These Dead Lands (Book 2): Desolation

by Knight, Stephen

  The convoy continued to travel south down US 30. The town of Cashtown lay ahead of them. Like most of the small towns they had encountered so far, Cashtown wasn’t much of a town to speak of; it was a scattering of houses alongside of the road. Charming two-story houses with covered porches had the tattered remnants of American flags on proud display. The convoy approached another T intersection when Hastings noticed a small brick building with a small parking lot and flag pole out front off to the left. It was a break from the residential houses alongside the road. On the front of the building was a sign.

  UNITED STATES POST OFFICE

  CASHTOWN PENNSYLVANIA

  “Stop us here,” Hastings said.

  Jones reacted to Hastings’s order and hit the brakes, bringing the MRAP to a fairly abrupt halt next to an old red wood barn. He scanned the road ahead, searching for some threat substantial enough for the captain to call an unscheduled halt.

  “What’s wrong, sir?”

  “Nothing—I just need to make a quick stop at the post office. Keep it running. I’ll be right back.”

  Jones looked over at Hastings with an odd look. “Post office— Uh ... roger that, sir?”

  “Hey, what do we got?” Slater yelled from the back.

  “Just a quick stop. I want to run into the post office to our six. Let the convoy know and bring four guys with you for security.”

  “You want to go to the post office? You mind telling me what the fuck we’re doing, sir?”

  “I want to run in real quick and check something out,” Hastings replied. “Just roll with it and I’ll explain later.”

  Slater gave Hastings the same look Jones had given him a moment ago, then keyed his handset and issued instructions to the rest of the convoy as he opened the MRAP’s ramp. The machine-gunner stepped up onto the platform and manned the .50-caliber while four soldiers in the MRAP grabbed their gear and pushed down the ramp. Hastings exited through the passenger door and shoved it closed behind him, then headed to the rear of the vehicle. The gunner atop the trail MRAP looked at him, eyes unreadable behind his sunglasses but the set of his chin was enough to tell Hastings he had no idea what the hell they were doing.

  The soldiers out back were already pulling 360-degree security when Hastings arrived. “Okay, guys, we’re gonna run into the post office here. I need you to help with the clear and pull security while Slater and I look around.”

  “What are we looking for, sir?” one of the soldiers asked.

  “Just do as you’re told,” Slater said as he hurried down the ramp, rifle in hand. “Let’s get this done.”

  The post office was a single-story brick building and didn’t look very big, so it looked like a quick job to the soldiers. As they moved over to the door of the post office, they automatically started stacking up while still maintaining security. Once at the door, they paused briefly and the number one man in the stack grasped the door handle and waited for the number two man to squeeze his shoulder, telling him to go. The signal came and they all flowed into the small reception area of the post office, covering down and collapsing their sectors of responsibility with a smooth and quiet precision. They paused for a moment and listened for any movement or the telltale sounds of reekers shambling toward them from inside the building. When nothing presented itself, Slater looked over at the men and gave the hand signal to continue and clear the back of the building. As they advanced, Hastings crossed over behind the front counter and started rummaging around the desk area.

  “What, you forget to pick up some stamps back at the Gap, sir?” Slater asked, voice low.

  “Good one, Slater. But no.” Hastings didn’t look up from his search.

  The four-man team returned from the back of the post office. “All clear in the back,” one of them reported. He maintained his position near the doorway to the rear of the building anyway.

  “Bingo! Gotcha,” Hastings said a moment later.

  Slater moved closer to Hastings. “What?”

  Hastings held a piece of paper in his hand. He looked at it for a moment, then turned it around so Slater could view it. It was an FBI ten most wanted list.

  “See anyone you recognize, Master Sergeant Slater?”

  Slater examined the paper. Sure enough, John Mosby was on the list … and the picture there looked a hell of a lot like the guy sitting in the Romeo MRAP.

  “This is why we stopped? You gotta be fucking kidding me!”

  Hastings folded up the paper and shoved it into one of the cargo pockets on his trousers. “Yeah, it just popped into my head as we were passing the place.”

  Slater shook his head slowly. “Great. Now what do you say we get the fuck out of here? I don’t want to wind up on some zombie’s lunchtime menu.”

  Hastings nodded. “Yeah, yeah. Sure, let’s go.”

  As he started to come out from behind the counter, Slater said, “Aren’t you forgetting something, sir?”

  “What’s that?”

  Slater gave him a toothy grin. “Your stamps, of course.”

  Hastings rolled his eyes. Everyone’s a comedian in the zombie apocalypse.

  The convoy continued moving south towards Site R. It rolled past the town of Orrtanna before pressing on through Fairfield. Fairfield was the last sizeable community on their way to PA 116, which would take them the remainder of the way to Site R. As the convoy pulled up to the intersection with PA 116, Jones pointed off to the right of the vehicle.

  “Hey look, sir! There’s a post office. You want me to stop?”

  Hastings looked over at Jones who had a huge smile on his face. “No, Jones—Slater made sure I stocked up on stamps at the last one. Good one, though. I’ll give you that.”

  As Jones slowed the vehicle to make the right turn at the T intersection, he pointed at a large cluster of vehicles parked on a gravel lot. They were all neatly lined up, and all had prices on their windshields. Everything from small, beat-up compacts to pickup trucks on lift kits with giant tires were represented—there was even a 1980s vintage red Corvette. Inside the lot, a small group of reekers turned toward the noise of the oncoming column. Their slack faces became only vaguely more animated when they saw the hulking, cliff-nosed MRAPs turning onto the street.

  “Hey, check out the crowd,” Jones said. “They must be having a hell of a sale. I’ll bet they’re offering zero down with a current LES and a guaranteed twenty-eight percent interest rate for seventy-two months!”

  Both Hastings and Jones laughed out loud. It was the kind of deal most new privates fell victim to in military towns when purchasing a new car or other high-dollar items.

  After rolling past the dealership, the convoy entered the Borough of Fairfield. It crossed over Middle Creek and the road’s name changed to Main Street. As always, the two-lane blacktop road was lined with homes on each side. Hastings worried about that. It was going to be like running a gauntlet with not many places to go, given the size of the MRAPs. The side streets were little more than narrow alleyways between the houses, which offered little opportunity for maneuvering off the road, presuming they could even manage the tight turns. Reekers began to appear now, stepping out onto the road from between the houses. The column made a lot of noise, as stealth wasn’t one of its attributes. At first only a few zombies appeared, but as Jones kept pulling the convoy forward, the number of reekers grew steadily larger. From behind them, Hastings heard short, sporadic bursts of gunfire. He knew the zombies were charging the column, and the softer vehicles had to open up on the threats to hold them back. It was a lot easier to damage a Humvee than an MRAP or a five-ton truck.

  As the convoy approached the intersection of Main Street and Fifth Avenue, Jones called out. “Sir, you see that up there?”

  A block or so ahead, the entire street was full of reekers. More importantly, there was a multitude of abandoned cars and trucks. This had apparently been an evacuation route, and the civilians fleeing the apocalypse had apparently driven right into a wall of the dead. But the zombies we
ren’t the problem. While the MRAPs and larger vehicles could crush their way through the dead, the tightly packed vehicles would be a different story. Jones had to slow down almost to a stop; otherwise, the MRAP would have traveled right into the blockage. The towering MRAP caught the attention of every reeker in the street, and they shambled toward it as of one mind. A shambling flood of dead, necrotic flesh and a never-ending appetite for human flesh and blood.

  Hastings looked at his map, then quickly to his left and right. He pointed to the alley-like street to the right of the MRAP’s cliff-like nose. “Turn right here! Follow it to the end, then hook a left. That should get us around them.” He raised his voice. “Slater! Let the rest of the convoy know we’re taking a detour. It’s gonna be tight, so everyone needs to make sure they don’t bunch up in case we have to back out.”

  “Copy that,” Slater yelled in response.

  Jones turned the vehicle down Fifth Avenue, which was more like a narrow driveway alongside a house than a legitimate road. The MRAP barely fit down its narrow width and Jones had to drive slightly to the right on the overgrown grass of a house’s lawn. Tree branches scraped across the top of the vehicle, and Hastings worried about the .50-caliber machine gun in the turret. But it would be worse to crash along the house immediately to the vehicle’s left, so Jones had made the right call.

  The road ended a few hundred feet down into another T. A huge, open agriculture field lay directly before the MRAP, and to the left was a chain-link fence surrounding a small children’s playground area. Jones cranked the steering wheel to the left and continued to drive, paralleling Main Street. The vehicle was now behind a church and the house of worship’s parking lot which was also full of incapacitated automobiles, piles of garbage, and temporary shelters that had long ago been overrun by the dead. Zombies poured around the church, zeroing in on the convoy’s new route. Ahead was another intersection, and Hastings consulted his map as Jones continued on.

  “Keep going straight,” Hastings shouted as he scanned the area outside of the vehicle. Jones continued down the side street, still paralleling the town’s main drag. The road became very narrow and soon they were driving behind people’s backyards. Low hanging tree branches struck the MRAP’s turret and top in a cacophony that was clearly audible above the roaring diesel engine and the whir of the MRAP’s tall, knobbed tires. A small group of reekers stepped out from behind some trees, and Jones accelerated to meet them. Just before the figures disappeared before the vehicle’s tall nose, Hastings believed they had been an entire family. A man, a woman, and perhaps two teenage daughters mindlessly threw themselves before the speeding MRAP, their clothes torn and stained black with dried blood. The MRAP bumped slightly as the front tires rolled over the corpses, then again a microsecond later as the rear set of tires did their job. No doubt all the other vehicles following behind would roll them over again. The machine-gun fire from behind was constant now—short, controlled, continuous bursts was all that could be heard along with intermittent radio traffic and Slater giving directions to the rest of the convoy.

  Jones paused the vehicle at the next intersection. The road ahead looked even narrower. “Getting tight here, sir—which way? It doesn’t look any better ahead, left or right!”

  Hastings looked to the left, back at Main Street. The horde of reekers still pursued them, boiling onto the side streets. They were still more than a half block away, but there were runners in the mix—they’d catch up to them in no time if they stayed put.

  “Take the right and follow it around,” Hastings said. “It should come out back on the main drag when it ends. Hopefully we’ll be able to make another right and get back on course.”

  Jones wasted no time in making the turn and moving the convoy away from the reekers. Behind, the machine-gun fire rose in pitch as the Humvees and five-tons found themselves under direct attack. They were in the center of the convoy, and there was no way to switch them out now—they would just have to soldier on. The road they turned onto began to curve around to the left, bringing them back to their original direction of travel. The street was wider now, growing back into two lanes of blacktop. The houses became more spread out, with wider yards separating them from one another. Aside from a few reekers in the street, Hastings saw the way ahead was a clear straight shot. Jones saw that too, and he pressed down on the accelerator to pick up speed and get the hell out of Fairfield, Pennsylvania, as quickly as possible.

  “Slater, how we looking back there?” Hastings yelled over his shoulder.

  “So far, so good. Sounds like a few vehicles sideswiped a few things but all are still mobile. We just need to keep moving and not slow down—we’re dragging a mighty long tail behind us.”

  “You heard him, Jones … keep it rolling. Take the left when we get to the intersection ahead. It should take us back to the main road.”

  Jones barely slowed down to make the left turn onto a road called Beechwood Drive, and the MRAP listed drunkenly to one side. There were some shouts of surprise from the back, along with the clatter of unrestrained gear shifting under the centrifugal force caused by Jones’s speeding, sharp turn.

  “Safely, Jones!” Hastings cautioned. “Safely—we don’t want to end up on our side!”

  “Sorry, sir.” Jones continued to the intersection with Main Street and paused momentarily to quickly scan left and right. To their front was the Fairfield area school and a huge parking lot filled with vehicles … and even more reekers.

  “Oh, fuck me!” Jones turned the vehicle and accelerated as the reekers swung around toward the MRAP.

  “Slater, let the convoy know to expect a heavy reeker presence when they get back on Main Street at the school.” A long burst of .50-cal drowned out the last part of Hastings’s sentence as they sped past the school. The MRAP in trail had already opened up. More weapons added their own salvos to the din, including the muted thunder of an Mk 19 grenade launcher.

  “I think they track that, sir,” Slater yelled back.

  The convoy continued down the road past the school. The roadway remained two-lane blacktop, which was a relief for Hastings and, he suspected, Jones. Threading an MRAP down a single-lane street was zero fun when the heat was on. Small businesses were on either side of the street, and Hastings verified they were getting close to the edge of town. The sounds of gunfire eased up, then ceased altogether.

  “Jones, ease up a bit,” he said. “Let the column tighten up some.”

  Jones took his foot off the accelerator. “Roger that, sir. I’ll keep us at around thirty. Okay?”

  “That’ll do fine, Jones. Thanks.” Hastings heard Slater still talking on the radio in back. The sound of the engine, the whine of the radios and their fans, and the muted conversation among the troops behind him felt like a deafening silence now that it was over and the gunfire had stopped. Hastings looked back at the navigation system and zoomed in and compared what he saw on the display with his map.

  “We’re coming up on a Y intersection. Stay to the right fork. I think it’s called Jacks Mountain Road. Couple hundred meters ahead.”

  “Copy that, sir.”

  Jones slowed the MRAP as it approached the fork in the road. He guided the vehicle to the right and peered out the driver’s window. Hastings leaned forward in his seat and looked to the left as well. He found what he was looking for: the street sign. Jacks Mountain Road. And right behind it was a sign that exclaimed, “Welcome to Carroll Valley Founded 1974.”

  The convoy continued down the road for a solid ten minutes, rolling past small houses and farms until the column was once again surrounded by open agricultural fields that were slowly returning to the wild.

  Hastings yelled back to Slater, “Slater … tell the column we’re stopping, but to stay buttoned up. I just want to get a SITREP and make sure we’ve got everyone we started out with.”

  “I’ll let them know. Stand by.”

  “Go ahead and bring us a halt, Jones. Right here in the middle of the road is fine
.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jones slowed the vehicle to a stop in the middle of the road.

  The high school parking lot had been one massive field of reekers when Hastings’s MRAP had pulled up to the intersection. With the rest of the convoy behind him, he was sure the reekers had swarmed the road en masse. Now that they were clear, they needed to make sure they didn’t lose anyone and that all the vehicles were together. He’d monitored the common net and had heard all vehicles report in, but he might have missed some in all the excitement. Calling a halt to verify readiness was expected.

  Slater walked up from the back after a moment. “Hey, Captain. Looks like we still have everyone. Several of the vehicles report some minor damage, but the thin skins took a beating. At least one vehicle needs to be checked, the driver thinks there might be a reeker stuck beneath the undercarriage that he’s been dragging since the school. Everything else sounds pretty cosmetic damage. If you’re okay with it, I’d like to have every vehicle drop a guy to do a walk around and make sure we’re still G to G.”

  Hastings looked back at Slater. “Ah, G to G?”

  “Yeah, good to go. What are you … new?” Slater answered with a smirk.

  Hastings snorted. “Oh. Right. Anyway, yeah. I’m good with that. But tell them to make it quick. We’re not very far away from Site R, and I’d like to get there while we still have light.”

  “No problem, sir. Uh, about the approach to Site R. It’s a narrow access road to get up there, and if it’s a dry hole, that’s going to be a colossal pain in the ass to get the entire convoy backed down.”

  Hastings thought about that. “I’ll pass that on to War Eagle, with the recommendation that the main body waits off the access road. We’ll take Eagle One and his detail up and go from there. Cool?”