by Brian Parker
“I— What do you know about— I—” he sputtered. The girl calling him out was right. He was worried for the girls and that was clouding his judgement. They were the good guys—or at least they were supposed to be. Leaving Carmen to the hands of those monsters was by far the most un-Christian thought he’d done in decades, maybe even his whole life. All that talk about judgements being passed, if he abandoned that family down there, then he knew what Saint Peter would say: Turn away from the straight and narrow, keep on the wide path toward the fires of Hell.
“Oh, doggone it. You’re right,” he sighed. “Okay, you take the gunner, I’ll take the driver.”
“No,” Sidney replied again. “You’re rifle isn’t suppressed. It’ll alert the others too soon. You take out one of the soldiers on foot. Sally will take the driver.”
He nodded. It was sound tactical advice. “Fine.” He raised his voice slightly. “After these two kill the truck team, we’ll start shooting. I’ve got the lead man. Katie, you shoot the one in the back. Mark, you get the next man. That’ll leave three more, so once your target is down, shift your fire toward the ones in the middle. Don’t get distracted with what each other is doing, just hit your target first.”
“Got it,” Mark said, wiping sweat from his forehead, despite the chill.
They let the soldiers approach Carmen’s hide location. When they were about twenty feet from her, their posture suddenly changed and the man that Vern had his rifle trained upon dropped into a high crouch, alert for movement. They knew Carmen was there.
“It’s time, Sidney,” he stated. “Show us what you can do.”
He heeded his own advice and did not look toward the truck. Instead, he kept his scope on the chest of the point man, the one who was now only a few feet from Carmen. Beside him, the woman’s rifle emitted a dull thunk as that suppressor did its job to block most of the sound. Another shot further down their small scrimmage line told Vern that Sally had fired at the driver.
He heard a mumbled curse from Sidney, but forced himself to ignore it. Exhaling slowly, he squeezed the trigger.
The report from the 30.06 was deafening in the quiet morning, jarring him as it bucked against his shoulder. The baby began crying almost immediately. Vern knew the rifle was loud, but he’d forgotten how loud it was after not using it for so long. At first they’d relied on John’s silenced .308 before he died, but Vern had never gotten the hang of the weapon. Then, after Jake and the other two soldiers arrived, their suppressed M-4s became the daily carry weapon of choice. The smaller caliber rifles had almost no kick when they fired, allowing even the most inexperienced shooter to keep them trained on their target after firing.
Between the intolerable screams from the baby and the shock of the rifle’s recoil, it took Vern a moment to reacquire the man he’d shot. He lay on the ground, squirming with a hole in his stomach. The old man decided that he would have to adjust his aim point to account for the bullet drop over the distance.
Rounds began to whiz past them as the remaining soldiers fired at them. The sheer number of bullets meant that Sidney had missed the machine gunner. Most of the rounds impacted against the trees above them since they were dug in behind a fallen log roughly the same height as the standing soldiers. Vern forced himself to remain calm as the chattering of the automatic weapon reached him across the distance, bringing long-suppressed memories with it of a time when he was eighteen and ankle deep in the perpetual mud of a Vietnamese jungle.
“Get thee behind me, Satan!” he said as he swiveled his rifle to one of the soldiers on the trail. The man was attempting to crawl away to cover. Vern knew that if even a single one of the enemy survived, then his family—and his new, extended family—was as good as dead.
His rifle barked again. This time, the sound and kick weren’t a surprise and he was able to keep the target in his sight picture. The crawling man shuddered as the round tore into his back. Vern didn’t take the time to ensure the man was no longer a threat; instead, he began searching for another target. He found a man on the far side of the tree line who fired indiscriminately in Vern’s general direction, but wasn’t even trying aim. Vern dropped him with a single round through the face.
Then it was all over and everything fell silent once more. The gentle purr of the truck’s engine as it rested against the trunk of a tree was the only sound Vern could hear. He hadn’t realized that sometime during the fight, the machine gun had stopped spitting bullets at 950-rounds a minute in his direction.
“Let’s go down there and get them,” Sidney said as she started to stand up with the baby carrier in one hand and her rifle in the other.
“Hold on,” Vern directed. “Let me make sure there ain’t no nasty surprises waitin’ for us down there.” He brought the binoculars to his eyes, scanning the trail below. Five of the bodies lay still, the snow underneath them smeared with blood. The sixth soldier—the one he’d shot in the back—had crawled into the far tree line, the rust-colored smear told him that he’d gotten the man good. But an injured man was not a dead man. They’d need to be cautious until they could verify his whereabouts.
A thick trail of blood ran down the truck’s windshield from the soldier who manned the machine gun. He was slumped over, a hole in his chest and another through the top of his head where Sidney must have tagged him a second time to be sure that he was dead. Two holes near the bottom of the windshield showed where Sally had hit the driver.
“Okay,” Vern grunted, pushing himself to his feet. “There’s one unaccounted for. He crawled off into the woods with a trail of blood behind him as wide as a cow’s backside. We need to be careful until we’re sure he’s dead.”
The girls didn’t wait to hear the last part. They were already calling out softly to Carmen as they ran toward her hiding spot. Vern turned to Mark. “Can you provide overwatch from back here, son? I don’t want us gettin’ caught with our pants down.”
“Yes, sir,” the teenager said, sliding back down behind the log.
Vern touched the bill of his hat with two fingers in response and stepped off toward the trail. The small copse of trees wasn’t big in comparison to other forests that he’d been in, but it was massive for the southern Kansas landscape. It took him several minutes to pick his way over the fallen timber and around piles of underbrush that the county had labeled as “nature conservation areas” and hadn’t allowed anyone to clear the stuff away.
By the time he reached the group of women, he saw that Carmen was crying, sobbing really. She hugged her boy’s body to her, rocking back and forth as Katie held the girl. Vern thought the boy might have been hit in the crossfire until Miguel turned his head and smiled at everyone in embarrassment.
“I almost…” Carmen sputtered.
“But you didn’t,” Sidney cooed, wiping away a few dead leaves stuck in the older woman’s hair. “That’s all that matters.”
Vern was confused until he saw the bright orange handle of a knife on the ground, the blade partially hidden by the leaf clutter that seemed to defy the snow around them. It didn’t take him long to put two-and-two together, Lord knows he’d seen it enough times back in Vietnam to sear the memory onto his brain. The girl was planning to kill her children instead of allowing them to be taken prisoner. She had far more resolve than he’d given her credit for.
The baby continued to cry from the carrier on Sidney’s back and it was grating on Vern’s nerves. The sound was like a dinner bell for the infected, and they’d already rung it enough during the firefight. “Miss Sidney, please get him to quit making such a fuss or what we did here this morning was for naught.”
He didn’t wait to hear her response; it probably wouldn’t have been pleasant anyways. Instead, he continued past them to the blood trail. The man’s rifle lay in the crunchy, frozen snow near the center of the path. Vern followed the smear of bloody, packed snow until he heard the wheezing gasps of breath and an odd gurgle that took him a moment to place. Then he remembered the sound. It was the sound a
man made when they’d been shot through the lung; the proverbial sucking chest wound.
Vern Campbell had spent a lifetime trying to forget the sounds, the sights, and the…the feelings of combat. He’d thought those demons were put to rest a long time ago, but they’d resurfaced. Killing the infected had not evoked the emotions that the past thirty or forty minutes had. He’d violated the Sixth Commandment, and he felt good about it.
Logically, he knew that the soldiers would have killed him and the others, so the Lord would forgive him, but he enjoyed killing those men. He’d exalted in his skill as a warrior, to be able to meet the enemy and survive. He’d been scared of how it made him feel when he was in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam, and he was scared of how it made him feel now.
Vern stepped into the woods along the path and saw the man he’d shot, the one who was making all the ruckus. He lay on his stomach, legs scrabbling uselessly in the snow. The gurgling sound told Vern that he was slowly drowning in his own blood as it filled his lungs. It was a terrible way to die, and he ought to know, he’d seen several men go through the pain and the terror of knowing they would die while they waited for the helicopter to come. Even with friends and medics around them, those men had been terrified and alone.
He couldn’t imagine how this man must feel, thousands of miles from home and completely alone.
“I’m sorry, son,” Vern said as he knelt beside the man. He started to roll him over onto his side to relieve the pressure and the pain, but stopped. The gooks would sometimes pull the pin on a grenade if they knew they were goners so they could at least take out a Yankee in death. Was this man the same way as them—were all of these men the same way, spiteful, even in death?
He went around to the other side of the prostrate soldier and rolled the body toward him, to keep the man’s torso in front of his own in case there was a grenade. He held the man up for several seconds, gritting his teeth against the possibility of an explosion only a few inches away. When nothing happened, Vern straightened up and positioned the body so the man was on his side. The blood would drain out of his lungs this way. It wouldn’t stop him from dying, but it would at least ease the pain and help his transition.
“There you go,” Vern said aloud, then said a quick prayer that the man’s soul would go to whatever version of Heaven that he believed in. He stood, looking down at the man, who kept repeating something in a foreign language. “I don’t know what else to do for you, son.”
It was true. He wasn’t a doctor or a medic. He remembered something about covering the wound with a plastic bag and taping on three sides to allow the air and blood in the lungs to escape and not let more in when it sucked back against the hole, but they had zero supplies with them. They’d been forced to run from their home and the small packs each of them had were just a change of clothes and some food in case they got delayed making it to the fallback position. That would need to change. They’d need to include a medical kit and beef up the other supplies in the bags once they went back.
For now, the only thing Vern could do was stare at the man as he died. He’d watched men die only twice before—he’d seen plenty that were already dead or died later on, but only those two had died of wounds in front of him. It was saddening to think about the potential that those people had and that they never got to experience the rest of their lives because they’d died in some far off land, doing the bidding of their nation. Is that how these men, these invaders of his country felt? Were they just doing a job and trying to make it back home to their girl, like he and so many young Americans before him had been?
“Aww, heck, mister,” Vern grumbled. “You’re making me question what’s happening here. I never would’ve thought that I’d be like those NVA lunatics, fighting for my life over a small patch of ground that I call my own. But you people have made that happen.” The man’s eyes pleaded with him to do something, but Vern couldn’t do anything except talk to him. He wanted to shout at the man, but it wouldn’t do any good, the foreigner didn’t understand English, so he kept his voice even and steady. “We were just fine on our own over here and you people attacked us, created those darn infected, and then invaded after they’d wiped out most of your resistance. Hmpf. I guess that’s what we are now: the Resistance.” He thought about it for a moment. “Yeah. I like that. That’s what we are, we’re the Resistance.”
The man had stopped babbling and his eyes were lidded and vacant. Vern knew the man was gone. “So long, fella.”
He went back out to the path and eyed the bodies. They all looked dead, but he couldn’t be sure, so he went to each one, checking for a pulse. When he was satisfied, he waved his hand over his head, then swept his arm from Mark’s direction to where he was to bring the boy in.
“Okay, we gotta be smart here, ladies,” Vern said to the women as he came back up to them. “There’s—Oh, good Lord! I’m sorry, Miss Sidney.” She had her breast out, feeding the baby in an attempt to keep him quiet.
“It’s alright, Vern,” she replied. “I’m not embarrassed. It isn’t anything you haven’t seen before. This was just the easiest way to shut him up.”
Vern grunted, pointedly keeping his eyes on his granddaughters. “We made a lot of noise. Any infected within five miles is gonna be headed this way. We need to search these bodies, take anything we may need and get to safety.”
The girls were still comforting Carmen. “We think Carmen’s ankle is broken,” Sidney stated. “She isn’t going to be walking very far.”
Vern looked around for a moment, thinking they could fashion some type of stretcher for her out of tree limbs. Then his eyes settled on the big truck pushed up against the trunk of a tree. “Well, we already made enough noise that a little more won’t matter that much,” he said, pointing toward the truck.
“Good idea,” Sidney answered. “Are we going to the first fallback location or are we going back to the farm?”
He thought about it and then asked, “What do you think? I’m leaning toward abandoning the farm all together. We could move the cattle up slowly, a couple each day, and then—”
“Then what?” Sidney interrupted. “It would buy us a couple of days, but it’s only delaying the inevitable.”
He sighed. He’d been thinking the same thing. “So what do you propose?”
“We take the fight to them.”
“Eh? What’s that?” He’d heard her perfectly clear; he just wasn’t sure of what she meant.
“If we abandon the farm, they’ll just find us again in a few days. We’re in Kansas, it’s not like we could hide out in the mountains. It’s a miracle that this little copse of trees is even here.”
“Arbor Day project by the high school about twenty-five years ago,” Vern muttered, remembering his son’s participation in the venture and how much time they’d spent constructing those underground water traps to keep the saplings alive long enough to make it on their own.
“Whatever,” she dismissed his interruption. “If we let them have free run of the area, they’re going to find us. I’m sick of running and hiding. I say we start setting some traps and kicking these bastards out of our country.”
He tried not to laugh at the absurdity of a woman with her breast out, feeding a baby, telling him they were going to fight an insurgency, but the look in her eyes when he met them told him that she was dead serious. “What kind of traps?”
Her eyes sparkled as she grinned. “I don’t know. You’re the soldier with all the experience fighting against the revolutionaries. You tell me.”
The wheels in his head began to turn. He believed her to be right about the Iranians, or Koreans, or whomever. They would eventually find them, regardless of where they tried to hide. There hadn’t been very many of the big cargo planes, three in total since they’d begun keeping an eye on the airport, so there couldn’t have been very many soldiers yet. If they could destroy the enemy’s foothold in the region before they built their walls and established themselves, then maybe they could c
arve out a small area where their little resistance movement could grow.
It’d be a lot of dangerous work, with little to no guarantee of success. The Devil will find work for idle hands, he reminded himself of a phrase his preacher used to say all the time when he was a child. If they didn’t do something, then the invaders would surely bring them in.
Plus, they had the element of surprise. The enemy would only be preparing to repel the mindless masses at first, they wouldn’t have any idea that anyone was actively trying to infiltrate their defenses until it was too late.
“I’ve got some ideas,” Vern finally said. “But they don’t involve no traps and sittin’ around waitin’ for the enemy to come to us.”
22
* * *
PERTH AMBOY, NEW JERSEY
FEBRUARY 28TH
“I need a refill, sir!” Corporal Jones shouted at Jake through the helmet comm to be heard over the sound of his machine gun. The lieutenant was only about twelve inches away from the gunner’s station, but he might as well have been on the other side of a raging river for all the noise the guns around them made.
Jake gritted his teeth against the stupidity of the CROWS platform. It was a .50 caliber machine gun mounted externally, controlled from inside the vehicle through cameras, sensors, servos, and other types of electronics. But to reload the damn thing, somebody had to open the hatch and expose themselves to enemy fire—or in this case, to the infected.
“Mother fucker,” Jake muttered. It was his responsibility to change the ammo. There were two soldiers in the back of his truck, both of whom could technically climb through the air guard hatch in the back and crawl along the top of the vehicle, but that would be stupid. His hatch was directly beside the CROWS and he was the commander of the mission—even if he’d gone AWOL and was now unofficially back in the fold. “How many more rounds do you have?”
