Survivors

by Z. A. Recht

  Sawyer, ignoring the raiders and their drama, instead scanned the office with his SureFire flashlight for any other booby traps. Not seeing anything, he finally shined the light on the swinging and turning figure. Grimacing, Sawyer barely recognized the pulped and destroyed face of Fire Team Alpha’s team leader. Of course, without his body armor, the shotgun slugs had ripped him up. Bits of him were hanging on by tendrils of stringy flesh and gristle.

  “Fuck,” Sawyer whispered. The game of fox and hound had changed, and the agent was starting to realize that maybe Sheriff Keaton wasn’t just some bumpkin from hickville.

  “Jesus, Coke,” Charlie said as the other man popped the modified top to the dump truck cab. “It’s just a hat, man. You telling me that you’re gonna go back out there, with them, for a hat?”

  Coke looked down at Charlie. “Yep. Got that cap from my boy before all this shit went down. Everybody else we come across, they’ve all got pictures or letters or something from before. Me? All I got is that cap, and I aim to fucking keep it.”

  With that, he sprung up and levered himself out of the cab. “Pass me up the baseball bat, huh?”

  “Before you go and get your ass killed, how about filling me in? What are we doing next?”

  “Bat.”

  Keeping his mouth shut, Charlie passed the bat up and watched.

  Coke paced the top of the dump truck, shifting his grip on the bat and glaring down at the seething mass of undead creatures. That was his hat. That was the last vestige of the old world, of his old life, and he was going to by-God get it back. Perhaps he wasn’t the best man ever, or even the best man he could be, but he’d loved his boy more than anything or anybody else and that hat was all he had left of him.

  The flat nose of the dump truck gave him some pause . . . if he leapt down and started swinging, the only way he’d get back up is if Charlie opened the door again. The raiders had modified all the big vehicles they used for moving around the infected so that an enterprising (or lucky) carrier couldn’t lift the latch and get the door open. So, it was either the door (from the inside) or the hatch up top.

  Let’s see . . . ladder up the back. Yeah.

  “Come get it, you dead shits!”

  He leapt off the passenger side of the front and banged the grill covering with the bat, making sure all the shamblers saw where he was. One or two got too close before the rest had homed in, and Coke reversed his grip on the bat and hit them with backhanded blows to the temples. The first one went down in the path of the others, and Coke saw what he needed to do.

  Backing up, he kept just out of range, swinging the bat now and again at hands and knees, herding the shamblers behind him in a shaggy ring around the dump truck. He darted in, swinging the bat and knocking shamblers back as he needed, until the one with the hat was at the back of the pack.

  “I’m coming, Charlie! Get the engine started.”

  With a hard swing, Coke knocked a linebacker-sized zombie into the dead shithead behind him and sprinted around the truck. He came up on the back of the line in no time, snatching the ball cap out of the carrier’s hand . . . or he tried to. The thing’s grip was monstrous.

  “Fuck!” Coke screamed. The mass of carriers in front of the one he had turned at his exclamation.

  He lifted the cap and hand as high as they would go, and turned, launching a powerful side kick into the carrier’s underarm. With a wet, squelching pop, the thing’s arm wrenched out of socket. Coke swung the bat one-handed into the dead man’s face, then repeated his kick. This time the arm came completely off the dead man, and Coke reversed himself, running for the back of the truck.

  One dead man stood between him and the ladder, and Coke flipped the bat at him, the aluminum bludgeon spinning end over end until it smashed into the shambler’s face, knocking it back a step. Coke leapt, planting one foot on the thing’s hip and using it as a springboard. He made the ladder and climbed, his left hand full of ladder rung, his right full of arm. As he clambered up the back of the truck, he felt himself jerked to a stop. Looking back, he saw the tallest of the bunch, an undead Wilt the Stilt, grabbing his boot and pulling, jaws open wide and slavering.

  Coke dropped the arm to the top of the dump truck and gripped the edge with both hands. He drew his other foot back and grit his teeth, then drove it into the top of the trapped foot, breaking the zombie’s fingers, and maybe his own instep. He got up, pulling himself upright, and tore the ball cap out of the dead fingertips.

  He limped to the front of the truck and dropped into the cab.

  “Okay,” he said. “About what comes next.”

  Sheriff Keaton combat-crawled into the woods on the outskirts of Abraham, dragging a weapons-laden canvas behind him. The new body armor (courtesy of the government goon that he left hanging as a present) didn’t fit quite right yet, but there wasn’t much he would be able to do about it until he found some shelter.

  The mud slicked everything over, both helping and hindering him; his progress was slow because hand and footholds were tenuous things, but progress was fast enough because the heavy canvas sled didn’t catch on much with the thick coating of mud on the bottom of it. He just hoped that the slackening rain held on for long enough to obliterate (or at least blur) the track he was leaving behind him.

  Whoever they were, the insurgents were dispersing and drifting out of the ruins of Abraham in teams of four. Keaton thought for a minute about following them back to their camp and using some of the weapons he’d rescued from the police station, but he knew this wasn’t just about Abraham. The soldier he’d drowned in shit had said Omaha. Whoever these people were, whoever they worked for, they were headed to Omaha, Nebraska, and they had bad things in mind for the people they found there.

  Casting a last glance at the pyre of his home, Keaton lay in wait for the troops to completely disperse. He had to get to Jose the mechanic’s place, grab an ATV.

  Maybe he would beat them there.

  Some time later, Keaton awoke to silence. He hadn’t intended to sleep, but it was that kind of day, the one that just wears on you, beats you down until you feel every ounce of atmosphere weighing on your back. Wes was gone. Hell, the whole town was gone. What had they done to—

  His thought was interrupted by a footstep. A stealthy footstep, but there was nothing the walker could do about the squelch from his or her boot coming up out of the mud.

  Maybe that’s what woke me?

  The Sheriff lay completely still on his stomach, wondering if his arms had fallen asleep and if that’s the way he would go out. That would be a fine ending to his quest to avenge his town: caught napping with a numb gun hand.

  A snapping branch caught his ear and he darted his eyes to the left. There he was . . . Keaton could see government-issue combat boots strapped up over the legs of a set of black coveralls like the ones the men from the night before were wearing.

  “Checkpoint Mike, all clear,” a man said, and that was followed by a short burst of radio static. He continued through the woods around the perimeter of the town. In retrospect, Keaton decided, the attackers had been lucky for the torrential downpour the night before . . . if these woods had caught fire, none of them would have made it out alive. Or maybe it had been planned that way.

  The man’s careful progress continued past Keaton’s hiding space, and as he passed, the Sheriff (ex-sheriff, he thought) rose slowly to his feet, hand brushing the big knife on his belt. He drew a large, staghorn-handled bowie knife, one of the things from the station, from a leather sheath and followed the soldier.

  He moved quietly, watching his feet and keeping clear of mud patches, staying behind the soldier for about a quarter of a mile.

  “Checkpoint November, all clear,” the man said into his radio. The burst of static was drowned out by Keaton’s sudden lunge through the brush and a pair of strangled cries as he buried the knife completely into the man’s back and twisted as hard as he could. With a cry of shock, the man half-turned to the Sheriff, but a knee in
his kidney stopped him. With an instant fury that he didn’t even know he had, Keaton unleashed a storm of elbows and punches to the already dying soldier. The bigger man sagged, his life leaking around the hilt of the bowie knife, and Keaton hit him repeatedly.

  Soon, the woods were still again. The Sheriff knelt by the perimeter guard, a high, keening sound coming from his throat at the loss of everything again. His breath came in ragged gulps and his chest heaved. Eventually, he stood and planted his foot on the dead soldier’s spine, bent down, and yanked the knife out of the man’s back. With a sneer, he drove it down again, neatly bisecting the dead man’s neck, severing the brain from the body.

  Find the other one.

  Get to Omaha.

  Omaha, NE

  30 June 2007

  0923 hrs_

  A DULL BOOM ECHOED across the asphalt parking lot as Brewster’s crowbar slipped free from the door frame with a resounding clank. It clattered to the ground.

  “Shit,” Brewster murmured.

  The pair froze in place, glancing nervously over their shoulders.

  Long moments passed, and nothing came tearing out of the shadowed alleys or scattered doorways at the building they occupied. The street remained clear and quiet.

  “Okay,” said Trev, careful to not let his annoyance at Brewster’s mistake show, “let’s try that one more time, minus the noise.”

  “It slipped out!” protested Brewster. “Piece of shit crowbar.”

  “Don’t blame the tools, Ewan.”

  “Hey, brother—only three people call me Ewan: my mother, my father, and people who outrank me.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Just get that bar wedged back in there.”

  The pair of scavengers were trying to force a door that led to the back room of a long-abandoned pharmacy at the clinic they’d been raiding for medical supplies. They had already emptied the more accessible outer areas of the clinic—the administrative offices and the handful of operating rooms and curtained checkup stalls. The waiting room was a mess. Water damage discolored the carpets and the fluorescents had been dark for months. They’d lit the hallway with a pair of LED lanterns.

  Brewster wedged the crowbar in the door frame once more and, with the help of Trevor, gave it a mighty tug. This time, the frame popped free, and the door swung outward, revealing a narrow room flanked on either side by stainless steel modular shelving, each shelf covered in plain white bottles of medication.

  Brewster, haphazard as ever, began scooping bottles into his pack without reading the labels.

  “Hey, hey!” admonished Trevor. “Read the labels, Brewster. Look at this shit!”

  Trevor began to paw through Brewster’s knapsack. He held up a bottle in front of the soldier’s eyes.

  “What the hell are we going to use this for?” Trev asked. “Since when is erectile dysfunction high on our list of medical priorities?”

  Brewster, indignant, spread his arms wide and spoke up in his own defense. “How the hell am I supposed to know what’s good and what’s useless? I’m not a goddamned pharmacist and we don’t have a list.”

  “Here,” said Trevor, plucking a bottle from a shelf. “Good. Amoxicillin. And here—Vicodin. Painkillers, antibiotics—these are our priorities. How many times . . .”

  Brewster looked undecided.

  Trevor acquiesced. “All right, all right. Tell you what. You start searching those drawers for bandages, instruments, syringes—that sort of thing. Leave the chemicals to me.”

  It didn’t take long for the pair to fill their packs. Most of the medications were swiftly approaching their expiration dates, but Trevor wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth. He grabbed everything that could be useful, hoping they wouldn’t have to make yet another run. This was the farthest out they’d ever been.

  Pack bulging, and making mental notes of the remaining supplies in the nearly picked-clean storage room, Trevor made his way back to the front of the clinic, Brewster in tow.

  “All right, buddy,” said Brewster. “Another mission accomplished. Back to base?”

  “Back to base,” agreed Trevor.

  He pulled open the clinic doors and they began the slow retreat to the Fac, sticking once more to the center of the streets.

  “This is the kind of mission I like,” rambled Brewster. “No real surprises. Just a milk run.”

  “Kind of have the feeling we’re being watched, though,” Trevor said, glancing around.

  “Hell, I’ve had that feeling ever since we got here. Probably a carrier staring at us from some alleyway right now. But, um . . . check it out.”

  Brewster reached down to a cargo pocket on the side of his pants and retrieved a collapsible baton.

  “See? Maybe I am learning something from you. Let ’em watch.”

  As it turned out, the pair of survivors were indeed being watched.

  Crouched in a stand of bushes, Private Mark Stiles held a pair of binoculars to his face. All he could make out were the backs of the retreating figures, laden with bulging backpacks.

  “Who is that?” whispered Hal.

  “I can’t tell. Might be friendlies. Might not.”

  Stiles grimaced. His eyes went back and forth between the wounded man behind them and the swiftly retreating figures in the distance.

  “Come on,” prodded Hal. “Make the call.”

  Stiles growled in frustration and racked a round into his Winchester. “Okay. I’m going to call out. You be ready to shoot if they turn on us, though.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m ready,” said Hal.

  Stiles stood, revealing himself, and raised his weapon above his head.

  “Hey!” he called out, as loud as he dared. “Hey! Over here!”

  The response from the retreating pair of survivors was immediate. One of them dropped flat on the pavement. The other ducked behind a stoop. Both had their weapons aimed in his general direction.

  “Hold your fire! We’re not infected, and we don’t want any trouble!” Stiles went on.

  There was a long moment of silence.

  The man who had hit the dirt slowly pulled himself to his feet, a look of disbelief on his face. Even across the considerable distance, Stiles could hear the man’s incredulous reply. “Stiles?”

  Stiles recognized the voice. “Brewster! Ewan Brewster! Holy hell, is it good to see you!”

  Each man let out a whoop of joy and ran toward the other, ending up in a bear hug, both speaking at once.

  “I thought you were dead back in Hyattsburg!” said Brewster.

  “I never thought your ass would make it this far!” said Stiles.

  “But—whoa,” said Brewster, suddenly breaking free from Stiles’s embrace and taking a long step backward. “You were bitten, man. No offense, but keep back from me.”

  “Relax,” laughed Stiles. “I’ve been bitten twice. Didn’t take; Hal here says I’m immune.”

  “Immune?” asked Brewster’s companion. Stiles saw that the man had shaggy hair and four-day beard stubble. He wore loose-fitting, comfortable clothes, and had an ASP on one hip and a Beretta in his hand. “But no one’s immune. Morningstar’s got a hundred-percent mortality rate.”

  “Well . . . ninety-nine,” Stiles said.

  “It’s true,” coughed Hal. “We found him in Hyattsburg. Hadn’t turned. Figured your doc would want to take a look at him.”

  “Damn straight, she will!” said Brewster. “She’s been bitching and whining about never making any progress—kept saying ‘If only I had someone with antibodies.’ I’m guessing that’s you, right?”

  “I suppose so. You have a base, then?”

  “Yeah,” said Brewster. “All right, come on! We’ll give you a hand! Let’s get back to the Fac! Anna will know what to do.”

  “Anna?” asked Stiles. “What happened to Rebecca? Is she . . .?”

  “Oh, no, she’s fine. Except for being a royal pain, she’s fine.”

  Stiles breathed a sigh of relief that didn’t go unnoticed by the others
in the group.

  “Let’s get a move on,” prodded Trevor. “The faster we make it back to the Fac, the faster the Doc can get started.”

  The sun had reached its zenith. Barely any clouds were in the sky, bathing the outskirts of Omaha with bright sunlight, both a blessing and a curse. The bright sun kept the survivors hot, sticky, and uncomfortable . . . but safe from the infected, who were cloistered indoors, and away from the group.

  General Francis Sherman surveyed the strip mall with narrowed eyes. The darkened storefronts gave him pause. They made for beautiful hideout spots for infected during the blazing summer sun. Still, they needed food and supplies, and risks would have to be taken.

  Sherman turned to the tall, wide-shouldered black man next to him. Mbutu Ngasy, as if feeling Sherman’s scrutiny, inclined his head in Sherman’s direction, a quizzical expression on his face.

  “Frank?” asked Mbutu. He seemed more and more comfortable using the General’s first name over the previous months. “What is wrong?”

  “I have a vibe. Place feels off. What are you getting?”

  Mbutu nodded. “It’s too quiet.” Mbutu Ngasy had an uncanny ability to spot an ambush before it was sprung. Rebecca Hall, when she had first met Ngasy, called it his “sixth sense.” Sherman had little use for paranormal buzzwords. Ngasy said he merely paid more attention to what was going on than others.

  The general sighed. Even with the previous run, they only had enough food for another few days, tops, and then they would be down to Vienna sausages and crackers. Again.

  “Okay, gentlemen. Do we try it?” Sherman asked.

  “Just give the order, sir,” growled Thomas, unstrapping his Beretta from its holster.

  “I don’t give orders anymore, Thomas,” sighed Sherman. “I’m asking your honest opinion.”

  Ahead of them, the strip mall beckoned, darkened storefronts and all.

  “Well, sir, if you want my opinion, I say go. This place is as good or bad as any other. And we don’t have much choice. We can die by the infected or we can starve to death. Personally, quick infection seems the lesser of the two evils.”