Survivors

by Z. A. Recht

  “All right, Wes . . . now!”

  Wes turned and rested against the hood of the car, shooting bursts at the tower the gunman was firing from. As he did this, Keaton crept over the lip of the trunk and sighted in. He saw the long barrel swivel back and shouted for Wes to get down.

  As long as I don’t move, I’ll be all right.

  The iron sights of the AK-47 rested on the dark area the muzzle flash was coming from. After a moment, there was a gleam as the barrel moved again.

  “One more, Wes . . . now!”

  The deputy swung over the hood and fired again. Keaton kept his eyes on the gunner . . . there! The man fired back at Wes, and Keaton had him. He let loose a single round and watched as the spurt of flame from the automatic weapon described an arc up and away from the front of the car they hid behind. He whooped and yelled to Wes.

  “We got him! Did you see that? We—”

  The Sheriff stopped as he looked over at his partner, his friend.

  Bleeding.

  “Ah, Wes.”

  Keaton dropped and crawled to his deputy and rolled him up. It wasn’t a bullet that had got him; Wes’s face and neck were covered in blood pouring from a ragged wound that started under his jaw and wrapped around the right side of his face to dart up between the unfocused eyes. A shard of metal, the same shade brown as the car they’d taken shelter behind, protruded from the deputy’s face, its broken end sticking out, wicked edges shining in the wan light of the burning buildings.

  The rain pelting his face, Keaton reached down and took the flashlight from Wes’s pocket. “I’ll be back with this,” he said. “I promise.”

  The perceived route of the intruders turned into a massacre as the people of Abraham chased the figures in black, only to find they’d been led into fiery traps. As each contingent of townsfolk reached the point of no return, the houses on all sides of them exploded, detonated remotely by Agent Sawyer at the control panel. He was taking reports from the teams in the field and humming as he snapped switches that turned other human beings into broken sacks of meat.

  Beside him, Lutz and his small crew watched through binoculars as miniature rag dolls were thrown wide by the sudden blasts. The retreating teams made radio contact as they cleared the perimeter.

  “And the Sheriff?” Sawyer asked.

  Lutz didn’t hear the response, but he knew it wasn’t a good one from the way Sawyer slammed his hand down next to the control panel.

  “Are you fucking kidding me? He’s a hick sheriff, with maybe a deputy at his side. One, two men. You couldn’t bag him?”

  A pause.

  “Out the back, right. And then what?”

  Another pause.

  “He what? How? With an AK-47?”

  Sawyer whistled.

  “All right. Hold on a minute.”

  Sawyer flipped up the covers on all the munitions and swept his hands across the board. The night rocked with the mass of explosions from the center of Abraham all the way to the edges, houses and commercial buildings going up in balls of fire that would eventually be beaten down by the unrelenting rain.

  “Okay. Everyone back in. Shoot everyone but the Sheriff. And the doctor, he might have something from Demilio. But everyone else is a target, copy?”

  Sawyer yanked the headset from his ear. “Lutz! You and your boys might have something to do anyway. Grab some gear and get in a Hummer.”

  He stalked away, clearly in a foul mood but excited by the prospect of the chase. Ritter looked at Blue and twirled his forefinger by his temple.

  Lutz nodded. “Yeah. He’s crazy. So crazy, we better do what he says. Grab some gear, then.”

  The raiders armed themselves from the cache of weapons left behind by the assault teams; Lutz got an M-4 with an attached grenade launcher, Ritter and Patton came away with two Browning Hi-Powers each and Blue and Jenkins armed up with SPAS-12 shotguns.

  With a wicked smile, Lutz recognized his knife in the tire well of a truck, sitting balanced on the rubber. He grabbed it and stuck it in his waistband, then turned to the raiders.

  “All right,” he said. “See if we can’t bag us a sheriff.”

  Ritter and Blue looked at the contingent of soldiers that were packing the equipment for moving out, then at each other. Something passed between them; Patton noticed it, Lutz had not. He was so full of himself at that moment, Patton knew his eyes were full of Sheriff Keaton’s big death scene and nothing else.

  Patton, who knew the men better than either of the Lutz brothers ever had, knew that, whatever the outcome of the day, they’d be walking away from Abraham with two fewer raiders than when they started.

  Hmm. Maybe four less, if Coke didn’t catch up to Charlie. I wonder how that went?

  “Open the door!” Coke yelled. “Open the fucking door, Charlie!”

  He ran at the head of a disorganized pyramid of sprinters, all with their arms out, reaching for his back and howling as they ran. It had been this way for the past mile, and the rain wasn’t helping any. Coke had taken one misstep and almost lost everything when a sprinter grabbed the trucker cap off his head, and with it the light that was clipped to the bill. Even with all the time he’d spent on the treadmill, Coke knew that if he didn’t get into the truck, that was it for him. Dimly, he could see Charlie in the driver’s seat, his chin tucked down on his chest and fast asleep.

  Not slowing his stride any, Coke bent down and picked up a stone as he ran, scooping and throwing in one motion. The small rock bounced off the side of the truck, startling Charlie awake.

  “Open! The! Door!”

  Charlie’s eyes went wide as he saw what was coming his way. He unlocked and opened his door, moving over as Coke’s hurtling form shot into the truck at high speed. The door slammed behind him, and so did the forms of three sprinters, moving too fast to check their speed as they collided with the metal of the truck and each other.

  “Did I miss it?” Charlie asked, wiping the sleep from his eyes.

  “Shut up,” Coke breathed at him, trying to catch his breath. “Water.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Here,” Charlie said, holding out a bottle. Coke snatched it from his hand and tore the top off, upending the plastic container over his face and drinking deep.

  “Whoo!” he yelled as the empty bottle hit the inside of the windshield. “I am never doing that again.”

  “Do what? Did I miss something?”

  Coke thumped Charlie in the arm. “Fuck yeah, you did. You missed getting goddamn killed.”

  “But what about—”

  Charlie’s question was cut off by the first explosion from Abraham. The pair of raiders were entranced by the billowing fireball, and then it was joined by another . . . and another . . . and another.

  “Jesus, God,” Charlie said. “Sawyer is not fucking around with these people.”

  Coke looked over and punched Charlie again. “And you, you son of a bitch!” He punched him again. “I ran all this way, in the dark, being chased by those dead fuckers, so I could stop you, and you were asleep!”

  Charlie rubbed his arm and shoulder where the punches were landing. “Th-those aren’t the dead ones. They move too—”

  “Ah,” Coke said, waving him off. “You know what I mean. Goddamn. There’s my hat.”

  He pointed out the window to one of the shamblers massed against the truck among the sprinters; the fiend in red that had grabbed his cap. The infected waved its arms up and down as it tried to get through its companions to the truck, the little flashlight cutting swaths through the darkness of the rainy night.

  “Anyway. Lutz says to hang back. Says he’ll try to signal us when the convoy moves out, so we can follow behind, and we’ll try our surprise another day. It’s not like they care, anyway,” he said, hooking his thumb back to the full garbage bed, where a mix of sprinters and shamblers bumped around against each other.

  Charlie put a pair of binoculars up to his face and clicked his tongue ring against his teeth. He let out a quiet whistle. �
��Take a look at that. Gunfire around the flames.”

  “Yep,” Coke nodded. “You should see the hardware they got in that camp. You think we had some nice stuff? Pfft.” He looked back out the window at the throng of carriers clawing at the steel door. His eyes were drawn back to his hat and flashlight.

  “Pop the top, Charlie. I’m going to get my hat.”

  Sheriff Keaton lay in the dirt uncomfortably close to a fire. He’d seen the thing they fired at his front door before, when he was at a law-enforcement seminar in Kansas City. It was called a SIMON breach grenade, and he’d wanted one.

  Funny to want something so bad and finally get it, he thought. Didn’t want it that way, though.

  He counted himself lucky that the insurgent forces had used the SIMON instead of just slapping a plastic explosive on the door. The breach grenade was designed to destroy just the door, with minimal collateral damage to whatever was on the other side.

  Collateral damage.

  Wes.

  With a sigh, Keaton moved closer to the fire, in case they were using heat detection, and took stock of his situation. A sharp pain caught his arm and he moved away just a little. Easy, pard; catching yourself on fire might be the only way to make this night worse.

  Whoever these people were, they’d wanted him alive. The gunner in the tower couldn’t have known who he was shooting at, not in the rain and at that distance. But the others, the ones that stormed the station . . . other than the SIMON, they hadn’t fired a shot at him or Wes.

  Wes, lying in the gutter with his face torn in two . . .

  He shook his head. No time for that now. Right now, he needed to survive. He needed to avenge.

  Voices. At least a pair of men coming toward him. He looked up and saw a ditch that ran from the wreckage of the building that was merrily burning at his back. He closed his eyes and held his breath, then rolled into it.

  Immediately, he regretted it. He’d been hiding out behind the remains of Eileen’s pub, and now he was in the shit trench they’d dug out back after the pipes clogged, up to his eyeballs in shit and piss and puke and whatever else made it out the back of this place.

  Two men in black gear walked past the fire, looking through the flames into the pub. “I don’t know why Sawyer wants this fucking guy, anyway,” one of them was saying. “He’s just a fucking hick sheriff, right?”

  The other, this one with a mustache, snorted. “Maybe. But he’s the one that’s been the thorn in Lutz’s side for months now. Agent Sawyer has plans for him. Keep an eye out, all right? I got to take a bad piss.”

  The doubter shrugged and turned away. “What I don’t understand is, why even have a camp out here? This place is nowhere, man.”

  Mustache unzipped the bottom of his coveralls. “You still don’t get it. This place was thriving. I know it doesn’t look like it now, but I’ve seen the reports. They had crops and shit, safe and sound in their little town. This was supposed to be the beginning of the new breadbasket for the RSA.

  “Now, it’s just a practice run for Omaha.”

  When the man was done talking, Keaton exploded up and grabbed the front of his coveralls, pulling him into the trench, the downpour covering whatever sounds they made.

  “Good for us,” the other man said, looking around the other burning buildings. “How come Lutz fucked it up so bad?”

  Mustache’s answer, if the other man could have heard it, was a shit-filled gurgle as Keaton held him under, one hand pressing hard on Mustache’s windpipe while the other felt his gear for a knife.

  He found one.

  Flicking it open to reveal a wickedly sharp edge, he smiled and drove it down into the man’s side, the only spot his thin body armor didn’t protect. Keaton knew that Kevlar wouldn’t stop a knife, but he didn’t want to dull it too much. After all, he’d need it again.

  “I said, how did Lutz fuck it—Hey!”

  Keaton looked up and saw the other man staring at him, eyes wide and disbelieving. Raising his offal-covered AK-47, the Sheriff pulled the trigger and blew the man back into the burning remains of Eileen’s pub.

  When the man finally lay still in the flames, Keaton looked at the Russian-made gun and grimaced.

  “I’d kiss you, but not right now. I’m sure you understand.”

  Taking in what he’d overheard, the Sheriff made up his mind to head back to the station. If this Sawyer wanted him taken alive, then they wouldn’t have blown the office, or at least not yet. And since they already chased him out of there, would they expect him back? He hoped not.

  He looked down at himself. The shit-bath he’d just taken would camouflage him pretty well . . . he just hoped the stink wouldn’t give him away.

  AK-47 and knife at the ready, Keaton stalked back to the station.

  In the field, Agent Sawyer was a different man than he was at the command tent. Before, he’d been a strutting cock, chest puffed out, in command, barking orders and always ready with a threat. In the field, a change came over him that, frankly, scared the dog shit out of Lutz. The agility that was apparent in his effortless way of doing things came to the forefront as he led a fire team and Herman’s raiders through the breach in the fence; the man went forward the way a jungle cat does, sinuous movements and fearsome grace. Even the seasoned troops that followed behind and ranged out in the town already didn’t move that way.

  The raiders clumped close together, arms held low. A letup in the rain made it easier for Lutz to see the disaster that Abraham had become. Former buildings now resembled hot configurations of tongue depressor and matchstick houses after a pyro kid was done playing with them. Remains of the townsfolk were strewn everywhere, some bodies whole, but most not. As the crew made their way deeper into Abraham, they passed through the worst of the trap, treading on arms and torsos of all shapes and sizes. At one point, Ritter stepped on crumbling ashes of a doll and he went gray as it croaked out its last “mama.”

  Sawyer came to a full stop and turned back to the fire team leader. “Check your radio with me.”

  “Yes, sir,” the soldier said into his lapel mic, and Sawyer shook his head.

  “Loud and clear. Damn. Fire Team Alpha isn’t responding to my hails. Take your men and rendezvous with Fire Team Bravo at the clinic. Keep your ears on. Lutz, you and your men are with me.”

  Blue and Jenkins looked at each other with identical questioning expressions, and Lutz knew he also looked confused. Patton just checked his gun and nodded.

  “I like that,” Sawyer said. “This one understands just following fucking orders. Now come on.”

  “I don’t get it,” Lutz said to Ritter as they trudged through the burning aftermath of Abraham. The rain and fires were at constant odds, alternatively chilling and heating the group as they walked through a precursor to Hell.

  “He doesn’t trust us,” Patton said from behind them. “So he keeps us with him. The plan was to go to the clinic first, but now the fire team doesn’t answer, so he’s going to check it out.”

  “And we’re his backup?” Blue asked.

  Patton snorted. “The day we’re his backup, check your ass for monkeys flying out of it. He’s babysitting us.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  Jenkins’s retort was cut off by Sawyer, who was stopped again in the street, his hand up in a fist. Three of the four-man fire team lay in the street, unmoving, their arms spread out in empty-handed death.

  Their weapons were missing.

  “Son of a bitch,” Blue said.

  The radios were gone, too.

  With his bullpup FN P90 aimed at the yawning black doorway at the front of the station, Sawyer soft-footed over to the dead men. He swore as he scanned their name tags; the team leader was unaccounted for. He turned back to the raiders and saw only three standing there.

  At his look, Herman turned around and saw Ritter and Blue missing. “What the fuck?”

  “They were right behind me,” Jenkins said, turning in place and trying to take in all of Abraham that
he could at one time. The edge of panic crept into his voice. “They were right goddamn here!”

  “Hey. Hey!” Patton said, grabbing Jenkins by the face. “Calm down. Keep it quiet. Whatever happened to them, you want it to happen to you?”

  Jenkins shook his head.

  “Keep it down, then.” Then turning to Sawyer, he nodded.

  Agent Sawyer jerked his head toward the station and went forward, his blunt submachine gun at the ready. Lutz, Patton, and Jenkins followed behind, creeping into the dark station.

  The small lobby of the station was empty of everything but the plastic seats that had been there since the building was put into service. The partition glass along the front counter was gone, only the frame remaining. The way to the small squad room beyond was open, though the floor was littered with plastic cups and bits of the front door that the fire team had blown in on their approach.

  No matter how carefully Sawyer moved through the room, every sliding step disturbed a bit of debris. Herman followed behind, his gun at port and trigger finger itchy. As Sawyer stepped into the squad room, a shape hurtled out of the ceiling and swung at him. He dove and rolled away, passing smoothly between desks as Jenkins screamed and fired slug after slug from his SPAS-12 shotgun as fast as he could pull the trigger.

  Old and cold blood splattered from the body as it swung through its arc and Jenkins screamed himself hoarse. With every impact, the body spun crazily and altered its course, but still Jenkins tracked it, firing until the semiautomatic shotgun clicked empty.

  “Goddamn, what the fuck is wrong with you?” Lutz yelled at Jenkins, who spun and pointed the empty shotgun at Herman’s face.

  Click.

  For one stunned second, Lutz stood there gaping at the set of Jenkins’s wide eyes. The second passed, and he reversed his M-4 rifle and hit Jenkins in the face, dropping the man to his knees.