Dark buildings began to cluster closer on either side of them. Wreckage in the form of abandoned and burned-out vehicles clustered the sides of the road. Jersey barriers with old concertina wire wilting from the tops of them. Large swaths of the road had been overtaken by the never-ending spread of nature, spreading out from what had once been grassy medians that now held two-year old saplings and scrub brush.

  Sam glanced over his shoulder and saw the two pickup trucks following them.

  Chris slowed to take the turn onto Skibo, but didn’t stop. The tires chirped as he swung around a Volvo that stuck out into the road. Sam hung onto the M2 as the centrifugal force tugged him through the turn, and he stared at the Volvo. Every door was open. The interior was shredded. The exterior pocked with bullet holes.

  The road obstructions thickened, and the convoy of three vehicles had to slow to twenty miles an hour as they cut a serpentine course through it all.

  Sam found he had a hard time focusing with both eyes open, so he squinted his left and focused on the night vision scene provided by his right. He scanned carefully, the ball bearings rumbling as he swiveled the gun to face right, then left.

  They made the overpass that crossed the All American Freeway. Below them, stretching to the north and south, the freeway was a landscape of forgotten wreckage.

  Sam had begun to hate cities, right around the time when they’d become the most dangerous places to be, when the hordes of infected clustered in them, numbering in the thousands. Even now, though the hordes had died through the attrition of starvation, exposure, and Marine artillery, Sam still felt acid roil in his gut as they delved deeper into Fayetteville.

  “There’s Cross Creek,” Billings announced. “Take this first entrance. Right here.”

  The mall loomed up to Sam’s left. The fronts of the department stores seemed to rise up like monoliths in the darkness, their unlit signs a sad monument to life before. More like tombstones now, than advertisements.

  Chris turned them right, and slowed to a crawl, approaching the massive buildings, the parking lots vast and empty.

  “Where we goin’, Allen?” Billings asked.

  “Uh…straight ahead there. Right between the department store and the auto center.”

  They drove straight forward, through a pair of jersey barriers that might’ve been a checkpoint in their former life.

  The place where they appeared to be heading was a dark corner nestled in the V shape created by the department store to the left, and a car care center to their right. Through his night vision, Sam saw Corporal Billing’s infrared laser lance out and scour a shaky path across the building fronts and linger in a whorl right there at the entrance to the mall.

  “Shit,” Jones murmured from below, his voice more audible without the wind blowing in Sam’s ears. “We’re not going in there, are we?”

  “I don’t think it’s inside,” Allen said as they drew closer. “I think it’s right there in front of us.”

  They were about a hundred yards from the entrance now, moving forward at an idle.

  Sam stared hard into the mall’s entrance but saw nothing there.

  “I don’t see no primals,” Jones remarked.

  “I told you,” Chris said, vindicated. “Fucker took it off.”

  “Alright,” Billings said. “Swing us around right here so we can hightail it quick. We’re gonna dismount.”

  Chris drove them just into the V of the buildings, then swung them around in a wide arc and stopped, the right side of the Humvee facing the entrance to the mall, the tires turned hard left towards their exit.

  The two pickup trucks moved in behind them.

  Sam swiveled the turret, scanning along the department store, and then the entrance, and then the car care center. His cheek began to ache from squinting his left eye.

  Doors opened and closed in rapid succession. They were gentle about it but the noise still seemed loud to Sam, even with the thrumming engines of the three trucks in the background. Billings, Jones, and Allen dismounted, joined by two soldiers each from the two pickups. Chris stayed in the driver’s seat, as did the drivers of the pickups. The last two soldiers took up positions on the opposite side of the line of trucks to cover their exit.

  Sam heard quiet voices, but couldn’t tell what they were saying.

  Billings and his group of six approached the belly of the V, the soldiers scanning outwards, their IR lasers swooping and arcing across the building faces, invisible to the naked eye. Allen huddled in the middle of their small formation, looking at the glowing readout of his GPS receiver.

  “You alright up there, half-boot?”

  Sam turned his head and saw one of the soldiers from the pickups looking up at him. Beneath his NVGs, his mouth was split into a snarky grin. Sam gave him a thumbs up.

  The soldier pointed out towards their exit. “How about you help us cover the exit, then?”

  Sam swung the turret around. Out towards the abandoned parking lots with their overgrown natural areas and clumps of weeds starting to push up from between cracks in the concrete. A gentle breeze blew, stirring everything, causing a disconcerting amount of movement.

  Sam’s eyes tried to dart around, but he couldn’t see much with the narrow field of view provided by his NVGs. He had to pan his head around to get the whole scene. Every time the wind stirred something his heart inched a tad higher into his throat.

  He didn’t like having his back to the mall, but he kept telling himself, watch your lane.

  He heard shuffling around inside the Humvee. Chris’s voice hissed up at him. “Fuck, Ryder, why you lookin’ out there?”

  Nerves let a bump of frustration through Sam’s placid demeanor. “They just told me to look out here!”

  “Fuck that,” Chris snapped. “Watch the roofline.”

  “Motherfucker.” Sam jerked the turret around, getting angrier, which he found was nicer than being scared, so he clung to it. Facing back towards the entrance, he saw Billings and his guys down in the dark hole at the belly of the V, looking at something on the ground.

  That’s the transponder, Sam realized.

  His eyes fixed on Billings’s figure. The corporal bent down and took something off the ground and held it up at eye-level. Sam couldn’t see the details of it, but he knew what it was. Chris had been right. The primals were smart enough to take the damn thing off.

  Smart enough?

  Or had it been like a dog that doesn’t want a collar on his neck?

  Su
rely it had just made the primal uncomfortable to have a foreign object strapped to it.

  Surely they didn’t understand what it was.

  Watch your lane.

  Sam tilted his M2 up.

  Brought his narrow, green-filled gaze up to the roofline of the department store.

  A flash of movement at the right-hand corner of his vision.

  He snapped his head to the car care center.

  Something moved out of view as he focused on it.

  “Hey,” Sam’s voice came out higher than he would have liked. “I think there’s movement.”

  “What?” Chris sounded exasperated. “You gettin’ jumpy up there, half-boot?”

  “I swear…” Sam stared hard at the top of the roof. Nothing else moved.

  “Just chill out and confirm what you saw,” Chris intoned from below.

  Sam felt a tickle in his subconscious. Maybe he’d seen something at the left corner of his vision, or maybe it was some sixth sense that told him to look left.

  He swung to the department store roof.

  A figure hung, halfway over the line of the roof, like a spider about to descend.

  “Oh shit!” Sam gasped, then belted out: “Contact! Contact!”

  As he yelled, the soldiers at the entrance to the mall all snapped around.

  And so did the head of the figure.

  Fifty yards from Sam, it stared him dead in the face, its eyes wide and shimmering like silver coins in a flash of light, its mouth open, teeth bared.

  Sam’s thumbs wrenched down on the butterfly trigger.

  The M2 blasted out two rounds and then clunked—jammed.

  Sam tried to yell a curse, but all that came out was something like a painful groan, as he stared out across the muzzle of the machine gun, saw the two big rounds punch the brick, and then watched as dozens of primals began to pour over the top of the roof, gripping to the crevices in the bricks with inhuman strength, leaping across to a metal awning over the entrance, and vaulting to the ground…

  “Get that fuckin’ fiddy up!” Chris screamed at him.