Southlands

by D. J. Molles

  “Hold up,” came an urgent grunt.

  It came from the man at the front window.

  All eyes pivoted to him.

  His body tensed and he pulled away from the window with a muttered curse. The whites of his eyes shone out from his face. “Flankers. About fifty yards out and moving around in our direction. Five of them.”

  “Shit,” Tex spat, moving towards the front of the house. He stood close to the other man and leaned out, peeking through the window, then ducking back in. “Looks like we’re not the only ones trying to use the lull on this side of the hill.”

  “We got time to get them out?” Lee asked.

  Tex shook his head.

  Lee considered their dwindling options. “We gotta hit that squad hard and take them all out. And then we’re gonna have to hightail it fast.”

  The man that had been watching the window peeked out again. “They’re taking the roadway on our left side. We’ll have a clear shot at them out these windows.”

  Tex nodded. “If you can pull a trigger, get on a window.”

  Lee had already registered that the house was standard construction. Vinyl siding. Stick-built. It would provide minimal cover when the bullets started flying. But they didn’t have a choice in the matter either. If they let that fire team get around them and onto the hillside, then they were just going to give up the high ground position on them. They had to hit them before they reached the hillside.

  Lee and Abe broke for the back door, while Tex and his remaining fighters took up the windows of the living room.

  Lee edged out the backdoor. He knew that the thin walls of the house weren’t going to stop any incoming rounds, but it still didn’t feel good to be so exposed. He crouched low, and Abe took up a position over top of him, both of them hugging the side of the house.

  Lee inched closer to the corner. Tex’s voice whispered over the comms in his ear: “Everyone wait for my first shot. Lee and Abe, take the front runners. We’ll take the rest.”

  Lee clicked his comms to indicate they understood.

  At the corner of the house, Lee looked out into the open area to their east. The sky was beginning to lighten with the first hints of dawn. About thirty yards to the east of the house was a dirt road that looked like it circumvented the hill. It was on this road that Lee spotted the line of men, moving in a file.

  His first thought upon seeing them was, These aren’t cartel.

  The details were lost in the darkness, but the impression was that these five men were well-equipped. From the outline of their figures, Lee perceived the familiar silhouette of helmet and body armor, and they moved like professionals.

  The lead pair scanned efficiently, and it was only at the very last second that Lee saw what looked like NVGs on their heads…

  The pointman in their column rocked to a halt, his head turned in Lee’s direction.

  “Contact!” the pointman shouted.

  Lee fired.

  The pointman jerked as though hit, but kept his aim and spat out a string of automatic fire. The first round buzzed by Lee’s face, but he was already lurching backward into cover. Abe fired over him, the team on the road fired back, Tex’s team inside the house opened up, and everything devolved into a cacophony of crackling rifle fire and whining near-misses and dull smacks of jacketed lead on the side of the house.

  Already crouched, and with Abe firing over him, Lee couldn’t rise to change levels, so he did the only thing he could do. He slipped into a prone position and rolled his head and rifle out of cover.

  A flurry of rounds impacted the corner of the house at the level that Lee’s face had been moments before, obliterating an aluminum downspout with a sound like steel drums being shredded, and wood and vinyl particles peppered Lee’s skin.

  He got the barest impression of his dim red dot touching the silhouette of one of the targets, and he fired again, three rounds in rapid succession and watched the man spin, caught in the shoulder, and then slump as the final round found something vital to penetrate.

  Lee rolled back into cover with a grunt of effort. A round shattered against the rocky ground in front of them and Lee felt sharp stings all across his face. He let out a small cry and blinked rapidly. Instant relief that both of his eyes still worked.

  Another fusillade of rifle reports issued from the house, and the response from the fire team they’d ambushed became sporadic, then just a single rifle. Then nothing.

  Tex yelled from inside. It took a moment for Lee’s ringing ears to register what he was saying.

  “Lee! Abe! We gotta move!”

  Lee felt Abe’s hand on the collar of his armor, hauling him up. He thrust himself into a standing position and then they both tumbled back into the house.

  The interior stank of spent propellant. It hung thick in the air as they barged back into the living room area, shafts of moonlight making it glow.

  Tex and his three able-bodied soldiers were already grabbing hold of the wounded, picking them up off the ground. One looked like he’d joined them at the window. He was now slumped against the sill, the drywall near his head broken open by incoming rounds, and his own blood and brain matter dripping down his ruined face.

  In that moment, all that Lee could perceive was a sense of relief that they would have one less body to weigh them down on their way back up the hill.

  The plan that Tex had outlined before went out the window. Now it looked like Lee and Abe were going to be hands-free, so it would fall to them to cover the others as they carried the wounded. No one argued about it. They were all forward momentum now.

  Tex and Williams each had the arm of a soldier with a wounded and tourniqueted leg. The wounded man’s face was blank and pale and sweaty with impending shock. Breckenridge and his other man supported the last wounded soldier.

  No one said a word about the one that was now slumped against the wall.

  Lee did a quick mental check of himself and his ammunition as he and Abe stalked to the backdoor. He was bleeding from bits of bullet jacketing that had caught the right side of his face, but other than that he was whole.

  At the back door, Tex called up: “We got all of them, I think.”

  “Roger,” Lee replied.

  But that didn’t answer the question of who the hell they were.

  Lee took the door first, punching through and retaking the corner of the house, this time standing. He scanned out to the road. In the moonlight, he could see three humps lying in the road. The last two might have died in the brush on the other side.

  The line of people exited the house behind Lee.

  The last man out gave Lee a slap on the shoulder to let him know they were clear.

  Then they ran for the hills, all the while with Lee wondering who that squad had been, and where they’d come from.

  ***

  Lee’s half-healed lungs burned like red pepper was stuck in them. The urge to cough was strong, but he resisted, knowing it was only going to take more air away from him, and probably make his chest feel worse.

  He was at the lead of the column, and Abe was taking up the rear, Tex and his men between them, struggling up the hillside in a slurry of curses and huffing breath.

  Lee was just beginning to feel the slope level out—thought he could see one of Tex’s trucks through the trees—when he rocked to a stiff halt, one arm raised.

  Everyone else stopped behind him, the sound of their feet in the leaves silenced, and only their gasping breath audible now.

  Lee pivoted to his left, towards the town of Caddo, and where the back-and-forth stream of tracers had been a near constant. He glared into the woods, registering that he was still hearing the pound of machine guns, but that something was different.

  “They’re not shooting at us,” Lee husked.

  Tex, gulping air next to him and supporting a wounded man, struggled to see why that was a problem. “Maybe they’ve had enough.”

  “No, they’re still shooting,” Lee said. He peered down the slo
pe into the darkness of the town below them, and he could still see the twinkling of muzzle flashes down there. But he could hear something else.

  The screaming of men.

  “Shit,” Lee muttered, then turned and shoved Tex up the hill. “Primals! Teepios! They’re getting hit by teepios!”

  Lee didn’t need to explain his urgency. This wasn’t a stroke of luck: The primals didn’t discriminate, and they were just as likely to shift their attention in your direction at some random sensory input—a shift in the wind that brought your scent to them, or the shuffling of your feet that somehow carried to their ears.

  The two wounded and the men that were hauling them up the hill started to lurch their way up the last fifty yards, all pretense of stealth now thrown to the wind.

  “Abe!” Lee called, looking through the darkness for him, and finding his friend already in a cover position about ten yards from Lee. Abe’s dark eyes glimmered in the pale dawn light now coming through the trees. He made eye contact with Lee and nodded.

  No further speaking was necessary.

  Abe held coverage down the slope. Lee turned and ran back about five strides, then posted on a tree. When Abe heard Lee stop moving, he started. The two continued to bound in this manner, always keeping one gun trained down the hill.

  They had less than a second of warning when it happened.

  Lee was just posting on a tree, his own feet falling silent, and in that small moment, he heard the thud of something galloping toward them.

  His eyes came up over his rifle just in time to see a gray shape hurtle out of a thicket of low brush, crashing through it and launching itself through the air in an inhuman leap.

  “Abe!” Lee yelled.

  Abe ducked, firing a burst on automatic that clattered through the branches, and one or two of the rounds caught the primal, but didn’t stop it.

  The primal hit the tree that Abe was shoving off of, and spun around it with an eerie rapidity, swiping out with its long-fingered hands and catching ahold of Abe’s elbow just as Abe jumped backward.

  Lee had no choice.

  The creature was right on Abe, but Abe was off-balance.

  Lee was already in his sights as Abe started to go down.

  Lee aimed high, hoping to catch vital organs and punch the spine out of the primal. He fired, registered that his first two shots splintered into the tree behind the primal, adjusted lower, and caught the primal in the hump of its back as it gnashed at Abe’s face.

  The creature jerked and twisted like it’d been bit in the back, let out a yelp, and rolled off of Abe, its wide, predatory eyes fixing now on Lee. Abe crabbed backward, one hand in the dirt and leaves, one hand holding his rifle like a pistol, and fired another burst that carried his rifle far off the mark, but the first three rounds found their mark and ripped the creature’s face to shreds at point blank.

  Abe twisted, shouted at Lee, just as Lee heard another scramble of limbs to his right.

  He dropped his shoulder.

  Something hit him, but glanced off, then went rolling past him through the dirt—a missed tackle. On one knee, Lee righted his weapon and fired five rounds straight down the primal’s mouth as it scrabbled through the leaves at him, all five projectiles punching through its head, through its body, and exiting somewhere out the backend of its torso, dropping it instantly.

  The second that Lee perceived it was no longer a threat, he swung around to cover his right flank again, searching for another target, but all he saw was the dim shape of gray trees.

  “You alright?” Abe gasped as he sprinted up to Lee.

  “Are you?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Lee’s hands and knees shook. “Let’s go.”

  Below them, in the town of Caddo, the machine gun fire became sporadic. The screams of men were silenced now. Shouts of command split the air. Were their attackers still dealing with the primals or were they going to return their attention to the hilltop?

  Lee and Abe ran, their legs tightening as they did, the lactic acid taking its toll, making each stride shorter and less powerful, but the slope was leveling out now, and when Lee looked forward again, he saw the trucks waiting for them, only twenty yards ahead.

  They stumbled into the clearing and Lee saw Tex in the bed of one of the pickup trucks, urging them on, while behind him, the other trucks turned around in clouds of dust and hightailed it off the hilltop, making quick use of the cessation in enemy fire.

  Abe hit the truck bed first in a clatter of gear and vaulted himself inside, somersaulting into the backend.

  Lee spun and took one last look at the woods that surrounded them, saw no immediate threats, and pulled himself up into the bed. Tex grabbed him by the shoulder as he did and hauled him in, sending Lee sprawling over top of a wounded man who swore at him.

  And then the truck was moving, tearing out of there, putting distance between them and the threats below.

  SIXTEEN

  ─▬▬▬─

  LINCOLNISTS

  In the darkness of the early morning hours, a radio transmission was sent out in Fort Bragg. It originated from the northwestern corner of the Fort Bragg Safe Zone, and it was sent out on channel 13 of a standard civilian FRS.

  The transmission had no voice. It was the click of a transmit button, three times in succession, followed by a three second pause, at which point the sequence repeated. It was repeated five times, and then was silent.

  In a single-family dwelling, not far from the place where the transmission had originated, a man awoke, hearing the ksh-ksh-ksh of the handheld radio that sat in its charging cradle next to his bed. He didn’t move. He lay on his side, with his head still on his pillow, but his eyes open, staring at the dark bedroom that he shared with his wife.

  He listened to the sequence of “clicks.”

  He listened to the silence that followed.

  His wife had come awake as well.

  She said nothing.

  He rolled into a sitting position and reached down and took the radio off its cradle, his heart ramping up from its resting rate. He repeated the sequence of clicks. Three clicks, followed by a pause. Repeated five times.

  Then he stood up and started to get dressed.

  “I’ll get ready,” his wife said.

  Ten minutes after that, this sequence had bounced from one end of the Fort Bragg Safe Zone to the other, reaching nine other single family households. The people in these houses then used their handhelds as a repeater to send the transmission on to the next.

  As the sky began to gray, these people left their houses, on their way to report to their work stations for the day. As they walked through Fort Bragg, each of them held a piece of white chalk in their hand, which they used to swipe a mark on every telephone pole they passed.

  As the first rays of sunlight broke across the eastern horizon, the rest of Fort Bragg began to wake and leave their houses to report to their places of work for the day. Most people took no notice of the small white mark on the telephone poles. But many did.

  Those that noticed it, stopped in their tracks, then turned around and went back to the houses they had come from. They all smiled and told their neighbors or house-mates that they’d forgotten something they needed. They went to their bedrooms, and from under beds and in the top shelves of closets, they all drew out large duffel bags of various shapes and colors, slung these over their shoulders, and headed out again, but this time not to their places of work.

  They began to gather at the nine single-family homes that the transmission had reached. They arrived in singles, and sometimes pairs. Sometimes ten to a house, sometimes eight. But they arrived discreetly, and locked the doors behind them. In quiet, nervous huddles, they began to unpack the contents of their duffel bags.

  Across Fort Bragg, foremen and forewomen waited for tardy workers to arrive. The woman in charge of the chickens was missing five people. The man in charge of the stockyards was missing six. A planting crew that was designated to leave the
wire and plant corn in Field 15 was missing three.

  At a large vegetable patch that had a literal ton of cabbage that needed to be harvested, the foreman went to one of his best and most punctual workers, who happened to be the man that had first been awakened by the transmission. A man whose house now contained ten people that did not live there.

  “Hey,” the foreman called to the good worker as he frowned at the clipboard that held the day’s roster. “You seen the Bakers?”

  The good worker had a white, plastic laundry basket in one hand, and a sharp knife in the other. He smiled, in a somewhat confused manner, and shook his head. “No, I haven’t seen them.”

  The foreman’s frown deepened. “Frank? Tilly? Price? You see any of them?”

  The good worker laughed. “To be honest, this early in the morning I wouldn’t notice a bear walking through the streets. Sorry, boss.”

  The foreman grumbled under his breath. “Alright then. ‘Preciate it.”

  The good worker took his basket and his knife, and walked out into the dew-covered fields and began to harvest cabbage.

  The vegetable fields were grown on a large chunk of golf course that sat in the middle of Fort Bragg. The foreman’s “office” was an old grounds maintenance shed near the eighteenth green. It had a direct line to the Soldier Support Center, which, despite the name, pretty much supported—and coordinated—all of Fort Bragg, both military and civilian.

  For safety reasons, all foremen were required to report “conspicuous absences,” which was defined as two or more people missing from work without explanation. This particular foreman figured it was a way for the powers that be to make sure everyone was putting in the sweat equity to make sure the Safe Zone ran smoothly.

  But he supposed it could be for the stated reason: to ensure that outbreaks of any sort didn’t go unnoticed.

  He called in the names of the missing people. The Bakers were a couple, so that meant he was down five workers today. He hung up the trench phone with the Soldier Support Center, irritated, and grabbed a basket and a knife.