by D. J. Molles
Wilson worked the det-cord frantically, but then all the lines were connected and he didn’t have anything else to do until they sent the bag back down with more C4. He filled the empty time with all of the ways it could go wrong. He had just sent a man that he barely knew to do the detonation. How did he know that Gilmore wasn’t going to freak at the first sign of infected and punch the detonator, blowing up Wilson right along with the bridge?
Shit, that’s a damn oversight.
What if Gilmore did the opposite? What if Gilmore was so scared that he refused to detonate even when the infected were crossing the bridge in droves? What if Wilson got cut off from his group, huddled there underneath the bridge while the sound of millions of infected feet pounded the cement two feet above his head?
What if Wilson couldn’t make it out from under the bridge in time? Did he really want Gilmore to punch it anyways? Did he really want to die for this bridge?
His stomach felt fluttery and weak. Fingers and toes tingled. Perhaps a little light-headed, which wasn’t good when you were balancing twenty feet off the cold water below. Cold water with snakes and biting fish and… and… whatever the fuck else was in there.
Water moccasins.
Is that a snake?
He’d heard people mention them. The name sounded ominous.
God, I hope there’s not water moccasins down there.
“Coming down!” Gilmore yelled.
The seabag swung down, heavy with explosives. Record time. If they’d worked this fast earlier then it wouldn’t be flop-sweat time now. If I make it through this one, it’ll only be midday by then. Could we rush to the next bridge and blow it before dark? If we can do that we can buy ourselves a little time. Then we won’t be under the gun so bad tomorrow.
As it stood now, it was a neck-and-neck race.
Wilson didn’t want to be in a neck-and-neck race with the infected.
He squatted down and reached, feeling his back and shoulder muscles complain as he snatched up the pole from where Gilmore had left in on the next pylon. Then he hooked the seabag and yanked it in. It felt heavier this time, maybe. Or maybe Wilson was just tired. Or maybe Gilmore had just thrown a bunch of shit into the bag without really counting out the poundage.
Can we afford to be this sloppy? Can we afford to be wasting C4? We barely have enough to blow all the bridges as it is…
Once again the anger poked up. Anger at Gilmore, indirectly, and Colonel Staley, directly. They needed help. It would take a goddamned five-second fire mission from an artillery battalion to level this bridge to rubble. No race against the clock. No potential loss of life—for them anyway. And he knew for a fact that there was artillery stationed at Camp Lejeune, because Gilmore had mentioned it in passing. He had mentioned it, very blasé, too.
Oh. What? You don’t have a battalion of 155 mm Howitzers?
Can you even kill a bridge with artillery? Wilson wasn’t sure. But he knew they could send an air strike. He knew that shit worked because he had seen it with his own eyes. He knew it would be expensive and a hog on resources for them, but they wouldn’t even have to do it for all the bridges. Just a few. Just to help Wilson get a leg up.
Did they not see the threat here?
He was slapping on C4, haphazardly, angrily. Uli knot. Cut the center brick. Stuff the det-cord in. Swing to the next side. From up top, blue det-cord swung down, wriggling and twitching like a live thing.
“Hook me up!” Gilmore shouted from up top.
Wilson gathered the det-cord that had already been chained together—deceptively heavy from all the other connections that had been made. He pulled it to him gently, not wanting to accidentally yank some det-cord free of the C4 it was intended to detonate. That would be just his fucking luck…
Tires screeched.
The sound of a Humvee roaring up, then the overused brakes squealing.
Wilson was frozen under the bridge. He could hear Tim saying something, but even as he strained, he couldn’t tell what it was. He could tell that Tim’s blood was up. He could tell that there was urgency there and it made Wilson want to just grab that rope, get up top, and get him and the group to safety. Fuck it. He would rather fight on the run than die for the goddamned bridge.
Sorry, Lee…
The voices on the top of the bridge became suddenly silent, as though they too were listening to something.
In Wilson’s straining, the blood rushing past his ears, and the steady, omnipresent sound of the water flowing underneath him, he almost didn’t catch it. But then a short, sharp bark echoed up to him from down the river and it seemed to break through to him, and then he could hear it.
The muted roaring sound.
Like a tornado bearing down on them.
Tim’s voice, yelling over the side of the bridge at him: “Wilson! They’re almost here!”
Shit shit shit.
Cut and run or stay? Cut and run or stay?
He realized his hands were still working. Shockingly smooth for how jittery he felt. All the rest of him was a live wire, twitching and sparking. But his hands seemed possessed by another, steadier man. He was working. Still working. Getting all the det-cords hooked up. And that seemed to be the impetus he needed.
I’m gonna get it done.
Two full cuts. Nice clean demolition.
Just keep working smooth and fast. Focus on the work. Not on how close they’re getting.
Close. They were getting very close. So close that he could hear them, and he bet that if he took his eyes off his work and looked down the river, he would see them splashing around in the banks, slinging water around and swinging around the trees that lined the water, crazy, stumbling, apelike forms, running forward and then stopping to sniff the air, to sniff out prey.
“Don’t look,” he told himself. His thoughts now coming out of his mouth. “Don’t look. Don’t distract yourself. Focus, focus, focus…”
He looked.
And wished that he hadn’t.
Dorian stared out the opposite end of the bridge, facing southeast—the direction they were coming from. And he could see them. Along the banks of the river. Very close. And he could see the whole woods rippling with them, the bare-bones forest seeming to come alive with strange, jerky movements.
He could hear them. He could hear the roar of thousands upon thousands of voices. A noise that he had never heard before. At least not like this. He’d seen crowds, and he’d been in crowded places, and in a way, it was the same sound. But he had never been in the presence of so many. And the noise was like a physical thing, pressing at him.
He ran to the other side of the bridge, pulling his rifle off of his back. He began pointing at people from his group, shouting to get their attention, and then he was pointing to the southern side of the bridge. “Get everybody off the bridge! Get off the bridge!”
Lance Corporal Gilmore had a big roll of blue det-cord and was running with it. It pinwheeled in his hands and the det-cord unspooled after him, leaving a trail where he had run. Here at the bridge, the main line of the det-cord had been shoved into a crack in the bridge abutment to keep it steady while it was unspooled. Beside where the det-cord was hooked, the black rappelling rope was also hanging over the side.
Dorian went to it and hung his upper body over the edge, yelling down. “Wilson! Hurry the fuck up!”
“I just got a few more bricks…”
“Fuck the bricks! You need to get out of there!” Dorian screamed, his voice going up with stress. “They’re almost on the bridge!”
Behind him, one by one, the vehicles roared away.
All but the LMTV to which that black rappelling rope was attached.
“Come on, Wilson! Just go with what you got!” Dorian looked down the bridge to the safe side—a relative term—his eyes following the line of blue det-cord. Gilmore was already off the bridge, heading for more distance. The vehicles passed him by, and then the last one slowed, and he hopped up onto the tailgate as it was still moving.
Dorian felt suddenly very alone. Very afraid. His courage was like a thread stretched between him and the others, and the more distance they gained, the more frayed and tattered that cordage became, and now it was breaking, and he realized that his hands were trembling.
From under the bridge, Wilson’s voice floated up, only breaking through to Dorian because of the urgency that it held: “I’m on the rope! Pull me up! Pull me up before Gilmore fucking blows this thing!”
Dorian looked down, could barely just see Wilson’s form swinging out from under the bridge, the top of his head, the dark skin, the eyes looking up at him, expectantly.
Pull me up before Gilmore fucking blows this thing.
Dorian glanced to the far side of the bridge and nearly fumbled his rifle.
Where before there had only been concrete, now there was a wall of bodies, hurtling toward him, all of them running in great loping strides, their voices mixing together in a blood-freezing ululation. The one in front, the one leading the others, was tall and lank and dark-skinned. Even across the distance, Dorian could see the flash of the thing’s teeth, gnashing in the air as though it could already taste flesh.
Holy shit.
Dorian fired his rifle. The percussion of that first round seemed to deepen his trance. The next three rounds Dorian didn’t even hear or feel. He was one hundred percent focused on the lead infected, sprinting toward him and the bullets that he was lancing out there, and he saw in intimate detail like a close-up, slowed-down, instant replay as the projectiles pierced the man’s lower leg, shattered the shin bone, rippled through the calf muscle.
The man faltered, that one leg going out from under him.
The next projectile hit him in the right side of his chest, perfectly square on so that Dorian could see the shock waves of flesh rolling out from the hole that was spewing bright red arterial blood. Dorian didn’t see where the last two rounds were, because the man that was sprinting at him collapsed, face-planting into the concrete, and he never moved again.
Behind the fallen infected, at that wild and dangerous end of the bridge, in a land stripped clean by the hordes of infected like a ruined farmer’s field after locusts, the roiling, animated woods, closed in on the road, choking the blacktop with gray bodies.
“Dorian!”
He looked over the edge, saw Wilson again.
Thoughts, very clear: If I pull him up, I will not make it out of here. If I leave him there, he will be blown up by the blast, but if I try to pull him up, I will be overrun by the infected. It is just me. Just me. Just me and nobody else. And I will be overrun and I will die. And Wilson will die either way—blown up or eaten. I could save myself if I ran, but I’m not going to do that, am I? No I’m not. I can’t do that…
“Hey!” Wilson had his knife in his hand. “Get off the bridge!”
Dorian fixated on the knife in horror. The edge hit the rope and started sawing. “No, no, don’t do that!” He reached out like he might grab ahold of Wilson, though the man was ten feet out of his reach.
Then the knife made it through the rope, and Wilson was falling.
EIGHT
FAULT
SNAKES SNAKES SNAKES.
Wilson thought as he fell.
He hit the water. For a moment, it didn’t make it through his clothes and then all in a rush it struck every inch of his skin and it was frigid enough to seize the breath in his lungs.
First thought: It’s so cold I’m gonna die.
Second thought: Too cold for snakes.
His boots touched the ground. Full-blown panic exploded the air out of his chest. He tasted muddy water. How deep did he have to be to touch the ground? Would he ever make it back to the surface? Oh, God, not the river bottom I hate the river bottom I hate the river bottom I don’t want to touch it I don’t know what’s down here what in the fuck is down here?!
He clawed for the surface.
Silt sucked at his boots. Branches that might have been skeleton fingers or the teeth of crocodiles scraped his legs. Then he was free and he could feel himself rising—or at least hoped that was the sensation he was feeling. Maybe what he was actually feeling was all the oxygen being depleted in his lungs and him drowning, still caught beneath the surface of the river.
He had an image so clear that he thought it was real—himself, thrashing around in the deep waters, dragged along by the current, never able to come up for air, being caught on a submerged tree, tangled up, dying there in the dirty brown water.
His hands hit cold air. Slapped the top of the water. Then his face and head broke, felt the water sheen off. He spat, then pulled in all the air he could handle. He opened his eyes to a watery smudge. His legs were pumping furiously to keep him afloat. He blinked rapidly to clear his vision and looked around him, twisting in the water. The bridge was maybe twenty yards behind him. He could make out the top of the last LMTV—driven by Dorian?—hurtling across the bridge toward the southern bank.
The current was quicker than it had seemed.
He could see the southern bank sliding past his vision with surprising speed. There was a lot of water between him and that bank. A lot of muddy, silty river bottom, and a lot of clawing, submerged trees. Something grabbed at his back.
He cried out, but simultaneously told himself It’s just another tree.
He twisted to push himself away from it.
Wild eyes. A dozen faces. Barking, reaching, grasping.
A tree branch swept into his view and he reacted too late, too sluggish in the water. The ends of it lashed his head, scraping across his face from left to right. An infected stood on the bank, knee-deep in the water and closer than the others, grunting madly at him, and trying to hit him with the tree branch that it clutched.
Wilson backpedaled, splashing loudly in the water and seeming to excite the infected on the bank. They inched closer into the water while the one with the branch took another swipe at him. What was it doing? Trying to knock him out? Or hoping that it could pull him closer to the bank with the branch?
Wilson couldn’t force himself to turn away from them, and he tried clumsily to backstroke away, but the current of the river was pushing him toward the infected, and now more and more were gathering at the riverbank, drawn by the excited calls and the sound of Wilson’s panicked splashing.
Not this! Not this!
You should have stayed on the fucking rope!
It would have been better to be blown up!
He was only a yard or so out of their reach. His feet hit mud. Squished down to his ankles.
The branch came again. This time Wilson warded it off with his left hand, while his right groped for the pistol he had strapped to his leg. He feared pulling his feet out of the mud and trying to swim. He thought that there was no way he could outswim the current, and then he would be pushed toward the infected and he would feel them grabbing his feet and that would be the end of him.
Eaten alive. Eaten alive. Do you want to be eaten alive?
He found the pistol and ripped it out of its holster. It breached the surface in a shower of white water and his finger was already pulling the trigger. He had no idea where the rounds were going, but the infected on the bank reacted by drawing back, one of them pitching over backward, though Wilson wasn’t sure if it was from one of his shots or not. He’d only seen them recoil from gunfire a handful of times. Perhaps their discomfort with the water was making his gunfire more convincing. Frankly, he didn’t give a shit what the reason was. He had them going in the opposite direction, and that was all that mattered.
He lurched out of the mud and propelled himself away from the riverbank, swimming as hard as he’d ever swum in his life. Just taking one big breath and not worrying about taking more. He plunged his head into the water and spun his arms as fast as he could, kicking his legs until they started to burn.
When he couldn’t go any farther without taking a breath, he lifted his head out of the water, gasping and spluttering, river water pouring into
his eyes. He looked over his shoulder as he swam wildly for the other side. He had gained distance, but not quite as much as he would have liked. The infected were still crowding on the bank, prancing around with irritation, like hunting dogs under a treed animal.
He was maybe halfway across.
His pistol was still in his hand as he swam. He thought about dropping it, letting the river take it, but he couldn’t bring himself to let it out of his hand, no matter how cumbersome it made his swimming. He didn’t even know how many rounds he had fired, or how many he had left in the gun. For all he knew it was empty and had just failed to lock back—which wouldn’t be the first time.
Ahead of him the riverbank loomed, the trees seeming monstrous from his low perspective. Their roots were tangled and serpentine and Wilson didn’t want to go near them. But to get to the other side of the river, you had to go through all those tree roots…
The world seemed to heave.
The sound hit him like a physical wall.
There was a sharp pain in his ears, and then a fluttery, waterlogged sound, like everything he heard was through the walls of a shower stall with the pipes running. Instantly, the calm river turned to white water. Wilson could feel himself being rolled over.
Rollin’ on the river, he thought dazedly. Ro-o-ollin’ on the ri-ver.
His free hand shot out through the water and grabbed the first thing he could find. His fingers wrapped themselves around decades of scum and algae that sheathed a tree root. His hand almost slipped off, but he held tight, feeling his body still drifting the way of the river flow, like a wind sock hanging loosely by a thread.
I don’t want to touch that!
But he wanted to be rollin’ on the river even less.
He looked up, feeling the cold water dribbling over his mouth and lips. Straight in front of him, maybe two hundred yards away at the most, the bridge was obscured by a massive dust cloud. He swallowed tangy and odd-tasting water, then coughed and pulled himself closer to the tree, his eyes wide with shock.
