Surviving The Dead | Book 9 | War Without End

by Cook, James N.

  I opened my mouth to protest, but Gabe stopped me with an upturned hand. “Hawk’s right. There’s no time.” Gabe leaned up and poked his head through the hanging cloth between the buckboard and the cargo area.

  “Thompson, stop here. We’re getting out.”

  “Roger that,” Thompson said, and began hauling on the reins.

  When the wagon was stopped and the brake set, we all piled out, dragging our packs and weapons with us. We were still wearing the unmarked black fatigues we had set out in earlier in the morning. The wagon had been brought to us by a pair of Blackthorns Gabe trusted to keep their mouths shut. We sent them back with one tied-up, hulking brute by the name of Maru Tahaka. Gabe told the Blackthorns to find a secluded room with a nice sturdy pole to chain him to, and we would deal with him later.

  “What’s the plan?” Holland asked as we donned our packs and checked our weapons.

  Gabe thought for a moment, and I could practically see the building plans for the tavern appearing in his mind like an interactive hologram.

  “Eric and I will hit the main entrance. I want you and Thompson to take the service entrance in the alleyway on the east side. Cole, Hawk, go in through the back.”

  “We’re not leaving anyone to watch the street?” Cole asked.

  “If I know Caleb, he’s already got somebody on that. Just make sure you announce yourselves going in. We don’t want any friendly fire. Questions?”

  No one spoke.

  “Same drill as before. Radios on channel three, keep the chatter to a minimum. Eric and I are Alpha. Hawk, your team is Bravo, Thompson, you’re Charlie. Let’s move.”

  I paired up with Gabe and followed him onto a side street, then turned left toward the tavern. The others went their own directions, paralleling the tavern so as not to be seen on approach. We were only one block down from our destination, but that was plenty of distance to get spotted by one of SRTs lookouts. However, as Gabe and I moved down the narrow street and dodged piles of garbage, delivery wagons, and homeless drunks sleeping it off in the early morning chill, I realized I need not have worried. Most everyone was asleep at this hour, and if the gunfire at the tavern bothered them, they gave no sign. I wondered what it said about this neighborhood that the sound of automatic weapons chopping away before dawn was no cause for concern.

  We turned a corner at a barber shop and waited briefly in the alley. The main entrance was directly across from us, less than twenty feet away. The gunfire inside the tavern was much louder and more rapid than it had been before. What few people there were on the streets moved hurriedly in the opposite direction.

  Gabe got on the radio. “All stations, Alpha in position.”

  “Bravo in position.”

  “Charlie, ready to go.”

  “Move on my mark,” Gabe said. “Three, two, one, mark.”

  Gabe went first. I put a hand on his shoulder, kept the muzzle of my rifle pointed alongside but well away from him, and held the optic at eye level with the stock tucked into my shoulder. We moved quickly toward the front entrance and stacked up on either side when we reached it. The door had been smashed in by a boot or a sledgehammer. It still hung on its hinges, but the handle and doorjamb were shattered. Somehow it had managed to swing shut, blocking our view of the interior. Gabe held up a hand, silently counted down from three, and then pushed through the door. I went in a step behind. Gabe broke left, as was his usual habit, and I broke right.

  “Caleb, it’s Gabe,” he shouted loud enough to ring my ears. “My people are coming through the entrances. Don’t shoot them.”

  I heard a muffled voice shout, “Roger that.”

  The room was clear. There were a couple of dead bodies on the ground, both obviously SRT. They had died before they could fire a shot, as evidenced by the fact their weapons were still leaning against the wall.

  “Clear,” I said after checking behind the bar.

  “Clear,” Gabe answered.

  We moved through the kitchen door and split up to cover both sides of the long counter running down the middle. There was a wood stove on one side, still burning with a pot of something dark and smelly on it, a filthy sink on the other side, and a few boxes of winter vegetables and raw meat stacked up in a corner. I had a second to wonder how people ate this shit without dying, and then gunfire picked up again above us.

  “Looks like the fight moved upstairs,” I said.

  Rather than answer, Gabe got on the radio. “All stations, Alpha. Report.”

  “Got a few dead bodies here,” Thompson answered. “Otherwise clear.”

  “The same,” Great Hawk said.

  “Copy. There should be two stairwells. One in the back close to the exit, and one on the other side of the kitchen where I’m at. Thompson, link up with Hawk’s team. Holland, you’re with me. Do it fast, we need to move upstairs.”

  A few seconds later we heard approaching footsteps and a knock on the wall. “Alpha, it’s Holland. Turning the corner. Don’t fucking shoot me.”

  Holland stepped around the corner. There was a crackle, and Thompson said over the radio, “Alpha, I’m good to go.”

  “Copy. Hawk, move now.”

  “Roger that.”

  Gabe took point going up the stairwell. I went behind him and turned as I went up to watch our backs. There was a landing at the corner atop the stairwell that led to a long hallway lined with narrow rooms on both sides. Several of the doors were open, and I could see figures crouched in the doorways. Gabe took one side of the hallway and I took the other. Holland followed behind, turned so he could watch our backs as we moved along. Ahead of me, I saw Great Hawk’s head appear above the floor at the other stairwell. He waved a hand, and Gabe waved back, motioning for him to stay low. If the Hawk and his team went up the stairs now, we would run the risk of hitting them if we had to shoot. Better if they stayed in reserve for the moment.

  As I walked down the hall as quietly as I could, a man I did not recognize leaned out of a doorway and peeked around. When he saw me, his eyes went wide, and he swung his weapon in my direction. I was ready for it. My rifle was against my shoulder, knees slightly bent, gaze steady through the optic’s glass. Before the man could aim, I hit him with a double tap through the sinus cavity. A splash of red appeared on the wall behind him and he slumped to the floor, weapon slipping from nerveless fingers. The suppressor on my rifle dulled the noise so it was not deafening, but it was still loud enough to announce our presence to everyone in the hallway.

  “Cover!” Gabe shouted, and rammed a shoulder through a doorway on his left. I did the same through a door to my right. The room was empty, for which I offered a quick prayer of thanks. There was a bed along the wall opposite me, a small chest of drawers with a pitcher and a bowl on top, and a tiny nightstand. Turning, I leaned out the door and covered the hallway while Holland approached and slipped into the room with me. Across the way, there was a high, feminine scream and a male voice shouting angry words. I heard a meaty slap and the angry words stopped. A second later, a scrawny fellow wearing only a pair of homespun pants came tumbling out of the room followed by a blanket-clad girl no older than sixteen. Both were barefoot, the girl’s legs flashing under the blanket as she ran down the hallway and practically fell down the stairs we had just come up. The man hesitated a moment, fists clenched, and then saw me looking at him. More importantly, he saw the rifle I had leveled at his chest. I took one hand off the weapon and pointed firmly toward the stairwell. The man nodded quickly and was gone in seconds.

  “Gabe, that you?” Caleb’s voice called out from a few doors up.

  “Yep,” Gabe called back. “Five friendlies with me. Watch the far stairwell.”

  “Roger that.”

  One of the SRTs took the moment as a distraction and leaned out to fire. A pistol appeared through another open door and fired four times. The man uttered an agonized scream, dropped his weapon, and retreated inside the doorway.

  “It’s over,” Caleb yelled. “There’s
eight of us and only three of you left. Throw down your weapons and come out with your hands in the air.”

  “Fuck you!” someone called out and followed up by shooting a swarm of bullets through the walls. The shots were aimed away from me, but I hit the floor anyway and flattened out as best I could.

  In movies, when people shoot at someone behind cover indoors, the bullets smash into the flimsy drywall and either stop or ricochet away from the heroes. In real life, it does not happen that way. There was no drywall here, only thin, vertical tongue-in-groove wooden slats. The insulation, judging by the tufts of pink fibers littering the ground, was salvaged pre-Outbreak fiberglass. Neither was anywhere near enough to stop a bullet. Also, contrary to what television and movies would have us believe, bullets can go through not only one, but several walls without much deviation in their flight path and without losing all that much velocity. Which is to say, even a bullet fired through several walls is still extremely lethal if it hits you. That said, most people shoot at shoulder level, so if bullets start coming through the walls, the best thing you can do is hit the ground and go as flat as you can. That much, at least, movies usually get right.

  The gunfire did not last long. Whoever was shooting was doing it on full auto. It only takes a few seconds to completely drain a magazine shooting that fast, which is why I rarely flip the selector switch all the way over. When the shooting stopped, I leaned out the door, aimed in the general direction of where the shots had come from, and fired six times. I heard cursing, but no screams.

  A few doors up, Christina Hahn poked her head out, saw me, motioned toward the door I had just shot at, and moved swiftly toward it. For a horrified second, I thought she was going to try for a room entry, but my horror turned to relief when she stopped and expertly winged a flashbang through the entrance.

  The SRTs had a second to shout at each other, and then a flash of light and a hollow boom filled the hallway. I had my eyes closed and my hands over my ears, but it was still somewhat painful. I could not imagine how the bad guys felt.

  When I looked again, Hicks, Hahn, and Downs were all approaching the door where the flashbang had just detonated. Downs was on point, yelled at someone to drop the weapon, and then fired five times.

  “Anyone else?” Downs said as he entered the room and went out of sight. Hicks and Hahn were right behind him.

  I looked behind me and saw Holland had moved back out to the hallway and was covering our retreat. Gabe was on one knee, leaning out of his doorway, rifle trained down the hall to cover Hick’s team in case there was anyone else in another room. I moved across the hall, took a knee, and joined Holland in covering our six. A few seconds later Hicks emerged and gave the all-clear. I stood up and looked at Holland.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “I got this.”

  I walked down the hall and stopped in front of Hicks. He was sweating despite the chill and had a bleeding scratch on his forehead, but otherwise looked unhurt. Hahn and Downs had a man by the elbows, his hands zip-tied behind him. He was smallish, rail thin, and probably not more than twenty years old. Just a kid, really.

  “This the only survivor?” Gabe asked as he approached behind me.

  Hicks nodded. “They put up a hell of a fight.”

  Gabe stood in front of the kid and stared down at him. The kid looked up nervously and tried to take a step back, but Hahn and Downs gave him a shake.

  “I’m only going to ask you this once,” Gabe said. “Where are they?”

  “What?” the kid said shakily.

  I barely saw Gabe’s arm move, but the sharp crack of his hand striking the kid’s face was unmistakable.

  “Want to try again?” Gabe said.

  Hahn’s eyes widened, and she looked at Gabe with a mixture of surprise and anger.

  “Hey, this is our prisoner,” she said.

  Gabe turned the cold gray eyes on her. “I don’t care. We need to find those things and we need to do it now.”

  “You mean the big ones? The monsters?” the kid said.

  “Yes.”

  “They’re not here.”

  Gabe did not speak for a couple of seconds. “Where are they?”

  “I think they’re-”

  Before the kid could finish, an explosion rattled the walls.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Sabrina,

  Memorial Plaza, Garden District

  A woman in a torn dress stood atop a pile of wreckage.

  From the heaps of bricks and protruding spears of rebar, one could infer the wreckage used to be a building of some sort. The woman clutched a short hatchet in one hand and the hand of a small boy in the other. The boy’s cherubic face wore a carefully crafted expression of fear, mouth open in alarm, eyes turned imploringly up to the woman. The woman looked not at the boy but stared straight ahead, shoulders squared, eyes fixed on some far destination. An inscription at the base of the statue read, ‘ALWAYS FORWARD’.

  It did not take a genius to figure out the symbolism. Looking farther down the bronze figure, Sabrina noticed both the woman and the boy were barefoot. If there was a better analogy for desperation than bare feet on sharp rubble, Sabrina did not know what it was.

  She had been barefoot when the soldiers had taken her mother away. She remembered broken glass biting into her feet while she screamed and struggled and tried to bite the hands holding her back. She remembered fleeing the encampment shortly thereafter and running and running until her feet were torn and bloody and the pain was unbearable and then running some more. She remembered panicking when a few hundred infected heard her crashing, clumsy flight and chased her to the charred remains of a small town in West Virginia. They could smell the blood, she knew. She had left a long trail of it over grass and fields and streets littered with crashed vehicles and dead bodies. The infected followed that trail straight to the house where she had taken refuge. They could not get to her, but neither could she get away from them. She remembered trying to decide if she would rather die a slow death of dehydration or find something in the house to do the job less painfully.

  And then she found Manny.

  He used his shirt to cover the wounds and stop the bleeding, and then they had waited long, painful hours in the stifling heat with only a liter of water between them. The infected eventually lost interest and wandered off. After waiting a few more hours just to be sure, she and Manny had climbed down from the attic and searched the town for supplies.

  They discovered food and water, but despite their best efforts, neither of them managed to find shoes that fit her and would withstand more than a day of trekking through the rough West Virginia hill country. Finally, after Sabrina had broken down in tears of grief and frustration, Manny patted her on the shoulder and said, “You rest now. Go to house. You keep rifle. I find something and come back soon.”

  He was gone until nearly sunset. When he returned, he had a leather awl, some twine, a vinyl cutter, and a dried-up old tire. Sabrina remembered being confused. Manny seemed so happy with what he had found, but it made no sense to be excited over a bunch of old junk. Her confusion soon gave way to curiosity, though, as she watched Manny use the vinyl cutter to trim pieces of the tire to fit Sabrina’s feet, pierced them in a few places with the awl, and then threaded the twine through the holes.

  When he was finished, he held them up and said, grinning, “New shoes.”

  It was two weeks before her feet were healed enough to try them on. At first, the cords raised welts on her ankles and between her toes, so Manny suggested she wrap her feet in cloth until they calloused at the places where the strings rubbed. She tried it, and after a few more weeks, her feet hardened and she threw away the wrappings. She remembered being so impressed she insisted Manny teach her how to make the sandals herself.

  In the years that followed, she kept an awl, some twine, and a sharp, thin-bladed knife with her everywhere she went. The world was full of old tires, and as long as she could find one, she would never go shoeless again.

 
; Looking anew at the monument, Sabrina thought if she had designed it, she would have made a few changes. The woman would have been Manny, and the boy would have been her at age ten. Instead of a hatchet, Manny’s fist would have clutched his old .22 rifle, and Sabrina would have a knife and pistol tucked into her belt. Manny would be smiling, as he usually did, and Sabrina would be scanning their surroundings with wide, feral eyes.

  “What are you thinking about?” Elizabeth asked beside her.

  Sabrina startled a bit and then berated herself for letting old memories distract her. In the wastelands, that kind of lapse could get her killed.

  “Manny,” she said after a few seconds.

  “The man who raised you?”

  “Eh…I wouldn’t say he raised me, exactly. More like we looked out for each other.”

  Elizabeth passed a hand through her arm and held it affectionately. The contact made Sabrina’s pulse quicken, and she only barely resisted a compulsion to pull away. For a fraction of a second, she was back in the darkness of an abandoned hardware store with a hand over her mouth, struggling to breath, struggling to scream, struggling to push away the heavy weight and stinking breath. Then the knife was in her hand and she was thrusting upward again and again and again. The heaviness cried out and the weight came off her and she heard Manny shouting angrily in Tagalog. Then she heard a sound like tearing paper, the distinct wet punching of repeated stabbing, coughing, gurgling, and then silence.

  “Like an uncle, or an older brother?” Elizabeth said.

  Sabrina swallowed and willed away the memory. “Something like that. He taught me a lot of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “He grew up in the Philippines, outside Manila. His family was poor, so they had to get by with pretty much nothing. He learned how to be self-sufficient. When I was ten, he taught me how to make shoes out of string and old tires. When I was twelve, he taught me how to build a forge and make my own weapons. He gave me these,” Sabrina held open her coat to show the twin karambits at her belt. “And he taught me how to use them.”