by Brian Parker
NEAR LIBERAL, KANSAS
FEBRUARY 20TH
“Oh, come on, Sidney,” Vern grumbled. “We’re doing just fine. You don’t need to do this.”
She shook her head emphatically. “We got lucky yesterday, Vern. And you know it. All it would have taken was for Katie to have not looked out the window when she did and…” Sidney let the statement remain unfinished.
Everyone had been exhausted after a long day of repairing the barbed wire that the Strykers had broken when they pulled out of the farm a few days ago. What Vern had thought would be an easy job turned into a nightmare of physical labor as three of the four strands had slipped off their posts for hundreds of feet. In the past, the old farmer would have used his tractor to stretch the wire and secure it to the posts, but there was no more unleaded gasoline for the tractor. So, the men had to pull the wire taut by hand while Sally and Sidney reused the bent and sometimes broken fasteners to lash the wire to the posts. It was tough work and they decided to trade security for an extra set of hands, pulling the lookout down from the roof to help.
As they were finishing their work near dusk, a group of seventeen infected stumbled up the farm’s driveway. To a man—and woman—everyone had been focused on repairing the fence line and none of them saw the infected. The creatures hadn’t seen the repair crew and didn’t scream to announce their presence as they closed in on the unsuspecting party.
In the farmhouse, Katie and Carmen were making dinner for the tired crew. Katie happened to look through the kitchen window and saw the infected coming toward them. She’d grabbed her rifle and ran out onto the front porch, firing as she went. It got the attention of the infected, so they turned toward her. The soldiers barely averted a disaster as they sprinted from the fence detail and intercepted the creatures before they reached the house.
And baby Lincoln.
“But she did look out the window,” Vern replied. “We made a mistake. Should have never pulled Caleb out of the crow’s nest. Won’t happen again.”
“Caleb,” she scoffed. “The only reason that kid stayed behind was so he could try to get in your granddaughters’ pants.”
“Woo wee,” Vern whistled. “Who pissed in your Cheerios this morning, missy? I’m supposed to be the grumpy old man on the farm. It’s my job to defend those girls’ honor. Not yours.”
She frowned. He was right. Sidney had never been the cheery, laugh at everything ditz that a lot of her friends growing up were, but she was generally optimistic. Since the fall of the old world, she’d become increasingly less so. “You’re right, you are a grumpy old man,” she said, repeating the words he’d just spoken. “I think… I think I’m freaked out about the baby. Lincoln could have been killed yesterday—not that you guys aren’t important, but well, you know.”
He nodded solemnly. “Yes, ma’am. I know exactly what you mean. You’re that boy’s mother and he means more to you than life itself. You’d give your own life to save him—and the Good Lord wouldn’t fault you one bit for it neither.”
Vern sighed and slapped his hands down onto the legs of his dirty overalls. “But, like I said, we made a mistake. I made a mistake. I chose to disregard our security in exchange for time. I learned that lesson almost fifty years ago in Vietnam when eight of my buddies were killed while they were filling sandbags, and here I went and forgot all about that. It won’t happen again, Miss Sidney.”
“I appreciate that, Vern. I really do. But I don’t think the security plan that you worked out with Jake is for the best anymore, and yesterday proves it. Those Iranian airplanes and the Army Strykers running all over the place have got the infected in the area all worked up. Leaving the main road open in the hopes that a government vehicle will come along to save the day isn’t cutting it anymore. The infected can bum-rush the wire and be on us in a couple of minutes.”
“So you want to close the road?” Vern asked.
“Yeah. I want to put out some of that concertina wire that Jake left. Maybe a few hundred feet down on each way where the lookout can see the infected before they’re right on top of us. I mean, we know that your regular barbed wire fence is somewhat of a deterrent when they’re just wandering around. We’ve watched them bounce off of it and head off in a different direction; they’ll probably do the same with the wire.”
Vern held up two fingers. “I’ve got two problems with your idea. One, it’s concertina wire, not barbed wire. That stuff is designed to make an enemy get all tangled up, so they probably won’t just bounce off like they do on the fences.”
“It’s designed to get tangled in clothes,” she amended his statement. “Most of the clothing has rotted away from them at this point.”
“Okay,” he conceded. “Maybe we could at least shoot them while they’re at the concertina like we do the ones that do end up getting tangled in the barbed wire.”
“Jake always said that being able to have standoff distance was the best defense against the infected.”
“What are y’all talking about?” a young male voice asked through a stifled yawn.
“Good morning, Mark,” Sidney greeted the boy.
“We’re just talking about beefing up our security a little bit,” Vern answered his question.
“I heard you say something about standoff distance—may I?” he asked, pointing to the coffee pot.
“Of course, son,” Vern said, pulling the toothpick that he’d been chewing on from his mouth. He pointed at the coffee pot with it before cramming the little piece of wood back between his teeth. “You don’t have to ask.”
“That’s not how I was raised, sir,” Mark said. “Thank you.” He poured himself a cup of black coffee and sat at the table across from Sidney.
“You want any milk?” she asked, wrinkling her nose at the dark liquid.
“No, thank you. This is how my mom drank it and I just developed a taste for it.” He took a sip and smiled dreamily. “Hot, brewed coffee is so much better than the cold instant stuff I used to make at the grocery store.”
Sidney smiled at the way he relished the simplicity of a warm cup of coffee. She hoped that Lincoln would turn out to be like Mark. He was a resilient boy, who’d lived alone with the horrors of the infected for almost a year. He knew a thing or two about surviving. “You were gonna say something about the standoff distance idea?”
“Hmm?” He opened his eyes slowly. “Oh yeah. I made a ring of shopping carts to act as a barrier at the grocery store. It gave me room to rush out, kill any of the freaks—uh, I mean any infected. Jake said the design was a good use of standoff distance.”
Sidney nodded politely. He wasn’t as helpful as she’d hoped. “That’s what I want to do here too,” she said. “I want to close off the road to give us that distance to figure out what to do before they’re right on top of us and we’re forced to make a bad decision.”
Mark sipped the coffee again. “I don’t know why that road is open,” he said. “Seems like it’s just inviting a disaster. My mom always used to say that when there was an obvious fix to a problem, but you went ahead and left the problem alone. Most times a little problem just got bigger and bigger until it exploded.”
Sidney glanced at Vern and raised an eyebrow. Maybe the kid was going to be helpful after all.
“Okay, okay,” Vern agreed. “You’re right.” He rubbed his pants legs again. “Besides those Cullen brothers and the Army trucks that Jake brought back with him, I haven’t seen anyone on that road in nine or ten months. Just been holding out hope like the stubborn old man I am.”
“Stubborn and grumpy old man,” Sidney teased, eliciting a chuckle from Mark. “You had two points earlier. The first one was about the infected getting tangled in the wire so we’d have to deal with every one of them instead of only a few like we do with the fences. What was your other concern?”
“Darn it, Sidney. What if someone comes along down that road? What if the Army shows up or if there was someone running for their life from a mob of those things. That conc
ertina will wrap around a car’s axle and put a stop to it permanently.”
“What if it stops the Iranians?” Mark offered.
Sidney grinned again. The kid was helping her argument. Giving them some time to hide from the Iranians was a huge reason to close off the road, even if she hadn’t thought about it in those terms. “We’ll put up signs warning people to stop—in English.”
“And Spanish,” Mark cut in. “Used to be lots of laborers here before the collapse.”
“And Spanish,” she agreed. “I doubt the average Iranian could read either of them. Taavi sure didn’t seem capable of it.”
“Mark my words, there’s something off about that guy,” Vern grumbled. “I think he’s a lot smarter than he’s letting on.”
“Well, he’s gone for now, but you’re actually reinforcing my point. If Taavi were to tell his fellow Iranians where we are, that wire could give us enough time to get everyone down into the cellar and close it up.” Vern had a trap door disguised as regular wood flooring underneath the kitchen table below her feet. The secret entrance led to a cellar under his house that he’d spent years digging out carefully by hand in the hard Kansas dirt.
“I guess that would be a good thing.”
“Okay, it’s settled. I’ll take the wire to the road and set it up with the help of those three soldiers. They should know how to do it.”
Vern laughed. “With as much fuss as those three put up for helping with the barbed wire, good luck. They sure don’t make infantrymen like they used to.”
“They’re not infantry,” Mark stated.
“What?” both Sidney and Vern asked at the same time.
“Yeah. I was talking to them the other day when Jake left. I’d thought about joining the Army after high school, so we were just hanging out. They taught me how to play Spades. Anyways, I mentioned that I wanted to go infantry and they were like, ‘No, man, you gotta get the Army to teach you a skill so you can get a good job after you get out.’ Of course, everyone laughed because there aren’t any jobs anymore.”
Sidney rolled her wrist. “Skip all of that until you get to the part where Jake didn’t leave us with soldiers who actually know how to fight.”
“Well, Caleb Stout is personnel, does like pay and paperwork. Rob is a medic. And Brown is a supply clerk. They all know how to fight, they had to go through Basic Training, but that’s not what their regular job is in the Army.”
“Son of a—”
“Watch your mouth, girl,” Vern cautioned.
“Bitch,” Sidney continued. She may have been a guest in Vern’s home, but there were some times when a curse word was absolutely appropriate and now was one of those times. “Do they even know how to use the scoped rifle up there in the crow’s nest?”
Vern grunted around the toothpick. “Hmpf. I hadn’t thought to ask about that. I figured soldiers riding around the country in combat vehicles would be infantrymen or tankers. Never thought we’d send out support personnel to do the fighting.”
“I know why the Army did that too,” Mark said.
“Goodness, son. How much information did you pump them boys for?”
Mark shrugged. “There’s no TV, no video games, no radio, only a few books… There wasn’t anything else to do except talk.” He took a long sip of coffee, tipping the mug up, emptying it. “Their unit—I can’t remember which one they said—got wiped out in a riot when a bunch of refugees went crazy.”
“That’s probably the uprisings that Sergeant Turner told us about when they first got here,” Sidney said.
“Yeah, so everyone who was alive and healthy enough to fight got sent up here to arrest Jake for starting the riot.”
“And then they all decided to cut their losses after Jake told them the truth about what was happening outside that base.”
Sidney nodded in agreement with Vern. “Seems like we got the short end of the stick here.”
“Did Jake know they weren’t infantrymen?” Vern asked her.
“He said that Specialist Weir was a medic, but never mentioned anything about the other two.”
Vern frowned. “Well, nothing we can do about it now. My granddaughters aren’t infantrymen, but they’ve learned and proven that they can be useful in a fight. We’ll just have to hope that these boys can do the same.”
Sidney groaned audibly as she pushed herself to her feet. Her body was still not at a hundred percent after her pregnancy. “You’re right, Vern,” she said. “Time for those three to get some OJT.”
“On the job training?” Mark asked.
“That’s right,” Sidney agreed. “We used to train all of our Peace Corps volunteers after they arrived in country. We called it OJT and they had to pick things up fast or risk getting left behind.”
“What are you going to train them in?” Mark asked, seemingly interested.
“Not me,” she laughed, having decided the best way to tackle their newfound problem with a legitimate—and funny—solution. “Vern was an NCO in the Army. He can train them to be infantrymen and how to defend our perimeter.”
“Now wait a darn minute—”
“Meanwhile,” Sidney said, cutting him off. “You and I will go put that wire in place.”
“Sidney—” Vern grumbled.
“Vern,” she replied impishly. “I’ll need two pairs of gloves, your wheel barrow, and some stakes to secure the ends.”
“And the stop signs,” Mark added.
“Yes, of course. And some spray paint or regular paint.” She pretended to bounce on her feet and clapped lightly, mindful of Lincoln sleeping upstairs. “This will be fun!”
Vern threw the toothpick from his mouth toward the trashcan and missed. “This is the last cotton-pickin’ thing I want to be doing.”
Sidney leaned down and gave him a peck on the cheek, making the old man blush. “Oh, relax. You’ll do great!”
18
* * *
CAPE GIRARDEAU, MISSOURI
FEBRUARY 20TH
Taavi yawned expansively as he stood shivering in the hatch at the back of the Stryker vehicle. He’d grown bored of staring at the wall inside the vehicle, so he’d manipulated the latch until it clicked back and he was able to heave the hatch open. The countryside looked much the same as it had when they’d stopped several hours ago, and the same as the day before, and before that as well. Brown, drab grass grew alongside a paved road lined with skeletal trees.
He knew it was winter here, they had the same seasons in his country, but he’d always imagined America to be lush, green, and fertile year round. He shivered once more, pulling the blanket he’d been given on their first night closer. His lengthy assignment in the jungle highlands had softened his ability to adapt rapidly to the environment as he’d done as a child in Iran.
They’d been traveling for days. Honestly, he’d lost count of how long they’d been on the road. In fact, the passing of time had become a blur for him after that dog, the Facilitator, had murdered his family when the labs and the facility that he’d worked at for so long was overrun by the Cursed. He’d been in and out of bouts of depression, thinking about what they’d done to his beautiful children and what those animals were doing to his wife.
It made his stomach flip as he stared at the fields beyond the road. Every so often, one of the Cursed would appear and begin to run after the convoy. Pfft, convoy! he laughed. This little procession of vehicles would not be able to withstand the Cursed, just as his men in Brazil had failed, and the poorly armed scientists and pilots had failed at the airport after they’d landed and discovered that the Air Force had ironically just established that location the previous day as a refueling site for their jets.
The Cursed were unstoppable.
He saw that now. They’d been foolish to believe that they could control them once their scourge was unleashed upon the world. Allah had guided the scientists’ hands to create the perfect killing machine. For the first time in his life, he hesitated upon praising Him. Few were immune, an
d those who were rarely lived long in the infested areas. Was this disease the next great extinction cycle? The difference was that Allah had used his followers to develop it instead of doing it himself.
Of course, you idiot! he berated himself. Before the arrival of the Cursed, the Earth’s population was upwards of eight billion people. Within a few years, the vast majority of the infected will have starved to death, leaving only the strongest among them, and God’s chosen people—plus those backwater rubes, the Koreans. He’d never agreed with the plan to wipe out the non-believers and believers alike. He thought there were other, more traditional ways to bring about the global peace promised by the Prophet Mohammed. But, the mass murder of billions must have been Allah’s will, otherwise, why would He have allowed it to happen?
Shaikh gripped the rough metal of the Stryker’s hatch as they hit a small bump and over the headset he wore, he heard Grady Harper say, “Sorry back there, Taavi.” The soldier did not know that he could speak English, that he’d been educated in the UK prior to returning to Iran to enter the Army’s officer corps. He’d kept all of it secret, pretending to be just a dumb foot soldier, and yet, the men and women had treated him fairly. Sure, every once in a while, someone said something insulting to his homeland, but it was never directed at him. The soldiers seemed to be genuinely concerned for his well-being. They’d accepted him into their ranks after he showed them that he was willing to jump in and help with tasks for preparing each night’s bivouac site.
He considered telling them the truth of his origins often, then disregarded the idea each time his gaze met Harper’s. The man had endured an entire year of testing at the facility, so Shaikh knew that his mind was likely addled, but every so often there was a spark of recognition in those eyes. Shaikh hadn’t visited the labs or the experiment rooms very often, choosing to send his lackeys instead. He had walked through the cells on a daily basis, though. He was sure that Harper had seen him often, even if he was recovering from whatever new hell the scientists had visited on him.
