On Steele’s left, waves crashed onto the shoreline, beating the sand with no remorse. The water was almost black, and the sky reciprocated the dreariness, reflecting a gray sunless sheet from above. The weather had been dismal since Colonel Kinnick and Joseph had left them on the beaches of Grand Haven.
“How much further?” came Gwen’s voice from behind him. The heavy packs weighed down on them, and the loose sand fell away from their feet. Each step felt like a battle against the elements, like they were walking on ground that could turn to quicksand at any moment. It wasn’t a nice little day hike but a soul-draining trudge enough for him to want it to be over soon. He looked over his shoulder back at Gwen. Her hair was pulled tight in a ponytail, her face set in a determined line of worry. Behind her trudged lanky Kevin and stout Ahmed, both looking equally as miserable. He stopped, facing them.
“We got about ten miles to go,” Steele said, pausing. “As long as we keep the cliffs on our right and the lake on our left, we will eventually get there.”
“Is there like a sign or something?” asked Kevin. The beanpole high-school teacher looked like a college student in an ROTC course with his too large Army Combat Uniform on.
“There’s an old dead tree that sits just below the hill on our beach. It’s big and gangly and ours. I’ll know it.”
Kevin strained against his pack and bent his neck to the side trying to relieve the stress. “I’ll keep my eyes peeled because I ain’t walking any further than I have to.”
Steele smiled, ignoring the complaining of his comrade. Instead, he focused on the land trying to recognize something from his past. A house sat on the cliff above them. It leaned dangerously on the bluff as if prospecting its own private beach. All whispers of a different time. Echoes of summer in the midst of a dying fall.
Wood stairs with landings every fifty steps raced up the sandy cliff leading to it. Clean naval-gray painted wood lined the house. A wooden deck lining the back of the house sat empty. Long rectangular panoramic-style windows were broken in. Behind the windows was only darkness.
“I figure we will trek another three miles up the coast and find a house to overnight in. That will give us about seven miles tomorrow.” He readjusted his thick pack that adorned his back, trying to free up some slack for his M4 carbine sling so it would stop chaffing the skin on his upper back. He shifted his tactical carrier vest, trying to regain some level of comfort from the weight of the black magazines of 5.56x45 mm NATO rounds. His chipped tomahawk hung from his right hip. In front of the hand axe rested his holstered M9A1 9mm Beretta. It wasn’t his preferred sidearm, but it had a similar double-single action design as did his former duty SIG he had grown accustomed to over countless hours of training in the Counterterrorism Division. He hadn’t had a choice. It was take whatever Colonel Kinnick had to offer him or have nothing for the long march home.
“Do you think she’ll be there?” Gwen said softly as if worried her words might reach him. Regardless, the wind carried her words away. Loose strands of her hair danced atop her head as she watched for his response.
Steele drew his mouth tight.
Steele pointed to the top of a short dune on their right. “Kevin, can you post up on that sand embankment and scout that way?”
“You got it, Captain,” Kevin said. He leapt up the sand dune with long strides and a groan of discomfort. Steele gave his back a dirty look. He hated when Kevin would call him “Captain,” a title he didn’t want or deserve.
He breathed through his nose and looked at her. “She was there six weeks ago. That’s the last I heard since phone service died.” The last you heard of your mother. What kind of son am I? She was here alone with no one, and I don’t even know if she’s alive.
“A lot has happened in the last six weeks,” Gwen said. Her words were pained and filled with worry. He gave her a flustered look. The puckering wound atop his skull reminded him that a lot had happened since the beginning and he still hadn’t fully healed from his last scrape with death. “I’m trying to forget.”
“Me too.” Her pretty lips frowned. “I’m only trying to manage expectations. A lot of horrible things have happened since the outbreak…” she trailed off.
The wound complained. The wind touching the exposed healing skin still sent weird pain and other shooting sensations through the nerve endings and into his neck. He gingerly ran a hand along the top of his head where the bullet had decided to spare his life. Instead, it left him with a wicked going away consolation prize.
“It doesn’t matter. I have to find out. If it were your family, you know we would do the same.”
“Would we?” she said. Her words took him aback. Unrepentant gray-green eyes stared at him.
Of course we would, but I can’t save us all. That’s one thing I know for certain. Then why do I keep trying? It was only another layer of stress piled atop him. It was hard enough to bear the losses he already had.
“But we’re here. So we’re checking on my family.” Waves continued their assault on the beach, roaring onto the shore.
“How will I ever know about my family?” Gwen said, her voice rising with emotion. He was taking them as far from people and cities as he could think of and basically the opposite direction of her family in Iowa. He considered them lucky to only have killed twenty or so infected in their entire four-day journey up the coast of Lake Michigan.
“I promise we will make sure they’re okay,” he said. Her face remained perturbed, her eyes almost matching the dark gray skies like a green thundercloud. Her eyes always seemed to change with her mood and the lighting. They spoke volumes of her soul and had only shown severe darkness since Pittsburgh.
He gave her a smile from underneath a beard that hung down to his chest like a castaway. Unwashed and unkempt save for lake water, it grew wild and free without oil or wax to keep it healthy. Just testosterone, sand and dirt fed the mangy animal on his face.
Her gaunt face paled as blood drained from her cheeks and lips.
He reached for her. “Gwen?” Her eyes grew wide and she smacked his hand away.
“What’s the matter?” he said as she spun around. She darted up a sandbank, clouds of tan sand springing up behind her. She bent in half at her hips, puking into the dune grass.
“Gwen? What’s wrong?” he called out. She continued to get sick as the swaying grass lapped her ankles.
Still bent over, she wiped her mouth with her sleeve. “It’s just something I ate,” she groaned.
Steele’s stocky Egyptian ally sidled up next to him. With his previously shaved head needing a trim, he looked a bit like a chia pet experiment gone wrong.
“What do you think it was? The fish?” Ahmed asked. He held his gun uncomfortably as if he wished it were a baseball bat instead. They both watched her heave, the two of them concerned. Ahmed had saved her life early in the outbreak, and his attraction to Gwen had caused tension in the small group. The two men bonded over their mutual care for Gwen while destroying the bridges of Pittsburgh at the behest of Colonel Jackson.
“We all had it,” Steele said. He watched the woman he had been in a relationship with for years heave.
“I haven’t been feeling that great,” Ahmed confirmed.
“The only other option is the MREs with enough sodium and preservatives to back you up for about a month.”
Steele’s eyes ran from Gwen back to Kevin. Kevin crouched in the grass, only his head sticking out. The lanky man gave no signals of approaching dead. Steele’s eyes never rested. He was always scanning for something out of the ordinary. Go with your gut feeling. Last time he had ignored his gut screaming, “It’s a trap!” he had almost lost his head. Not again.
“I’m just thankful we have food,” Ahmed said.
“A little variety couldn’t hurt. Let’s go check on her.”
The two men hiked up the embankment. Gwen held her abdomen, hunched in a miserable position.
Steele placed a hand on her back, rubbing her gently.
&
nbsp; “Babe, you okay?” he said.
“I’m fine,” she snapped. She spit hard in the sand. She stood upright, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Color returned to her cheeks in uneven blotches as if they still weren’t sure she was better.
“I can carry your pack,” Steele said, reaching for her. It would be horribly inefficient and exhausting, but he would do it. She dodged him, throwing a shoulder out of his reach.
“I got it. You have enough.”
“I could carry it. I got less,” Ahmed offered. Steele was already maxed out, having been forced to ruck most of the ammunition for the group generously offered by Colonel Kinnick.
Gwen straightened her back.
“No. I can do it myself. I don’t need either of you carrying my pack for me.”
Ahmed gave her a sorry smile. “Just trying to help.”
“I’m fine. Let’s keep moving,” she said with an apologetic smile for Ahmed but nothing for Steele.
I cannot wait for this conversation later, he thought.
“Steele, come look at this,” Kevin half-shouted. Steele scanned the beach quickly, looking for movement. That was one of the only good things about their enemy. They were noisy and moved like blacked-out drunks. He ran along the dune ledge, bounding alongside Kevin. Steele quickly took a knee, decreasing his profile next to Kevin. The gangly man pointed down the beach.
“Well, I’ll be damned. More than we’ve seen yet,” Steele said as more of an afterthought. A ragged pack of infected hobbled down the beach a couple hundred yards away. Wind whipped their torn clothes. Fractured bones protruded from gray dead skin, and intestines peered out from open gut wounds.
“What about up the stairs?” Kevin asked, straight brown hair flipping around his head. The beach had provided them with ample protection from the infected. Something had now driven them this way. Steele was wary to find out. Every time they engaged the infected, they chanced infection themselves or expended too much ammunition putting them down. Ammunition was a finite commodity at best. Only a headshot will do. Save the bullets for when you need them.
Steele nodded to Kevin. “Up the steps. We’ll follow the coastline up top along the cliff.”
They jogged along the sand embankment. When Steele reached Ahmed and Gwen, he slid down the dune, letting the collapsing sand take his weight down a few feet.
“We got infected incoming. We’re going to take the cliff,” Steele said.
Gwen eyed the houses as if they were wolves, peering down upon them from atop the lake cliff. “What if there are more up top?” Gwen insisted. His girlfriend was a voice of concern and reason in a sea of doubt, but doubt bred doubt. Indecision got men killed in warfare all the time. Indecision when facing the infected was a final mistake.
“Then we will have to come back down to the beach.”
“We could get pinned between two groups,” Ahmed said. Steele stared at him. Sometimes he wondered if he was even in charge, or if this was some cruel prank where if the infected didn’t kill him, their nagging would. The Arab man looked expectantly at Steele.
“That does look like a lot of steps,” Kevin said. His eyes fluttered up the cliff as he counted.
Steele took a deep breath. “So you’re telling me, you would all rather risk fighting a whole pack of infected with the possibility of dying than walk up some damn steps?”
Kevin shrugged his shoulders. “Just saying. That’s a lot of steps.”
Steele gave him a snort of a laugh and a shake of his head.
“If you weren’t carrying so many bottles of booze in your bag, this wouldn’t be a problem.”
Kevin smiled. Mirth filled his half-open eyes. “You don’t seem to be complaining.”
Steele grinned. “I’m not one to complain about a drink at the end of a long day.”
“Hey, you guys. We don’t know it’s safe,” Gwen said. Her carbine was angled downward in a safe position, but her eyes continued to watch the cliff, untrusting of what might lie in wait above them.
“We don’t know what we don’t know. Eventually we are going to bunk in one of the houses. No better time than now,” Steele said.
“Fine,” she said, glaring at him as if she had let him win this time but wouldn’t the next.
Steele made for the red wooden steps at a jog, not looking behind him, knowing that one way or another they followed him.
KINNICK
Airborne somewhere over Illinois
Whop whop whop. Two helicopters’ rotors thudded as they raced one another across an angry sky. Clusters of gray clouds crowded above them, pushing on one another for space. Below them, patchwork fields of brown and yellow created the land quilt of rural Illinois. A wide chocolate brown snake curved over the land, crawling as far as Kinnick could see north and south. The Mighty Mississippi River. More like the Muddy Mississippi, he thought to himself. Wind cut through the open doors of the UH-60 Black Hawk that ferried his men to the United States Government’s last rally point in Colorado. Those were the last orders he had received from General Travis before the Pentagon was bulldozed under the dead.
Brown-bearded Special Forces Master Sergeant Hunter, his senior non-commissioned officer or 18Z, slept in the seat across from him. His beard crept down the front of his tactical gear like a neck protector, and he wore sunglasses that covered his sleeping eyes. His head leaned back against the helicopter wall with his mouth slightly open. If they weren’t in a helicopter, Kinnick was sure he would hear the man snoring. The M4 carbine, the shorter, lighter variant of the M16 assault rifle, leaned muzzle down, resting against his thigh between his legs. A gloved hand rested on the pistol grip, his index finger straightened out just above the trigger. He was still safely handling his weapon even when sleeping.
Next to him sat the elusive Center for Disease Control doctor, Joseph Jackowski. His shaggy brown hair swept low, almost into his eyes that were concealed by glasses with cracked lenses. The doctor had evaded them for over a week in the remains of Pittsburgh, Ohio, and Michigan. Kinnick’s squad had finally caught up with the squirrelly doctor on the lakeshore of Michigan. Now, Kinnick’s unit was a lot lighter than when they had first started. Almost half of his pieced together search and rescue unit were gone.
The doctor had brooded since they left Michigan, even as he studied Patient Zero from across the Black Hawk cabin. His eyes blinked rapidly, taking in every breath, twitch, and movement of Patient Zero.
Patient Zero mumbled something unintelligible through his gag.
Special Forces Weapons Sergeant Turmelle hit Patient Zero with his shoulder. “Shut up, Jody.” He gestured to the defeated man with his head. “Jesus, this guy is such a fucking pussy.”
Patient Zero hung his head in defeat, revealing his sparsely haired bald head.
Kinnick’s men called Patient Zero a Jody, in reference to the military man’s civilian nemesis featured in military cadence calls. Jody was medically unfit, not squared away, or brave. In military lore, a Jody actively worked against the men by stealing their girls and living a luxurious life while the servicemen fought. For Kinnick’s men, Patient Zero fit the bill on everything they despised. While they had been serving their country, Patient Zero, a pathetic, infected, out-of-shape man, had destroyed their world.
When Patient Zero was coherent, he went by Richard Thompson. The man had only had one relapse since they were airborne. His body writhed and he launched himself violently at Kinnick’s men. A relapse was an ugly thing, dangerous all the time and potentially deadly while in the air.
Green socks stuck out from underneath the duct tape covering Patient Zero’s mouth. His men had been generous with their application of the tape. Whatever little hair Patient Zero did have would be gone when they ripped it off. His hands were gray-taped nubs, the tape wound so many times around that no part of his hands was exposed. He was seat-belted in tight as possible. He wore an extra harness clipped to the side of the helicopter in case he decided he was tired of this world and wanted to throw h
imself out, plummeting to the ground. Kinnick was pretty sure by the sorry look of him, he didn’t have it in him to do the job right.
Turmelle nudged Hawkins, sitting next to him. The half-Asian intelligence sergeant’s face was stoic as stone.
“What’s the matter, Hawk? Jody’s got your tongue.” Turmelle snickered at his own joke.
Hawkins didn’t take the bait but blinked acknowledgment. “No,” he said.
Turmelle shook his black curly-haired head in irritation, staring at Patient Zero. “What?” Turmelle yelled at Patient Zero, pumping his head at him. Patient Zero flinched and looked downward. Satisfied with his level of intimidation, Turmelle leaned back with a smirk. His hand stroked his kukri. The wicked knife at his hip was enough to make Kinnick nervous that Turmelle might use it on the infected man.
Kinnick’s radio clicked on in his headset. “Colonel Kinnick, we’re getting low on fuel. I believe it would be prudent to set down in Hacklebarney. There’s a small airfield there,” the pilot said.
“Hackle-what?”
“Hacklebarney, sir. A small airfield in Iowa.”
“There’s an airfield around here?” Kinnick said. He leaned to the side, looking at the rectangles of brown farmland below.
“Yes, and they’re responding to our radio chatter.”
“There are people down there?” Kinnick leaned forward toward the cockpit. “Here I was thinking we were in flyover country. Put me through.” The radio crackled and went silent.
“Hiya, this is HAK. Grady here,” came a rural accent, not a drawl like the south and no elongated vowels of the northern Midwest. They stretched their sentences enough to let you know they weren’t from the city and sounded off on their O’s a bit so you knew they were from the Midwest.
Kinnick smiled. Now this is a down-home country boy.
“This is Colonel Kinnick, United States Air Force.”
Hunter perked up in front of him, visibly snorting himself awake. He swatted at Turmelle’s knee with his hand.
The Rising (The End Time Saga Book 3) Page 2
