“Good.” She managed a world of satisfaction in that one word.
I relaxed. Whatever the whole story about her presence here, she wasn’t connected to Allen and my wounded were getting treatment. She glanced over her shoulder. “Your ride is early.”
Sure enough, another wagon pulled by those giant horses had appeared. One by one my team climbed down and pulled themselves into it. Padded with straw, it wasn’t too bad even with the jolting. I pulled myself up towards the front, hooking one elbow over the front of the wagon, at her left side. The Sergeant Major drove, clucking gently at the team and occasionally slapping the reins against their backs. The rest of the guards we left behind, and I looked back to see them spreading along the wall to their original positions. Next to the Sergeant Major sat the young trooper. We jolted along the remains of a paved road for perhaps an hour, gradually turning away from the edge of the wall. “What is that?” I asked over the clopping hooves.
“A twenty-foot sea wall.” She replied over her shoulder. “In the days after New York City fell, people in the biggest towns in Vermont took the hint and started leaving in droves. Even though the locals knew we were here, most fled east and north. Only a couple hundred made their way to us, and most of them stayed in Grand Isle. There was a window of about four weeks between the zombie plague spreading north and their arrival in Burlington. We took advantage of that and looted every construction site we could find. Most looters were taking things they could cart away in sedans and SUVs. Since we are mostly farmers, we went in there with trucks and trailers. It took over two years, long after we had to start defending ourselves from the Undead, to steal enough cement blocks to circle the island, but now the wall is complete. We also excavated thirty-foot deep trenches into the lake bed. No one can reach us from the lake, unless they’ve got a Naval fleet.” This struck her companion as funny, somehow, and he laughed. I had to give her credit: it was no small feat to circle an island, however small, with that kind of defense. If nothing else, she could organize a work force.
“You know the Zs don’t like water. Was it worth the effort?”
She nodded. “There are worse things than Zombies in the world, as I’m sure you know, Sergeant.”
Eventually she pulled into a long driveway that snaked this way and that through a line of trees, dead-ending in a stable yard. There was a huge, three-story barn on one side, some sort of walled-off enclosure directly in front of the drive, and a third, smaller structure to the left. When I jumped off the back of the cart, I landed on cement. A glance at the constellations told me it was well on towards dawn, and in the growing light I could see the dark circles and haggard expressions of my team. None of us had slept in better than thirty-six hours, and it was starting to catch up with us.
Several young guys had come out from the barn and unhitched the team, leading them away. The Sergeant Major and her companion slung our packs over their shoulders. “This way,” she said. We followed her up.
It might have started life as a barn, and the horses might bed below us, but the top half of the structure had, at some point, been turned into living space. In a world where people lived badly and a bath was usually a dream, I could only be amazed that she had managed to maintain this place. It was clean — not just the half-assed clean you get by removing muddy boots at the door and maybe sweeping around with a broom made of twigs — but clean. I hadn’t seen anything like it outside Seattle. There was even a TV on the wall and a pool table near a tall bank of real windows on the opposite side of the room. I looked around. The space beneath stairs leading to the third floor was filled with books, facing a small kitchen that had, from the sound of it, a working refrigerator. She looked at my astonished face with amusement, and I hastily shut my trap. The others were just standing there, heads hanging, so dog-tired they couldn’t even drum up the enthusiasm to look around for themselves.
“You can sleep here tonight,” she said. “There are enough beds upstairs for you all. Do me a favor and strip out of your clothes, and we’ll have them clean in the morning.”
I just blinked at her, stupidly. The combination of a week’s poor sleep, high-alert while teasing out Westbrook’s squad, then a two-hour adrenaline rush escaping a pack of zombies had all cost me. Seeing this place was my limit. It was all I could do to stand upright with my eyes open. Processing information was out the fucking window. For a half second, I thought maybe I was really dead and this was just one messed-up stop in purgatory. By the time I understood what she was saying, she was already headed down and the others were stumbling their way upstairs. It was Brit’s hand in mine, pulling me towards the stairs, that got me moving at all.
Twenty minutes later, I tossed our combined uniforms into the hallway, truly glad the reeking mess wasn’t in the same room as me, and passed out next to Brit where she lay, dead to the world, on the double bed upstairs. If they were going to kill us in the morning, I didn’t give a shit about it tonight.
Chapter 20
Around four am, Red shook me awake for my watch. I got up groggily, and he slipped down the hallway into Harts room. Good for him, I thought. Good for them both. The hour of my watch passed slowly, and I was close to nodding off again when Brit stumbled out to relieve me. Even though we seemed safe, we could never let our guard down. I had spent that hour pacing the hallway, worrying about Doc and Ziv. Hopefully they were being treated well, but I wasn’t going to go stumbling around an armed camp at zero dark thirty to find them. I fell back asleep almost instantly, once I was sure Brit was awake and ready for watch.
I actually woke up to the sound of Brit’s “Holy shit, would you look at that!” as she stood naked at the window, nose mashed against the glass, looking down.
I scrubbed sleep from my eyes and caught sight of her. “You’re probably giving those farm hands a cheap thrill standing there like that.”
She either didn’t hear me or, more likely, didn’t care. We might love each other and all that sappy-happy crap, but she still enjoyed giving total strangers awkward hard-ons. “Get over here and check this out.” Less of a hedonist than her, I wrapped the sheet around myself before stepping up beside her. I glanced down and immediately saw what had caught her interest.
At three am, the place had seemed like a farm. At a quarter past eleven in the morning, I could see that it was. The walled enclosure I had spotted earlier was at least an acre in size and filled with raised beds of vegetables. This late in the season, it was a riot of green. Between the garden and the barn, outside the wall and almost directly beneath us, I could see the curve of greenhouse glass beneath a deck off the second story. A walk to the window against the east wall showed me the smaller barn and beyond it, at least twenty acres of pasture in which a herd of beef cattle were grazing, four or five of those giant horses mixed in with them. The thought of a steak filled my mouth with saliva. A couple of cows, a different breed to the cattle, were grazing in a separate pasture but mooing at the huge bull bellowing at them from the other side of the electrified fence. Brit was bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet like a three year-old, although the effect was quite different in the nude. “Look at that orchard!” she squealed, pointing out her window. Sure enough, long rows of fruit trees stretched out past the garden.
“Where are we?” I wondered.
She shook her head in wonder. “I don’t know, but I can die happy now. Fuck the Army, I’m not leaving this place ever again.”
I just shook my head. A glance outside the door showed me that the Sergeant Major hadn’t been kidding the night before; clean, folded uniforms were waiting outside each door. After a long shower and the delight of toilet paper (seriously, you have no idea how important toilet paper is post-zombie apocalypse. None of those movie directors got that right), my team assembled in the main room on the second floor. None of the people I had seen the night before were to be found, but there were scrambled eggs, fresh bread, butter, and a toaster sitting on the kitchen counter when we arrived, and Doc’s medical bag
was neatly unpacked and laid out inspection-style on the coffee table. That reminded me that neither he nor Ziv were anywhere in the building, but after I caught sight of the Sergeant Major’s Wall of Pride that Red was examining; the long lines of military guidons and other goodbye-plaques that most soldiers end up with after a couple decades of Army work, or used to, back when places that made that useless shit still existed, I figured she was legit enough I could trust they weren’t buried in shallow graves somewhere. From my vantage on the insanely comfortable leather couch, I spotted at least half a dozen deployment-related shadow boxes and twice that many from various Army posts. It seemed the Sergeant Major and her husband, from the look of the name plates, had been stationed almost everywhere.
The rest of our packs were resting neatly in a line along the wall. I could tell at a glance that they had all been searched, but when I went through mine I found everything was there. “Nothing about this place makes sense,” I said as I repacked.
“What do you mean?” Brit and Hart had set up the pool table and a sharp crack echoed through the room when Hart broke the triangle. At least three balls, two solid, one striped, landed in the pockets.
“Look around. I haven’t seen any place like this since the plague hit. We’ve got two ex-military with nine deployments between them living on a farm with more food than I’ve seen in years, at least four farmhands, herds of cattle, horses, you name it, surrounded by a sea wall of all fucking things, and zombies on either side of the mainland. What sort of crazy shit is this?”
“The dead are walking the skin of the earth, Sergeant. This place is no stranger than the rest of reality.” Her voice, crisp and clear, cut across the noise from the pool corner. Brit paused halfway through her shot, the white ball landing in the center pocket, unnoticed. Hart straightened up, leaning her pool cue against the window, and opened her mouth to say something, but Ahmed beat her to it.
Whatever you can say about our resident terrorist, he’s not a woman-hater. For all that he and Brit call each other names, more than once he’s risked his life to save hers, so maybe I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was when he stepped towards the Sergeant Major and bowed from the waist, placing one hand over his heart in the Afghan gesture of respect. She smiled at him, the lines in her face softening. “Ahmed Yassir,” she said, returning his bow. “You are the absolute last person I ever expected to see here.”
“I am glad to see that you have survived, Sergeant Major. You were a worthy adversary,” he replied.
She chuckled, then seeing our confusion, explained. “I met Ahmed Yassir near Kandahar in 2004. I was with the 82nd then, a battalion Sergeant Major at the time.” She nodded at Ahmed. “He was a frustrating opponent. It wasn’t until I finally sat down with the locals in his area that I learned why. We pulled back some of our COPs off his land, because I had a hunch we could trust him to take out the Taliban without our involvement. He proved me right, and shocked us all when he met with me at a meeting of the local headmen to negotiate a treaty that spared our soldiers’ lives while killing all the Taliban that came close.”
Ahmed nodded. “The agreement worked while you were there. When you left, your replacement was, how do you say… less accommodating.”
She sighed. “I was afraid of that. From the bottom of my soul, Ahmed, I did what I could to convince them to trust you. But old habits die hard, and my replacement had just come from the invasion of Iraq. He was too stupid to listen.”
Ahmed nodded. “We learned that. It is what drove me into the hills, and why Nick there sent me to Guantanamo three years later.”
Her glance towards me then was more of a glare. “You don’t acquit yourself well by doing that, Sergeant Agostine.”
“Water under the bridge, Sergeant Major. They kill us, we kill them.”
“Typical Combat Arms mentality.”
I scowled, crossing my arms. I couldn’t say why, but the old woman made me nervous. “Ahmed an I have worked it out.”
She did not rise to that, simply shook her head. She glanced around the room. “We searched your bags to see who you are, and to ensure you had nothing dangerous to us. You are clearly military, or most of you are—” she eyed Brit for a second “–but I saw no unit markings beyond the tags on your uniform. What unit are you assigned to?”
“We’re Irregular Scouts. Technically we’re not in the Army at all, though for Big Army’s purposes we fall under JSOC.”
She nodded slowly. “Your two soldiers are at my house, a few hundred meters from here. They are both doing fine, although Master Sergeant Hamilton needs some time to recuperate. The General was not a gentle host.”
“Thank you.” I could not hide the relief in my voice at knowing they were still alive.
“We were able to recover sixty-eight people from South Hero,” she said after a moment, moving over to the kitchen to clean up our mess from breakfast. We followed her, Brit and Red snagging the chairs on the opposite side of the bar.
“There were a thousand people on that island,” Red said hoarsely.
“We hope that more were able to make it to North Hero before the bridge was blown. I have heard reports that some of the residents there went south to see if they could find more survivors. Hopefully we’ll find more.” She scraped the leftover food into the sink and stacked the plates into the dishwasher as she spoke. “As for Allen, I met that son of a bitch when we first bought land up here, ten years ago. He was the head of the Vermont National Guard — he lived on Grand Isle and heard, probably through our land agent, that we were both military. He tried talking me into transferring over once I dropped my retirement papers. I wasn’t interested. I could tell the man had an ego, but even I hadn’t expected him to turn into a tinpot Hitler so quickly. I think I was blinded by my belief that someone with that many years of military service wouldn’t forget his obligations to the American people so easily.” She shrugged.
“He’d blocked off the highway leading from the mainland onto South Hero, you saw that. But he sent his people out in forays to what’s left of Burlington in order to pick up supplies. We do the same thing, but we move by boat, so we land south of the city, away from his scouts. He knew about us, of course, and we had to give him a third of our harvest every year just to keep him away. Had he only ground troops, I would have told him to go to hell, but he had air support and was perfectly capable of killing everyone and simply taking over the land. So I negotiated with the bastard.”
“Only sixty-eight? Sixty-eight?” I persisted, taking notes on my iPhone.
Her mouth compressed into a thin line. “You saw what those JDAMs did, Sergeant. You ordered them, did you not? I am surprised so many survived. We’d blown our bridge when the plague reached Burlington. One of my men stole six pounds of C4 from a construction site, but none of us had much experience with demolitions. I was in electronic warfare before I got promoted to Command Sergeant Major, so I had no experience with the stuff. We packed three pounds on either side of the causeway over a hundred meter distance.”
I winced. Six pounds of C4 would have taken care of that causeway and probably everything around it for half a kilometer. She grinned outright at my reaction. “It destroyed the entire causeway and dug a crater sixty feet into the bed of the lake. We’d bricked up the entrance to the island, so most of the debris hit that instead of us behind it, but we had to rebuild the wall afterwards. You could have seen that plume from southern New York, I imagine.
“We’ve informed North Hero that we’ve blown the causeway to their south, so at least our sister island is safe.” Her eyes darkened. I felt myself start to sweat as I imagined the scene, and was grateful I had not been there. “But we had so little time. My men reached the bridge an hour before the first zombies came crawling out of what was left from your bombs. The few dozen survivors jumped into the water, and they saved as many as they could, but some were too afraid to risk it. I finally had to order my troops to fire on the crowd at the edge of the lake, because dying is bet
ter than… than that.”
She was silent for a minute, then gave a little shake of her head and looked at us. “Grand Isle is finished. We’ll start looting tonight. I want their ammunition stores and equipment, and we got incredibly lucky. Two of his pilots fled with full crews and UH-60s. We’ve parked the birds on one of our open spaces, since we don’t have anything like a parking lot on the island. The pilots will help distract any surviving zombies while we find what we can find to salvage. I suspect it won’t take long.”
“Then what?” Red asked, his hands clenched together as he listened.
“We’ll burn the island. It’s the only way to clear the zombies off of it, and I want that land. The soils are better there, and it gives us more breathing room. I don’t expect, after your little display, that consolidation will be much of a problem. And with three islands, we’ll be able to hold out indefinitely.”
“That’s might not work.” I said. “The government is going to want the land too, and our job was to figure out how useable it is for a base in this area.”
“The Army will have nothing to collect but ashes,” she said simply. “And I don’t think they’re coming. They are, after all, the ones who just turned it to glass.”
Chapter 21
We were all silenced. With the bombing of South Hero and the death of Allen, that was one problem solved. I didn’t like the idea of some wannabe-dictator controlling innocent civilians; it reminded me too much of what LTC Jackass McDonald would have done if he’d had a chance. At the same time, it was sickening to realize that a thousand people were now dead. They’d survived four years of this shit, and thanks to one man’s blind ego they were gone. Even Brit was subdued. Hart had her head bent over her entwined hands, maybe praying. Red was staring out the windows, and Ahmed was studying the Sergeant Major with his usual closed-in look, expression unreadable. The Sergeant Major was looking at me, one old NCO giving another the time to absorb what she’d said.
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