I moved between the pines with practised ease, taking long strides through the snow and stepping over the tracks the dogs had left. I was grateful that they'd chosen this morning to pass through here. It'd mask my footprints better than anything I could do.
I stopped from time to time and listened, opening my mouth and breathing slowly. Far ahead I picked up something just on the edge of hearing. I strained my eyes left and right, catching the slightest movement from a falling leaf or bounding rabbit.
I took another few steps forward and stopped again, always using the largest tree as cover. I heard it again. Something like a snapping branch. My calves were burning as I crouched. I listened again. It was nearer, but from where?
I moved right, looping counter-clockwise around the source of the sound. Another. And another. It was a cocking rifle, the action of the bolt being pulled back over and over. Mumbled words. Cursing.
I continued moving slowly until I saw something move between the trees at the edge of my range. A flash of dark green fabric. More sounds. Words becoming clearer. I pressed on until I saw them in a gap amongst the trees. There were three of them, three green shapes that I wondered if they stood still would disappear into the pines.
Using the trees as cover I moved closer in, never taking my eyes off them. I could see blood in the snow now - splatters of it where teeth had rendered flesh with violent tears. Ahead, maybe a metre or two, was a leg daubed in bloody fur. There was more gore further on. Bits of neck and shoulder. A rib.
“Fucking piece of shit,” said one of them and it came through the woods as clear as a bell. I froze to the spot, staring down the narrow gap amongst the trunks. The soldier was struggling to free the jammed round in his weapon and the others were watching with silent amusement.
“In your own time, Healy,” said another. “It's not like we're in a rush or anything. I want to get up there and radio it in so we can fly back to the ship.”
“It's bad enough we have to be out here in the first place. Shitty fucking weather, shitty fucking weapon,” said the guy with the jam.
“Can't we just pipe it in now, boss?” said the third guy. They all sounded the same from this distance.
“Shut up. It's up that hill, nothing more. I saw the damage from the frigging 'copter. She didn't survive that, not on my fucking life.”
The man with the weapon suddenly cheered as the round popped out of the chamber and dropped to the ground. Then they began to move again, heading south-west towards the ridge where Riley would be waiting. Could she shoot Americans in cold blood? I didn't know if I wanted to find out. I suddenly realised I was concerned for her, a former Ranger, who could easily look after herself without my help. Was it concern or something else?
I followed the three soldiers but now I began to close the distance. There were the remains of two more dogs along the way and I used their mess to further hide my trail. A plan was forming in my mind and I hoped that not all the dogs had fled, that some of them were still out there somewhere.
“It's just up there,” said the leader, pointing through a clearing to the rise of the cliff face that Riley had fallen from just days before. “Come on.”
The man who'd had the jam dropped back a little to poke the remains of a dog with his boot. The other two carried on tramping through the snow. I circled to the right again, coming within two trees distance of him. Already I had a length of paracord strung between my hands and wrapped around my knuckles. He still had his back to me until the boss shouted for him to catch up. When I looked I realised he was within line of sight of the two of them.
I followed. They weren't far from the edge of the woods now and soon I'd hear Riley begin firing. If she nailed all three of them we'd have no information other than what they were carrying, which might be nothing. I quickened my pace, keeping close to the straggler as he struggled to catch up with the others.
Then it happened. He stumbled and it almost seemed theatrical - like it'd been planned. He began laughing to himself but the other two were now out of range of him. I began running, closing in on him. My breathing turned into harsh, tearing sounds as I felt the adrenaline surge. I dropped to my knees behind him and he turned, his flushed face now ashen pale as it dawned on him what was happening.
With the same movements I'd used on many an animal I slid the cord over his head, bringing both my hands in towards my chest and throwing my weight backwards into the snow. The cord snapped tight around this throat and he buckled, falling back but with his knees still beneath him. He writhed on top of me, kicking his feet free and I pulled my head close in behind him, shutting off any hope of him smashing my skull with his own. Far off a crack of thunder sounded and it was rapidly followed by another. Riley had taken the two soldiers and this man was now alone.
He fought for his life but he needn't have bothered just yet. As soon as he passed out I released my hold on him, putting him on his side and tilting his head back. His neck was bleeding where the cord had cut into the flesh but his breathing had started again. I used the cord to tie his hands behind his back, then another piece to bind his ankles.
The next part of the plan was to communicate to Riley that it was over, that there'd only been three of them without getting myself shot. I left the soldier still breathing and followed the tracks of the other two, coming across their lifeless bodies just outside the edge of the woods. Both had been dispatched with precise shots to the head - the backs of which were open like smashed melons. I kept far back from them and hid behind a tree, just in case.
What to do now? Wait until dark? I didn't want to keep my prisoner out in the woods that long. If my plan was to work I wanted the dogs to come back and preferably not whilst I was there. It meant that Riley needed to come down and help interrogate the soldier.
With my heart firmly in my mouth I stood up and put my arms in the air, walking towards the edge of the woods, waiting for the sound of the rifle and the impact of the bullet in my skull. I guessed I wouldn't feel it but the fear was still there. I just hoped she was the skilled marksman she claimed to be and didn't fire before identifying me.
I stepped out between the bodies and stood there, arms up like a fool and waited. When the silence told me what I needed to know, I nodded, gave the thumbs up to where I thought she might be. Then I began looking at the two dead soldiers.
On closer inspection I could see they were young - too young to be of any danger to us and more than likely they were on some kind of shitty assignment to try and impress their superiors. The 'boss' was no older than twenty and the other was seventeen at the most, fresh out of training. A quick search turned up a wallet with his I.D in - I'd been a year out. The 'boss' was nineteen, the other eighteen.
They had no packs, only waist belts with twenty-four hour survival kit in. They expected to be picked up that day, maybe within the hour. There was a radio on the boss - their means of telling the 'copter crew they were ready to be picked up.
By the time I'd stripped their bodies of anything valuable, I began to hear footsteps and saw Riley coming across the snow, limping considerably on her bad leg.
“G. Is,” she said. “Kids.”
“You okay with that?”
“Guess I'll just have to be, won't I?”
“I heard them - they were looking to make sure you were dead.”
“Me? No mention of you?”
“No,” I said. “Radio, no packs.”
“Then they'll be missed. The helicopter will be back.” I showed her the radio. “How many?”
“Three. The other one is back there,” I said. He was coming around now and his legs started to move. Riley began to make her way over to him whilst I gathered the stuff we could use. I left it in a pile where I could find it again, then began dragging the body of the boss back into the woods. By the time both corpses were lying face-up next to our prisoner, Riley was talking to him.
“What's your name?” she demanded. He was still on his side but he was looking up at her with terror i
n his face. When he didn't respond, she yelled at him. “Name and rank, soldier!”
“Morris, Tom, Private.”
“What are your orders, Private Morris?”
“Morris, Tom, Private,” he repeated.
“We don't have time for this,” I said. I took the coat off the larger soldier's body and passed it to Riley to hold. I wasn't going to take the guy's pants but I took his gloves, hat and scarf that were in a pouch on his belt. I replaced both wallets on the bodies where I'd found them.
“Private Morris, I'm a former US Ranger. Are you aware of that?”
“Morris, Tom, Private...” he said and Riley smashed the butt of the rifle into his knee. There was a loud snapping sound and Private Tom Morris began to scream.
“Private Tom Morris. Your orders. Now.”
“Morris, Tom, Private.” Riley stepped on the smashed kneecap and leaned forward. Private Tom Morris began writhing and bucking under the pain. “Our orders were to make sure you were dead! Please stop!” he cried. Riley stepped off him.
“Do you know who I am?”
“They said you were a terrorist, a traitor who was trying to finish us off with a chemical weapon.”
“Who said?”
“Colonel Korban. He's in charge, he's been giving the orders.”
“Since when?” Sadly, the boy found some courage and began reciting his name and rank again. I winced as Riley smashed his other kneecap into fragments with three successive blows from the rifle. When the screaming finally stopped, Private Tom Morris was ready to talk.
“Colonel Korban took command after the President killed himself. He ordered us to board the Revenant and we sailed here last week.
“A carrier? Where?”
“Just off the Isle of Mann. He said the terrorists responsible for killing our families were here. We were to hunt them down and kill them. You were one of them. You're supposed to be dead.”
“Well I'm not - but a good friend of mine is. What's happening back home, Morris?” she said.
“They're dying. All of them.”
“How?”
“We don't know. Something in the air. We wanted revenge so bad. That's why we signed up when Corban asked us to.”
“Revenge for what?” said Riley. “What the fuck is going on back home?”
“It's all over - millions are dead. There's no government now, no command, no nothing. All my family are dead... all dead...” He began weeping and his tears dripped into the bloody snow.
Riley turned away from him and looked at me, her own face now pale with horror and fear. I didn't know what to say or what to do. Our eyes met and she began to shake her head softly from side to side.
“It's all true,” she said. “Everything I feared.”
“Are you sure? He may be lying,” I said.
“No,” she replied. “He's only confirming what I already knew deep down, what I guessed. The riots. The panic. It happened and now they're all gone.”
“Not all of them - there'll be survivors, something, some kind of hope...”
“I... I don't know... What do we do now, Miller? What do I do?”
I looked at Private Tom Morris. I looked at the dead bodies of the soldiers. I looked at Riley with her gorgeous sky-blue eyes that were begging me for answers, for a solution. A Mr. Fixit option. I only had one.
I took the rifle from her trembling hands, pulled back the bolt and killed Private Tom Morris.
10.
The dogs came back later that night as we sat huddled around the pile of ashes, waiting. We heard their howls and the sound of them fighting each other for a piece of the three bonus meals we'd given them. We heard the helicopter come flying past, stopping to scan the ground with its enormous search light. We heard it lower someone down who began firing at the dogs with sustained automatic fire until they could identify the remains. Then the helicopter gathered altitude, turned around and headed back northwards, satisfied that their team had been killed by a pack of roaming savage dogs who'd fled the city in search of food.
Eventually I lit the fire I'd prepared earlier, heaping logs on the roaring flames until we were finally warm again after the longest day we'd had together. Riley sat alone, her back against the wall, just staring into the hypnotising fire, somewhere else a million miles from me. We'd survived. It was what I'd been doing since Dad could teach me what the word meant, but there was one thing he'd never told me - how to work out the cost.
“What now?” asked Riley without even turning to look away from the fire. I'd been giving it some thought since the helicopter left and I hadn't really come to any conclusions.
“It's your mission - I'm just the hired help,” I replied. “We're another week from the bunker and chances are whatever was going to happen has happened and we've missed it. If you still want to go, I'm still willing to go with you. But you need to know we have limited kit now - my pack, Piotr's pack and the gear we took from those lads. It isn't much but it might be enough to get us there if we can hunt some game.” I'd checked on our 'fridge' and found that the dogs had gotten to it first last night. That left us with only a handful of MREs and food packs.
“What do you think?”
“What do I think? I guess after all we've been through so far the sensible thing to do would be to go home - if we still have one - and call it quits. You gave it a good shot but clearly there's more going on here than we realise and if we keep at it we might just end up dead.”
She thought about it whilst I packed some more logs into the blaze. Her brow, framed with her soft blonde hair, furrowed with concentration as she tried to find an answer she was comfortable with, one that her conscience would allow her to live with.
“What would you do?” she asked, finally fixing me with those eyes.
“Honestly?”
“Honestly. If you were me.”
“Well, I know that quitters don't find quitting difficult, they're only too willing to walk away. On the other hand, those who succeed usually just need a bit of encouragement to keep on going. They want to hear it'll be all right when their body is telling them it won't be.”
“Are you saying I'm not ready to quit?” she asked.
“I'm saying that if it were me I'd see this thing through to the end. I'd just want you to remind me why I was doing it.” She nodded slowly and smiled.
“I want to go on,” she said. “If nothing else I want to find out what happened to Alex and Saska. Do you think we can do it?”
I nodded. “That's why you hired me.”
It was almost sad to say goodbye to our shelter and once I'd been through all the gear we had and packed both bags evenly, we stood facing it with lumps in our throats.
“It saved our life in a fucking weird way,” said Riley, looking at it through the light snowfall which had started in honour of our decision to carry on.
“Kind of,” I replied. “We saved each other too.”
“Yeah. I guess we did.”
We turned and resumed our long walk south, passing the ridge where Riley had fallen on our right before turning south-east and setting off across a stretch of open moorland. The snow kept coming, falling in small flurries that whipped around our faces in spite of the hats and scarves we wore. We stamped and crunched our way through the layers of snow, sometimes slipping into deep ruts, other times walking on its surface where the frost had hardened it like concrete. All the time we kept pressing on, most of it in silence, until mid-afternoon when I called a stop at the mouth of a narrow scar in the hillside that led to an alcove we could sit in out of the weather.
I handed out a portion of dried beef strips which we washed down with water from our bottles that tasted faintly of wood smoke.
“How's the leg?” I asked.
“The stitches are rubbing but I'll manage,” she replied. “Fucking starving here.”
“Half-rations until we find something edible,” I said.
“We were on half-rations at the shelter.”
“Okay, th
ese are quarter-rations then,” I laughed. “The stitches need to come out in the next few days. Let me know if it gets any worse.”
“Will do. At this rate we'll get to the bunker in time for the ice age.”
“We're not doing too bad. Just take your time.”
“Time. Fucking time. I can't help but feel we're just way too late, you know what I mean?”
“Like we missed out on a chance to change the outcome? Guilt at not doing what we could have done?”
“Yeah, just like that. I feel like we missed the boat.”
“We can't help what happened and if you'd tried to walk any sooner the risks of infection would have shot through the roof. Instead we did everything right given all possible outcomes. We couldn't have done anything different.”
“Maybe not brought the tech with me,” she said.
“Again, we dealt with it once we know about it. We're alive...”
“Piotr isn't.”
“This isn't helping,” I said.
“I know, I'm just getting it off my chest. Have you ever had to make decisions like this? Knowing the consequences are beyond your control?”
“A few,” I said, remembering them. “I made it through okay.”
“But you came out of it different, right?”
“Yeah, I did and I like to think it was for the better.” She laughed.
“Life really sucks sometimes. I keep thinking about my Mom and Dad, about what might have happened to them and how I'm not there to help them. I had friends, guys in the forces, I feel like...”
“You've let them down?” I offered.
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