Surviving the Dead (Novel): The Hellbreakers

by James N. Cook

  “You ready?” I called out.

  “Send it over,” Cary replied.

  I let the ladder fall slowly. One of Cary’s people, a man about my height, reached out and took hold of it. We braced the ladder between us as best we could. The asphalt shingles on the shed gave better purchase than the clay tiles on his, but there was nothing for it. We would just have to be careful and hope for the best.

  “Let’s move,” I heard Cary say.

  I risked a glance around me and wished I hadn’t. More ghouls were filtering in from all directions, hundreds of them. If we did not get out of this place in the next minute or two, we would be trapped. And that would be the end of that.

  “Come on!” I ordered. “You see those fucking ghouls? Let’s go!”

  The first person on the ladder looked eighteen if he was a day. He was a short, darkly tanned kid with black hair and dark eyes. His eyes were wide and his hands shook as he placed them on the rails.

  “Don’t think about it,” I told him. “Just do it. The others are waiting.”

  He looked at me, swallowed, and nodded quickly. The dark eyes closed for a few seconds, his lips moved, he made the sign of the cross on his chest, and then he began crawling. To his credit, he did not mess around; once he was going, he went fast. In ten seconds he was across and safe.

  “Brace the ladder,” I told him when he was back on his feet. “Don’t let it move.”

  “Okay.”

  I stood up and the kid took my place. My legs straddled the peak of the shed’s roof and I waved the next person on.

  It was a woman this time. She had gray hair shaved down to half an inch or so. Her skin was so black it was almost blue. There was a diagonal scar on her face from her right temple all the way down to her left cheekbone. It made her nose look slightly sideways. She laid down flat on the ladder, stretched her hands forward to brace herself, and pushed on the ladder rungs with her legs. From her quick progress, I guessed she had done this kind of thing before.

  “Thanks,” she said as she stood up. I pointed at the kid.

  “Thank me by helping him.”

  “Got it.”

  Now there were two people bracing the ladder. Another man, a guy a little bigger than me, came across. The bracket that held the two halves of the ladder together bent a little, but held.

  Cary said something to the man holding the ladder. He shook his head and nodded toward the shed. Cary opened her mouth to argue.

  “Just come on, goddammit,” I yelled. “We don’t have time for this.”

  Cary looked toward me. I pointed downward. Her eyes followed and swept the yard. Enough ghouls had gathered beneath us that we had maybe a minute before we were cut off from escape.

  “Fine,” she said.

  She stretched out on the ladder and was across in seconds. I helped her stand up and pulled her toward me. She hugged me back, her arms strong around my waist, her skin hot beneath my hands.

  “You’re okay,” I said. “You’re okay.”

  I was not sure who I was trying to console, her or me. She planted a kiss on my helmet’s facemask, her lips leaving a perfect outline like lipstick on a letter.

  “Thank you,” she said, and let go of me. “All right, Landon, your turn.”

  There was a second of jealousy when she diverted her attention, but I pushed it down. She was doing her job, and I needed to do mine. No one needed me on the ladder, so I walked to the edge of the roof and looked down. It was all bad news down there. The space between the house and the shed had filled up. There was a wall of ghouls six feet wide on the back end, the place where we were to make our escape. If Cary and the others were going to get down, something needed to be done about them.

  “Hail Mary full of grace…”

  I backed up two steps, unslung the axe and the AR-15, and tossed them past the edge of the Horde. Cary turned to look at me.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting us out of here.”

  I took a deep breath, held it, ran two steps, and launched myself into the air. My arms pinwheeled as I flew, struggling to keep my legs beneath me. My body cleared the ghouls but the ground was rushing up at me fast. I managed to turn a little in the air before hitting the dirt with my knees bent. The impact drove the air out of me. Without thinking, I let momentum take me forward into a roll, a cloud of dust flying up around me, the world spinning from earth to sky and back again, over and over. My head hit the ground hard enough to make my teeth click, and I thanked the sweet Lord above I had remembered to wear my helmet. A second later the rolling stopped. As I stood up, oxygen found its merciful way back into my lungs and I breathed deep.

  Moved the arms. Moved the legs. Nothing broken. Good.

  My left leg was not entirely cooperative as I lurched over to collect my weapons. Bruised knee, the inner voice said. No big deal. Push through it.

  I slung the axe and came up with the AR-15. Chambered a round. Flipped the safety to fire. Took aim.

  CRACK.

  Heads whipped around. The ghoul I shot went over like a felled tree.

  “That’s right, assholes. Look over here.” I fired again and hit what I was aiming at. Evidently, the drop had not harmed the VCOG sight.

  Sturdy little bastard.

  I worked my way around toward the ladder, firing as I went. I had no hope of decimating the ghouls’ numbers; my goal was to distract them from the people over their heads. As I rounded the corner, the next to last person crawled across to the shed. The only person left on the house was the tall guy who had helped me brace the ladder. From the bottom view, I could see that the brackets holding the ladder pieces together were badly bent.

  “Hold on,’ I roared, trying to be heard above the moans and howls. “Let me draw them away first.”

  The man shook his head and held his hands up to his ears. I can’t hear you.

  “For fuck’s sake.”

  I refocused on shooting. I yelled and cursed and hurled insults and tried to make my bullets count. I was mostly successful. To my dismay, despite Cary shouting and motioning for him to stay, the man began crawling across the ladder. The brackets sagged. The man kept going.

  “Hey!” I screamed “Stop! Go back!”

  One of the brackets popped. The ladder sagged violently and the man went prone, hands clutching the rails, eyes bulging in horror.

  “No!”

  The second bracket bent, squealed, and gave way.

  The man fell.

  Cary and her people looked away. The screams were the most heart-rending thing I had ever heard. The man disappeared into a heaving morass of limbs and howls and teeth. I tried to get a shot at his head for a mercy kill, but could not see him.

  “Fuck. FUCK!”

  My teeth clenched so hard I thought they would break. I lifted the rifle and began firing. The barrel poured out flame and fury until there were no rounds left in the magazine. I pressed the release, let it drop, and slammed in a replacement. Released the bolt. Took aim.

  “Stop, Alex.”

  A hand tugged at my arm. I spun around to strike at it but stopped with my hand in the air.

  It was Cary.

  “What…how did you get down?”

  She pointed. I looked. The ghouls were so bent on feeding on the dead man they had abandoned the back of the shed. Cary and her people had used the unbroken side of the ladder to climb down and simply walked away.

  “We can go now.”

  I looked back to where the man had disappeared. The screaming had stopped. I sent up a silent prayer to whoever was listening that the ghouls damaged him enough he would never wake up. My hopes were not high. From what I had seen since the Outbreak, the gods had become appallingly stingy with their mercy.

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  THIRTY

  I began to sway as I walked.

  We were on a road called Jackrabbit Trail headed south. Cary got underneath me and looped an arm around my waist.

  “Easy there, Alex.
Let me get this jacket off you.”

  I shook my head. “Not until we’re safe.”

  “You have heat exhaustion, Alex. You’re about to collapse. Take it off.”

  I wanted to argue but did not have the strength. I stopped walking and dropped my weapons. Cary undid the fasteners on the front and peeled the heavy coat from my shoulders. There was a light breeze blowing from the north, the first stirrings of the coming fall. I turned into it and held my arms up. A gust of air cooled the thin layer of moisture over my skin, a pleasure better than anything I could think of at the moment.

  “The helmet too,” Cary said.

  I took it off and squinted at the sudden brightness. “Where’s Hahn?”

  “She called me on the radio. I’ll keep her updated on our position.”

  “We should go find her.”

  A shake of the head. “No. Hahn’s a tough woman. She can take care of herself. You, on the other hand, need medical attention.”

  Again, I had no will to argue. The dark-eyed kid got under one arm, Cary the other, and the two of them held me upright as we made slow progress toward a massive house in the near distance.

  “We’ll stop up there,” Cary said, pointing. “There’ll be shade. Hopefully some water too.”

  I lost track of time. Sound came to me in a stir of warbling echoes. My limbs felt heavy and my head pounded in time to the thrashings of my heart. I knew I was in trouble but could not bring myself to care. All I could pay attention to was the ground, the dirt under my boots, little clumps of dry brush coming into view and disappearing behind me. I have no clue how far I walked like that.

  After three or four eternities of slow, agonized marching, a shadow fell over me. I looked up to see what it was. The sun was hot on my face and my vision swam.

  “We’re here,” Cary said.

  We walked a little farther. There was a sliding glass door ahead. It had been smashed open. Thousands of shards littered the ground in front of it, sparkling and casting rainbow prisms in the sunlight. My boots crunched glass and sand as I walked over it. I happened to notice one particularly large piece and stopped. Something was off. I stared at the triangular shard and tried to place what was wrong.

  “You okay?” Cary asked.

  I kept staring. Something was stirring in the gray matter, but there was so much haze in my head it could not resolve into a clear message. “Something’s not right,” I said, my tongue thick in my mouth.

  “What?”

  “The glass…”

  Cary pulled at me impatiently. “It’s fine. Probably been there since the Outbreak. Let’s go.”

  I let her pull me inside. Let her lead me to a couch. It was covered in dust. I sat down and a thin, sandy cloud puffed up around me.

  “Dust…dust…”

  Cary squatted down in front of me and took my hands. “Alex, it’s gonna be all right. You just need to sit and cool down for a while. Here, take some of my water.”

  She handed me a half-full canteen. I turned it up and drained it in four long, thirsty gulps. My neck felt weak, so I leaned my head back and rested it on the couch. Another dust cloud formed around my face.

  Dust…

  I remembered the smoke I had seen from the top of a hill overlooking Sun City West. I remembered hearing gunfire on the far side of the valley where no gunfire should have been. I remembered the drone operators’ reports of activity at the far end of their little aircraft’s range. A picture of the shard formed in my mind, clear and bright and clean.

  Clean…

  My head snapped up. There had been a clean spot on the glass, like someone had scraped away the grime with the edge of their fist. For a moment I thought it could have been one of our people, but that didn’t compute. No one had been sent to this block. My squad was supposed to cover it, but that was before Cortez had given the order to retreat. Which meant…

  “Shit. Cary, we have to get out of here.”

  She frowned. “No, Alex. Everything’s fine. You-”

  “Would you shut up and listen to me?”

  Cary’s eyes widened. I leaned forward and whispered.

  “There’s someone else here. We’re not alone.”

  The pretty brown eyes did a sideways roll. “Alex, there’s no one else here.”

  A voice I did not recognize said, “Actually, there is.”

  We both looked, our heads swiveling to the staircase behind me. The kid was there. He looked scared. He had good reason to be. There was a man standing behind him with a gun to his head.

  “Nobody moves,” the man said.

  I remained motionless. It was just me and Cary in the living room. The others had fanned out to search the house for infected. I vaguely remembered seeing the dark-eyed kid head upstairs alone.

  Cary stood up, hands raised. “Listen, take it easy. Okay? We’re not here to hurt anyone.”

  The man smiled. It was not a nice one. It was bright and cruel and shiny as a stainless steel razor. He nudged the kid and they both started walking down the stairs.

  “Bring ‘em in,” the man shouted.

  There was movement from two corners of the house. Form those corners, two more strangers appeared. Each of them had a pistol jammed into the back of one of our people’s heads. Our people were unarmed, their weapons in their captors’ possession. I wondered how the gunmen had captured them without making a sound.

  Professionals.

  “Drop the weapons, both of you,” the man on the stairs said.

  Cary kept her hands up, but did not move. “Listen, I don’t know what you think is going on here, but-”

  The man pointed the gun at Cary.

  “Shut. Up. Now.”

  Cary stopped talking.

  The axe was propped against the couch next to me, its blade on the floor. I doubted the man on the stairs could see it from his angle. Not that it did me any good. He had me, Cary, and the kid in his field of fire. No way to fight back. I looked at the other gunmen. They were all male, dirty, bearded, lean, and they all had nasty, ghoulish delight in their eyes. Their skin was brown from sunlight and accumulated dirt. I could not determine any of their races; the filth on them was too thick. Their prisoners, the surviving members of Cary’s team, looked terrified.

  “What do you want?” I asked. The gun swiveled my way. I didn’t find this terribly comforting, but at least it was not pointed at Cary.

  “Stand there and be quiet. One more word and you die.”

  I swallowed a bitter retort and stayed quiet. The man moved the gun to the back of the kid’s head and used his free hand to take a radio from his belt.

  “Home, this is sparrow five. Repeat, sparrow five. How copy?”

  There was a crackle of static. “Loud and clear, sparrow five. Sitrep?”

  “We have bingo, home. Repeat, bingo. Request immediate transport to my position.”

  “Copy, sparrow five. Wilco. What’s your twenty?”

  The man gave directions. I listened intently. When he was finished, he replaced the radio on his belt. We all stood and waited. The gunmen smiled. Cary’s people looked frightened. I was struggling to keep my face still and blank, just the way I used to do in the cage.

  The water Cary gave me had cleared my thinking a little. I replayed the radio conversation in my head. It only took a few seconds to reverse-engineer the directions the man on the stairs had given.

  I know where you’re based now, asshole. If I get out of here alive…

  “We’re all just going to stay calm and wait. Nobody moves, nobody gets hurt.”

  I didn’t move. The man on the staircase had scarred-over wound on his left ear shaped like a half moon, like someone had cut off a piece of it, or shot at his head and missed and nicked the ear.

  Crop-ear. That’s your name.

  I looked to the other two. One was maybe five-foot six. He had a gun to the black woman’s head.

  Stumpy. That’s your name.

  The last gunman was tall and lean and had a huge no
se that looked like it had been broken at least five times. A large knot of tissue along the bridge gave him a distinctly birdlike cast.

  Buzzard. I’ll call you Buzzard.

  Crop-ear stopped trying to stare me down and began scanning Cary from head to toe. There was a subtle shift in his face, a lightening of the eyes, a smug sneer taking shape around the mouth. I felt my blood begin to boil.

  “My, my. Aren’t you a pretty one.”

  Cary stayed silent.

  “What’s your name, beautiful?”

  Silence. Cary had gone pale.

  The gun moved. The smile on Crop-ear’s face turned into an aggressive snarl. “I said what’s your fucking NAME!”

  The shout reverberated through the room loud enough to make my ears ring. Something moved to my left. I looked and saw Hahn standing in the shattered glass doorway.

  “Down!” she ordered.

  There was a split second of hesitation from everyone in the room. Then things got frantic.

  The kid was the first to react. He ducked and hurled himself down the stairs, curling into a ball as he went. Hahn fired two shots at Crop-ear, but the angle was bad and the shots went wide. Despite that, they passed close enough to wipe that smug fucking look off his face and send him ducking for cover.

  Buzzard reacted next. He tried to take cover behind his hostage, the black woman whose name I hadn’t caught. She was having none of it. She twisted in his grip, faced him, took hold of the arm attached to the hand gripping her collar, and bit it as hard as she could. The man screamed and raised his pistol to bash her in the head.

  He never got a chance.

  Hahn’s rifle coughed twice more, the reports as loud as exploding bombs. Both shots hit Buzzard in the neck, one of them ripping through his bulging Adam’s apple. The man dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.

  Must have severed the spine.

  Stumpy was a little smarter. He lowered his aim and fired a round into his hostage’s thigh. The man screamed and his legs buckled. Stumpy took a knee behind him and fired over the wounded man’s shoulder. His target was Hahn, but by the time he pulled the trigger, she wasn’t there. Stumpy’s bullets hit only air. I heard him curse in frustration.