by SD Tanner
Deciding to bluff, he asked gruffly, “What the fuck are you still doing here? Why aren’t you out dealing with the fire?”
“I can’t move. You assholes screwed me up.”
Walking towards the man, he found himself staring at the business end of a Glock 19 handgun. Now standing near the bed there were used packs of morphine scattered across the floor.
The man said coldly and steadily, “Stay the fuck away from me, asshole, or I’ll kill you.”
Realizing the man was injured, he put his hands out in front of him. “Easy, kid. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“You know.”
He was about to say he didn’t when Rich spoke from behind the bed next to the one the man was lying on. With his M4 pointed directly at the man’s head, Rich asked, “Who do you think will get the first shot?”
When the man turned to see where Rich was, he quickly stepped forward. Grabbing the man’s hand, he pointed the gun away from him. The man’s trigger finger reflexed and he fired a wild shot that whizzed past him, thudding into a bunk bed on the other side of the room. He twisted the gun from the man’s hand.
Looking defeated, but somehow still defiant the man said, “Just shoot me and be done with it.”
The man still hadn’t tried to get out of bed, and pulling the covers from his body he saw why. The man’s legs were covered in blood, and from the angle they were lying, they looked to be badly broken in several places.
“What happened to you?”
“You know what happened. You guys did this to me.”
Rich replied, “Not us.”
Looking at Rich and then back at him, he said, “I’ve never seen either of you guys before. Who the fuck are you?”
“We work here.”
“No, you don’t.” Suddenly looking hopeful, he asked excitedly, “Are you from the bases?”
When he didn’t reply, the man continued. “It was you! You dropped the bombs we just heard. Why are you here? What are you doing?”
He wasn’t sure what to say and stood silently. Almost pleadingly, the man said, “Take me with you. Please. I can’t stay here. They’re going to feed me to the hunters. Please don’t leave me here. I know I’m fucked, but I don’t want to die like that. They eat you alive!”
Seeing the man’s injuries he felt sorry for him, but he didn’t have time to talk and nor did he want the added risk of taking him with them.
Seeing his indecision, the man added, “I know who you’re here for, but he’s not here. They took him away. I can help you find him. I’ve been here for a month. I know stuff, but you have to take me with you.”
Glancing at Rich, he looked back at the man and asked, “Who are you talking about? Who did they take away?”
“The soldier. They caught one of the main guys from the bases. He was here for a day at the warehouse and then they took somewhere else.”
“Where did they take him?”
“I’m not telling you unless you take me with you.”
“Are you saying he’s not here?”
“No, he’s been gone for three or four days now.”
“Was there anyone else with him?”
“No, he was the only one.” Sighing and clearly unable to lie, he added, “Look, I don’t really know where they took him. I just wanted you to take me with you, but do me a favor and give me my gun before you go. I’m screwed anyway.”
He couldn’t explain why, but he didn’t want to leave someone so badly injured. Taking him with them would compromise their mission, and while he hesitated, Rich shouldered his gun and picked the man up in a fireman’s lift.
Walking like a lumberjack carrying a log of wood, Rich said, “We bomb shit out of everything now.”
Amused by the big German, he followed him out of the door and they went back down the stairs. While he walked, he radioed Lily to bring the four-wheel drive back to the entrance and told Mike and Darren it was time to go. They met up at the main doors and Rich dumped the man into the back of the four-wheel drive. They were about to climb into the vehicle, when a man walked across the parking lot in front of the barracks.
“Where the fuck are you goin’?”
Before he had a chance to answer the man tipped backwards and fell like a board to the ground. Lily put her Beretta M9 pistol back into her lap.
Nodding, he said, “Nice shot.”
“He wasn’t the only one asking questions I didn’t want to answer.”
Deciding he would ask her what happened later, he said, “We need to call in the airstrike and head to the camp.”
“Why?” Rich asked. “Pax is not here and we still don’t know where he is.”
“I know, but we’re here now and we might as well finish this bitch off.”
From the back seat of the vehicle, the man said, “Hallelujah.”
While Lily drove he radioed the bird and they headed to the refugee camp. After a few minutes he heard the barracks exploding behind them. He grunted in satisfaction, but he didn’t turn around and continued to survey the road leading to the camp for any signs of danger. There were none, but that wasn’t surprising. Their attack had left the camp in disarray and trucks were heading back from the warehouse towards the barracks. No one challenged the presence of their four-wheel drive as it continued to head towards the refugee camp. When one of the vehicles careened past them, a man in the passenger seat stared at him hard, but he nodded brusquely and the vehicle drove past them.
The refugee camp was actually a series of long, single story huts, clustered around a large three-storied building. The buildings looked like short term army barracks, designed to house thousands of soldiers on a temporary basis. They were cheap and plain, and would be okay for a week or two, but they were never designed to be lived in for months on end. They looked like ugly, squat, long concrete huts, with a row of windows on each side and doors at either end. Inside there would be row upon row of bunk beds, each with a small locker and banks of toilets and showers at one end. There would be a couple of rooms for senior personnel, otherwise the rank and file would sleep, side by side, in the congested main room.
The large three-story building in the middle of the low buildings would be similar. The only difference was they usually had a small kitchen on each level, but it would be an identical configuration. To the far right was another building with a row of windows above head height, and they were probably the shared showers and toilets for the barracks plus a laundry facility. The ground around the barracks was churned into mud, and the place looked desolate and miserable, as if there was no life left.
Lily stopped outside the main building, but there was no one around. It was daylight and he couldn’t work out where the people were.
Staring at the front doors to the main building, he said, “I don’t know where everyone is. We’re gonna to need to get in there.”
“Do you want me to wait out here?” Lily asked.
He opened the car door and was getting ready to step out, when the man they’d rescued from the barracks grabbed Mike’s M4. With a sharp yank, he pulled it from Mike’s hands and swung it around in front of him. Rich aimed his weapon to shoot him, but the man continued to swing the M4 around until it was pointing out the passenger window. He began firing through the window and he shouted, “Get out now!”
He heard bullets thudding into the ground around their vehicle and into the walls of the main building next to him. Aiming his weapon as he turned, there were two trucks heading in their direction and they were being hemmed in. Both vehicles were keeping up a steady pace of gunfire. They could either try to drive away and risk getting bogged down in the mud, or barricade themselves inside the refugee camp. The decision was made for him when the hood of their vehicle became pitted with bullet holes. Their four-wheel drive wasn’t going anywhere.
“Gotta go,” he shouted.
Mike and Darren tumbled out of the passenger side and quickly began to return fire at the incoming trucks. He climbed out of his side of the f
our-wheel drive, and waving them into the main building, he gave them covering fire as they ran inside.
Waiting for the big German to get out of the vehicle, he shouted, “Rich! What the fuck are you doing?”
He quickly glanced back through the passenger door to see why they weren’t getting out, and what he saw was bad. The injured man was still firing at the trucks and Lily was sprawled in Rich’s lap, while he was shooting steadily through the window.
Without turning, Rich said, “Go! She is dead. I give you cover, but go now!”
Glancing at the man who was still firing, he said, “You gotta go now!”
Also without turning, the man shouted, “No! I’m staying. This is payback!”
Realizing he didn’t have time to argue he turned to leave and shouted, “Thanks.”
While Rich and the man gave him cover, he ran into the main building and stopped dead in his tracks. Expecting to find a dormitory of bunk beds he couldn’t understand what he was looking at. It took a moment for his mind to adjust from what he expected to find to what he was seeing. There were no beds, only small cages, five by five foot cubes, each stacked one on top of the other and side-by-side. Inside each cage were listless creatures who were filthy and cowed. The room looked like a chicken factory for humans.
“What the hell is this?”
Mike and Darren were both standing at the door, looking equally as dumbstruck.
Striding over to the first cage, he peered inside and said, “Hello?”
The creature in the cage was so dirty and unkempt he couldn’t tell if it was male or female. It launched at him, snarling and shrieking. With matted hair that hung in strings, its face that was so twisted in rage it didn’t look human. Its skinny arms hammered angrily at the wire of the cage and bloody saliva drooled from its mouth. He was hit by the stench inside the room. It was an indescribable combination of human waste, blood and rotting flesh. Gagging slightly, he tried to breathe shallowly through the rancid odor.
Finally finding his voice, Mike asked, “What are they?”
“I dunno,” he answered and he really didn’t. They looked vaguely human, but so did the hunters.
Looking along the row upon row of cages, every one of them was full and most had one person per cage, but some had two or three. The room erupted into a cacophony of animal sounds reminding him of the monkey cages at the zoo, only these chimps were really pissed.
Suddenly a thought came to him. The thought didn’t seem to be his own and it certainly defied common sense, but it said, let them out, let them out, let them out, let them out. The thought wouldn’t go away and he suspected it was their only chance of survival. There was no way they could hold out against the shooters for long. They didn’t have the ammo or the people to fight off so many, and deciding to listen to the voice in his head, he flicked the latch on one of the cages.
Mike shouted, “What the fuck are you doing?”
The creature leapt through the cage door, almost slamming into him. It scooted past and he heard it speak.
“Thank you.”
With that simple gratitude the creature shrieked loudly and began flicking open the locks to the cages. Realizing they weren’t creatures, but people who’d been tortured and abused in ways he wasn’t sure he ever wanted to know, he began to unlatch the cages too. As he did the people either unlocked more cages or ran towards the doors at the front of the barracks. The activity in the barracks became increasingly manic. People clearly driven beyond reason were tearing through the room and out the front door. He, Mike and Darren flattened themselves against an empty cage, as hundreds of the barely human people ran screaming and screeching through the small corridors that weaved between the cages.
Darren asked, “What happened to them?”
“I dunno.”
After about twenty minutes the crowd began to thin, and although some still ran through the doors, those left were injured and they moved slower. With the noise inside the barracks subsiding, he heard gunfire and shrieking. A short, thin and bent woman was walking slowly towards the doors. She hesitated and turned to face him. Under the filth, buried deeply in her old and wrinkled face, she had bright blue eyes that briefly twinkled. Patches of her sparse white hair were missing, and when she spoke, she had few teeth left.
She placed a thin and dirty hand on his. Smiling oddly, she leaned close to his head and said softly, “Stay here and live. We will protect you.”
She was telling him to leave the fight to them, that it was something they needed to do, and they wanted them to live. Nodding to the woman, she squeezed his hand gently and turned and left with the others.
Now the building was empty, he turned to Darren and Mike and said, “We need to check on Rich and the other guy.”
The sound of gunfire had subsided and they cautiously peered out of the front door. The muddy land was littered with bodies, some were the refugees and others were dressed in ACUs. One of the trucks was on fire and another appeared empty. He heard more gunfire in the distance. Looking at the rows of barracks, many of their front doors were now swinging open, and it was clear the refugees had freed their fellow prisoners. Crouching low, he made his way to the still open door on the passenger side of their vehicle. Rich was dead, with his arm still protectively wrapped around Lily. It was a sad and beautiful sight, and the image of them joined in death would stay with him forever.
The injured man in the back seat was slumped in the foot well. Checking his pulse he was surprised feel a steady heartbeat beneath his fingers. Whistling quietly through his teeth, he got Darren’s attention and waved him over. Between them, they pulled the injured man from the vehicle and dragged him to the relative safety of the barracks. Laying him down on the floor, he checked the man over and found a bullet wound in his neck. It wasn’t a fatal injury and he was only bleeding a little. He assumed that the man was knocked unconscious, or that maybe he’d collapsed from his accumulated injuries and not just the one.
“Now what?” Mike asked.
They were stuck. With no vehicle, daylight was fading and they could only wait. Surrounded by enemy soldiers in the day and hunters at night, they couldn’t be more stuck.
“We wait. We can’t leave with nightfall coming, and we don’t know if anything will be left by morning. If we’re lucky, the refugees will kill most of the men in the army barracks and we can slip out.”
“What about this guy?” Darren asked, looking down at the man.
“He was prepared to die for us. He goes where we go.”
***
Cutter was sitting in the front Stryker, leading the convoy of armored vehicles to the camp as ordered. They were less than half a mile from the refugee camp when he saw massive movement on his video screen.
“Oh shit!” The driver shouted.
He didn’t blame him for shouting. On the screen there were thousands of hunters converging on the convoy. Within moments he heard the first dull thuds of the densely muscled bodies of hunters hitting their armored vehicle.
Gunfire erupted and Cutter batted his own gunner. “Cease fire! Cease fire!”
He hadn’t been at the battle at the missile silo, but he knew what could happen. Mackenzie told Gears and Pax, in his vision the accumulated corpses of thousands of downed hunters blocked the vents of the vehicles and suffocated the people inside. Luckily the vision hadn’t been true, but Gears and Pax agreed it would happen if they tried to kill too many hunters in their armored vehicles. He’d been taught that if they were ever swarmed by hunters, all they could do was try to drive through it slowly or wait it out. In theory eventually daylight would come and the hunters would leave.
“What do we do now?” One of the shooters asked.
“We wait for dawn.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Dead before their time (Lydia)
Her dark glossy hair fell in a tumble around her shoulders, framing her grey and drawn face. She thought she looked twenty years older than she was, but then what did she expect to look like when
she was dead? Standing in the bathroom, she pulled the cotton bathrobe around her bulging belly protectively and felt the baby kick.
“There, there,” she said softly, and she gently ran her hand over her extended belly.
She believed her father had spoken to her and it hadn’t been in a dream. He told her she was dead and she believed him. She felt sure she’d contracted the designer virus, and it slowly infected her until she became one of the undead. Under direction she’d murdered perfectly healthy men and women and, in many ways, she felt it was karma and well deserved. It wasn’t even Gears fault, he’d believed her when she’d told him it was only an infection and not murder.
Sighing sadly, she pulled her cotton bathrobe tightly around her again and shuffled to the lounge. The golden star she could see in her mind was slowly growing brighter. The voices and feelings that spun through her consciousness were now taking form, and she knew they were the Infected. In a strange way she found them comforting. She’d never realized that being infected came with such a deep sense of calm and peace. Perhaps being dead is not so bad, she thought idly, as she drifted into the kitchen looking for a cup of tea. Without thinking she lit the gas burner, filled the battered metal kettle and placed it on the stove. Still on automatic, she opened the door to the cupboard next to her head and pulled out a finely made, but sturdy porcelain mug. As she fumbled with the cardboard box filled with teabags, in her mind, she felt the Infected suddenly become alert. There were no words, but an intense awareness that there was danger to the living.
She reached for the kettle, as she reached with her mind and asked, what’s happening?
Answers seemed to flood her in feelings and fragments of concepts and images. They warned her that danger had arrived. An image of blood and torn flesh flashed through her mind, followed by another image of the shelter. She saw herself in the shelter and the message was clear. The Infected wanted her to be safe. Her life was already lost, but the baby must be protected.
Go, go now, whispered through her thoughts.
