Surviving The Dead | Book 9 | War Without End

by Cook, James N.

  I chewed on that for a while. “How big do you think they are, exactly?”

  “Not sure, but I intend to find out.”

  “And that’s why you’re going with us?”

  “Part of it, anyway.”

  “What’s the other part?”

  He shrugged, and a fraction of the smile came back. “Maybe I missed you guys.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Maru,

  Southtown

  He entered through the back alley and walked through the kitchen of the Red Barrel Tavern. The cooks, servers, and dishwashers saw him enter and quickly looked away, pretending to be absorbed in their work. This was fine with Maru. He had never been much for conversation, preferring silence to stuttered greetings spoken in fearful voices. Not that he deliberately tried to frighten people, for the most part. It just happened, and he did nothing to discourage it.

  He saw his chief seated at the bar. The tavern was crowded, but Heinrich sat in a bubble of isolation, only a few people daring to sit within six feet of him. Those who did kept their voices down and their eyes averted.

  Looking at Heinrich, Maru felt a cold, sinking dread. He did not want to be here. Did not want to talk to this man. Did not want anything to do with the circumstances he found himself in but had no idea how to get out of. That was the shit thing about the path he had chosen—it no longer mattered what he thought or felt about things. Heinrich was chief because his followers believed he was. Men like the ones who made up the Storm Road Tribe needed someone to follow, someone to be the boss, someone to hate and fear and envy but, inevitably, obey. It mattered nothing to them that they followed an unhinged madman. In every pack there is an alpha, one who dominates. Among animals, such things are decided by brute force, but among humans, it is decided by cunning and ruthlessness. Both were qualities Heinrich had in abundance.

  Maru took a seat beside his chief. The man greeted him by glancing over and pushing a glass in his direction.

  “Have a drink, Maru.”

  “Thanks, Chief.”

  Maru hated moonshine. He was no great fan of alcohol in general. Nevertheless, he picked up the drink and downed it, keeping his face blank with a great effort of will. The stuff tasted horrible and the burn was anything but pleasant. He honestly did not understand why people lusted after drink with such fervor. There were far more pleasing substances out there if a man wanted to dull his mind. But refusing a drink from Heinrich would have been an insult, so he drank it and kept his revulsion to himself. It occurred to Maru he had been keeping his revulsion to himself about a great many things for an awfully long time.

  “Things are going better than I had hoped,” Heinrich said, watching a whore ply her trade at the end of the bar. The girl was perhaps sixteen but had the eyes of an old woman.

  “How’s that?” Maru asked. He did not really want to know, but when Heinrich dangled a sentence in the air, Maru knew he was expected to take the bait. It irritated him to no end. Heinrich loved shit like this. Theatrics, drama, playacting. It was how he drew people in, how he got his hooks into them and manipulated them into becoming instruments of his will. Maru saw through it, but as far as he could tell, he was the only one who did. Everyone else seemed to swallow the bait and ask for more. So, he went along. Had been going along for years now. But over the last few months he had started to question why he chose to do so.

  “Panic is spreading,” Heinrich said. “The government tried to suppress what really happened in the Refugee District, but word is getting out. People are talking.”

  Maru could not think of anything to say to that, so he merely grunted.

  “Pretty soon the cowards at Cheyenne Mountain are going to start pointing fingers. I’m not sure who’s going to take the blame just yet, so for now, we’ll have to wait and see.”

  Another grunt.

  “Things are going to heat up, though, you can count on that. And once the public is screaming for blood, we’ll know where to attack next.”

  Maru resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose and groan. “Any idea where that will be?”

  “Not sure yet. But wherever it is, we have to make sure that when it’s over, the public has no choice but to blame the government. Once that happens, chaos and panic won’t be far behind. That will be our opportunity.”

  Maru nodded silently. He hated the way Heinrich always used words like ‘we’ and ‘our’. There was no we. There was no our. Not in Heinrich’s philosophy. There was only him and whatever the hell he wanted.

  “I think I get it,” Maru said. “You want to destroy the public’s faith in the people supposed to protect them.”

  Heinrich smiled, revealing his missing teeth and twisting the scar at the corner of his mouth. Maru noticed a glossiness in the man’s eyes and a flush to his skin.

  Fucking hell, he thought disgustedly. He’s drunk.

  “That’s it exactly,” Heinrich said.

  “Seems we’re pretty far down that path already.”

  “True, but not quite far enough. I reckon one more blow ought to tip the scales.”

  Maru felt a strong urge, then. He had been feeling it a lot lately. He wanted more than anything pull his gun and put a bullet in this man’s head. It would solve so many problems and undoubtedly prevent a great deal of suffering.

  So why don’t I? For God’s sake, after all this time, what’s stopping me?

  Maru had no answer to that. Not yet anyway.

  “And what happens afterward?” he said. “I mean, what are you trying to achieve here? What’s the endgame?”

  Maru knew he was pushing things. Had he been sober, Heinrich would not have countenanced such a question. He would have given Maru a nasty grin and said something nebulous and cryptic and made a knowing face while saying it. There had been a time when Maru had bought into the bullshit and believed Heinrich really did have a secret plan. But time and hard experience had opened Maru’s eyes.

  The truth was, Heinrich was only good at planning up to a certain point. From there, he just made shit up as he went along. Maru knew this was true because when Heinrich was feeling confident, when he was sure of his next step, he had no trouble telling anyone who would listen what his plan was. The man’s narcissism required him to constantly brag about how smart and devilish and cunning he was. But once he reached that crucial stage, once he was unsure what to do next because he had not thought far enough ahead, that was when the winks and the grins and the ‘just you wait and see’ horseshit would start. And no matter how bad things turned out, no matter who died or how ruined things got, Heinrich always found a way to spin the narrative in his favor. If things went well, he took all the credit. If things went badly, it was always someone else’s fault. Maru had forgotten how many times he had watched someone die as a scapegoat, their life sacrificed on the altar of Heinrich’s ego. And all just so the mad bastard would not have to admit he fucked up.

  “The endgame,” Heinrich said, “is to create opportunities. Think about it. What happened after the Outbreak? Things were bad for a while, sure, but it also opened the door for men like us to create our own destiny. But the problem is, here in the Springs, the game is rigged. We got here too late to position ourselves at the top. I mean, sure, we can rule the underworld and buy influence, but how far will that really get us? I’m telling you, sooner or later, some crusader will come along and find a way to shut us down. It’s inevitable. So, in reality, there’s only one thing left to do.”

  Maru spun the glass on the countertop. He did not look at Heinrich because he knew if he did, he might give in to the urge kill him.

  “Change the game,” Maru said. “Burn the whole thing down and start over, just like after the Outbreak.”

  Heinrich laughed and clapped Maru on the shoulder. “You’re learning, my friend. You’re learning.”

  *****

  Maru, alone in his room, laid on his bed and stared at nothing. The nothing stared back at him and was silent.

  Like he di
d most nights when the silence became unbearable, he thought about his childhood. Thought about the crippling poverty and rampant drug and alcohol abuse among his people. He thought about how hard his parents had worked to give him a better life, and how he, in turn, had worked hard to do well in school. He thought about how excited he had been when, as a young man, he had emigrated to the United States to study engineering. He remembered the pride on his parents’ faces when they said goodbye.

  The excitement did not last long. Even now, he still was not sure how it all went so wrong so quickly. First had come the drugs. Then the money. Then the girls. Then the slow descent into not caring about school anymore, the forgetting of what he had set out to accomplish in the first place. When he was kicked out of college, he had told himself he did not care. He had found a new path, and he was going to walk it his own way. He had been arrogant then, sure of his own invincibility. Evidently, the act was convincing, because after beating the shit out of three puffed-up Colombian gangsters in a bar in Chicago, his life had changed forever.

  When the men had shown up at his door with several of their friends, he had thought it was over. That he had reached the end and he was going down hard. And it was the end, in truth, just not the way he thought. It was the end of one life, and the beginning of another. The men had not come to kill him.

  They had come to offer him a job.

  Then had come years of drugs, partying, women, steroids, endless hours at the gym with his fellow enforcers, and the inevitable violence of his profession. In those days, he had always told himself it was temporary, just a way to make money until he figured out a better plan. One day, he had told himself repeatedly, he would get out of the game and go legit.

  But years had gone by with nothing changing. Maru had not seen the path he was on because he had deluded himself against it. And he remained thusly deluded until one fateful afternoon when he had seen police lights behind the car he was driving—a car with twelve kilos of pure, uncut cocaine in the back.

  The bang of the judge’s gavel finally broke the delusion.

  When the Outbreak hit, he was two years into an eight-year stretch. Prison had not been that bad for him, comparatively. He’d had to hurt a few people early on to prove himself, but afterward, the gang he had run with on the outside welcomed him in. After that, it was just a long, endless slog with every day going along pretty much like the one before.

  The first sign of trouble was when the television feeds got cut. The guards only did that when something was happening on the outside they did not want the prisoners knowing about. He remembered watching with growing anxiety as, day after day, the guards grew increasingly tense and worried. A few of them must have talked, because it was not long before rumors began to fly, and the inmates began demanding answers. The warden acquiesced, rather than face a riot, and played video of the carnage taking place on the east coast.

  There was shock and fear, but surprisingly, no violence. Life went on pretty much as it had before. Even hardened criminals, apparently, have a hard time acknowledging that the world as they know it is ending. To compound this, the warden did an excellent job of convincing the inmates they were actually safer in prison than on the outside. This was reinforced by three companies of soldiers showing up and using the prison as an operating base. Maru remembered his fellow inmates seeing this as a good thing. They had spent the last few weeks watching whole cities burn on television, and the idea the government was taking steps to protect them was encouraging.

  But Maru knew better.

  The troops were not there to protect them, as the warden said. They were there because the prison was an excellent defensive position for the kind of threat the Army was facing. The troops could not have given less of a shit about the inmates. They wanted fences and walls and open ground between themselves and the growing hordes of undead.

  During the weeks leading up to his first encounter with the infected, life had been tense, but not altogether bad. At least not worse than any other day in prison. The guards came and went, meals were served, and the lights went out a ten. It was like being part of a machine that was slowly falling apart, and all the cogs and gears were trying to pretend nothing was amiss because if they did, the whole thing might explode.

  He was in the yard when the real trouble started. The guards hit the sirens and ordered a lockdown. Once in his cell, Maru had laid down on his bunk, ordered his cellmate to shut the fuck up, and listened. There was not much to hear at first. Then came a few gunshots. At this, the cell block came to life and descended into a cacophony of shouting.

  Despite the noise, Maru could still hear the fighting outside escalate. It went on for hours, the ceaseless chatter of guns turning the prison into a boiling frenzy. And then, just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.

  It took a while, but eventually the cell block went silent. A few minutes ticked by quiet enough Maru could hear his cellmate breathing. Then, slowly, a few at a time, prisoners began shouting for the guards, demanding to know what was going on. They got no answer. This went on for ten minutes or so, then out of nowhere, there was a clank and the cell doors opened.

  Maru remembered being surprised. The doors never opened without guards on the floor. He had gotten out of his bunk and walked outside and saw an army of other jump-suited men doing the same, all wearing similar looks of confusion. Maru had an inkling what was going on and started walking with purpose toward the doors leading to the outside.

  To his confusion, he found them open. What he did not find, however, was guards. And when he went outside and looked where the Army had set up their operating base, he did not find any soldiers either. Or trucks. Or Humvees. Or anything else, for that matter. The prison had been abandoned. But before leaving, some compassionate soul had taken pity on the inmates and opened the doors to let them out.

  He could not see much from inside the fence, so he walked outside of it to get a look around. As he approached the main gate, the wind shifted, and he was struck full-on by a roaring stench unlike anything he had ever encountered. It doubled him over and made him retch on the ground for a couple of minutes before he managed to gather himself and proceed on. When he emerged from the gate, the sight that lay before him was more terrifying than he could have imagined. He had seen similar things watching coverage of the Outbreak on television, but seeing it with his own eyes, in real life, laid out before him in all its horrible splendor, was almost more than his mind could take.

  He turned and fled back inside the prison’s walls. The rest of the prisoners, on the other hand, wasted no time leaving. Maru watched them go. When groups of them asked him to go with them, he refused. By nightfall, he had the place to himself. He thought it an ironic twist of fate that he had spent the last two years wanting nothing more than to leave this place, and now that he had a chance to escape, he could not bring himself to do it. The world outside was more terrifying than prison had ever been.

  He went around the huge facility and shut every door giving access to the outside. In the warden’s office he had found a pistol, two magazines, and a box of ammo. He took them to his cell and stashed them under the mattress. He was not sure why did this, it just seemed like the right thing to do.

  The next morning, standing in a guard tower and looking eastward, he spotted a small horde of ghouls in orange prison jumpsuits walk past. He ducked down and remained quiet and still for what felt like hours. Finally, his aching bladder motivated him to peer outside again. When he did, the ghouls were gone.

  It was the last time he visited the tower.

  He remained for another week. The kitchen had been stocked with canned food, and there was still running water, although he knew that would not last much longer. He spent most of his time in his cell reading books from the library and wondering how long it would be before something happened that would force him to leave. On the seventh day, he found out.

  He had ventured out of his cell that morning to check the exits were still secure. As he walk
ed toward the main gate, he heard the distinctive rumbling of an engine. It grew closer and closer until finally it was right outside the gate. By that point, Maru had already hidden himself from view, but could still see the road outside the prison. A pair of Humvees stopped beside the razor-wire fence and several men in Army uniforms got out. They swept the area with their carbines, shouted a few times, and then cut the chain securing the fence. The Humvees drove inside.

  Deserters, Maru thought. He was not sure how he knew, but he knew. And he also knew that if they found him, they would kill him. So he went back to his cell, grabbed the bag of food and water he had prepared, stuffed the gun and the ammo into the bag, and fled through a back exit.

  Thump, thump, thump.

  Maru’s thoughts snapped back to the present. Someone was knocking at his door. He opened his eyes, got up, and walked over to answer it.

  “Anything you need tonight, sir?” the innkeeper asked. “The kitchen’s about to close.”

  “No,” Maru said.

  A nod, the eyes looking furtively away. “Alright then. Have a good night.”

  Maru shut the door, walked slowly back to his bed, and laid back down. Put his hands behind his head. Let out a sigh. The ceiling looked the same as it had before. Looked the same as it would in another minute, and another after that, and all the minutes to come until something happened to change it. Maru found a metaphor in that. His life had become the same kind of blank space as the ceiling, unchanging because nothing was happening to change it. But unlike the ceiling, Maru had a will of his own. He did not have to remain the same and never alter the emptiness he lived in. He could do something about it. Problem was, he had no idea what.

  Not yet, anyway.

  CHAPTER THIRTY