I finally sighed. “Well, this mission is over.”
She nodded slowly, studying me. “To be frank,” she said. “I’ve been wondering how you managed to continue as a scout missing one foot.”
Brit stirred. “We’re supposed to be retired,” she replied, “but those asshats down at Fort Orange wanted to collect on a debt.”
I gave Brit a look that told her to play it close. “We’re here because Doc was here. I don’t leave anyone behind. After this, we’re out for good.”
“Stay here instead,” the Sergeant Major suggested gently. “I’ve got six hundred and forty two lives to worry about, more, now, depending on how many are on North Hero. I could use a few more people to patrol the walls and help with the defense. Your training is priceless, even if you don’t know this end of the lake. If nothing else, you could teach our younger ones to dodge zombies and help us when we have to make supply runs.” I hesitated. What we’d seen from our window upstairs this morning had been encouraging, but there was more to this place than one farm. She might be doing fine, but what of the other people living here? Perhaps she was no better than the General, another little dictator making a play for our sympathies. Six well-trained soldiers would give her one hell of an advantage. She must have read what I was thinking, for she straightened up. “If you doubt me, come outside. There’s more to see here.”
She led us over a dirt path from the courtyard through a little grove of trees to the main house. It was a one-story building, almost rambling in its many corners and rounded edges. An elegant deck with a round seating area dug four feet into the ground sat off the back of the house. A firepit in the center was stacked with birch wood. A grill and brick oven had been built into one wall. Climbing the stairs, we followed her into a spacious kitchen, all clean stainless steel and dark wood cabinets. Again, the sheer cleanliness of the place struck me more than anything. It was like being in the world before the plague hit, as if the world in which the rest of us existed had not touched this place. I had to remind myself that if I looked past the trees, I’d see the seawall protecting the island from external attack not a quarter mile away.
We trailed her towards a bedroom in the back, past an impressive wine collection. Brit had the grace not to just grab a bottle, but I saw her eyeing them. The Sergeant Major opened a door and ushered us through.
Doc and Ziv were laying on military-issue cots, Doc with two IVs in his arm and a bandage around his ribs. His uniform had been recently cleaned, the jacket hanging on a nail above his head. His color had come back and he clearly had a good night’s sleep. Ziv, in no more than his boxers, had one arm behind his head and was staring at the ceiling, but he got up and came to greet us when we walked in. Brit did the unthinkable by giving him a hug, although she was careful about it once she saw the bruising on his abdomen and back. His left arm was in a cast. On the other side of the room, a man in his mid-fifties was staring into the eyepiece of a microscope. I looked around. The room might not have been the island’s hospital, but I got the impression that it was the first place anyone injured found themselves. A row of shelves held glass bottles and random instruments, including scalpels soaking in some kind of solution. A stethoscope hung from a nail under the shelves, and those lights doctors used to look in your eyes and throat sprouted from a mason jar. It was a clean and serviceable room, if decidedly rustic. The chairs against one wall were all home-made, clunky but looking like they could hold the fattest person with no trouble, not that there were many fat people around these days.
The doctor stood to greet us, offering his hand. “My name is Alexander Brundage,” he said, politely.
We clustered in the center of the room. “We need to take blood samples from all of you.” She told us. “It’s just our policy. Doctor Brundage did the same to the refugees we recovered last night, before we sent them to stay with families throughout the island. It won’t take long.”
The others glanced at me but I shrugged. What would a blood sample hurt, and it wasn’t as if they’d actually see anything. The doc pulled a sterile lancet from a sealed package for each of us and pricked our fingertips. He squeezed a drop onto a slide, labeled each one carefully, then sat down before the microscope. I walked over to Doc and looked him over. After a moment, Cassandra joined me at his side. “He was beaten pretty badly,” she said, including the others who had taken seats after giving the doctor their blood samples. “The fingernails on his right hand were pulled out, probably with pliers. They may or may not grow back, so he will have to be very careful for a while. No broken bones, although he’s got a couple of cracked ribs. We aren’t sure if his eye orbit is broken, but it will be a few days before the swelling goes down and he can see out of that eye again. He’s not going to be able to eat solid food for about a week, just to save his jaw the trouble. One molar might be cracked. There’s a dentist on North Hero we’ll try to bring over to check the rest of his mouth. I’m hoping he won’t need that tooth pulled.” Doc woke up as she described his injuries, and gave me a thumbs-up.
She nodded at Ziv. “This one was luckier. His elbow is fractured but we put a smaller cast on it so he can use the arm. That shouldn’t keep you guys here more than a couple of weeks. He won’t say, but I think they beat him with a metal pipe. No lacerated organs or internal bleeding, but his spleen is enlarged and there may be some damage to his liver. No vodka for you, Soldat.”
Ziv scowled at her. “Vojnik. I am Serbian, not Russian.”
The Sergeant Major’s expression did not change, but I sensed some disdain in her tone when she replied. “Perhaps I should have guessed. I knew that accent reeked from someplace familiar.”
“What is that supposed to mean, Woman?” Ziv started up from his bed, reaching for the big knife strapped to his pack.
Before it broke out into violence, Brundage leaned back and smiled at us. “None of you are infected,” he said. “Although I’m sure you knew that. I can say that you all could use a few good meals and some rest.” I nodded. MREs did not a fat man make, and we were all on the edge of malnutrition. I was secretly hoping some of the vegetables in her garden would be ripe enough to eat, because I was sick of MRE #11, the Sammich. Man cannot live on Spam alone.
The Sergeant Major tapped my arm. “Hamilton and the other one can rest here for a while. I doubt they’re up for dancing. But if you would like, I can show you the rest of Isle La Motte.”
Chapter 22
Sure enough, we got a tour of the island, although from horseback. The only one of us who could ride competently was Ahmed, and even he was intimidated by the horses when the two young men from last night brought them out. “They’re Shire horses,” she told us as she easily swung up into the saddle. “About the same size as Clydesdales, those big horses you used to see in the beer commercials. They eat everything they can reach, but they don’t balk at the sight of zombies and I’ve trained them to fight. Their height means the rider is more protected from attack, although a horde would bring horse and rider down easily enough.”
Uncomfortable though it turned out to be, I did bask in the luxury of riding instead of walking. My prosthesis wouldn’t fit in the stirrup, but I found I could ride a half-assed sort of sidesaddle when the jolting got too rough, and I didn’t mind Brit’s teasing too much after she fell off twice. “You could sell these to the Army,” I pointed out when we stopped for lunch at the home of another farmer on the north side of the island. “It would be the difference between life and death for scouts.”
The farmer, a big bear of a man with the proverbial farmer’s tan, guffawed loudly as he left the table for his plowing. The farmer’s wife, a lady who looked older than she probably was, shook her head and followed her husband out. “These horses are bred for war, that’s true,” the Sergeant Major explained. “They might do you good when it comes to scout work, but they aren’t easy to care for. You’d spend half your time just searching for grazing, and frankly we don’t have enough to lose. If it wasn’t for the fact that Burlingt
on was mostly empty when the infection reached it, we wouldn’t have enough gas to run our tractors. Eventually we’ll run out, even if we can resupply from South Hero, which I doubt. In two years, we’ll be out of fuel. These horses don’t breed every year, and we need them for the plow and for clearing fields. We won’t sell them, and we’ll fight to keep them.”
I shrugged. “Oh well. It was worth asking.”
She grinned. “It was sheer luck that we have them. If my husband hadn’t retired before me, we wouldn’t have had time to build up the farm and bring in the horses before the plague hit. He spent the last five years of my career up here.”
“Is he that man, Pierre?”
She shook her head, her smile fading. “He died of cancer three years ago. He was halfway through chemo when the plague hit.”
“I’m sorry.” Brit spoke up, the first words she’d said all morning. Her sympathy was real enough, but it was so rare for her to express genuine emotion that even I glanced at her askance.
The Sergeant Major shrugged. “The last months were easier without the drugs and radiation. He said there wasn’t too much pain, but he was tired all the time. I do miss him, but I’m glad he didn’t live long enough to realize how bad things would get.”
“What were the first couple of years like here?” Hart asked as we remounted and carefully turned the horses back south.
“We didn’t starve, I can tell you.” She was at ease on the back of the big gelding, a red roan whose size dwarfed her as a rider on his back. She swayed with the horse’s gait, comfortable on what was essentially a half-ton of solid muscle. “Most of the island had been farmland in the past, and once the community realized what was happening, and what would happen if we got overrun by refugees, it was easy to organize everyone. Bryan — my husband — we didn’t have much trouble with that. It was lean, the first winter, but between foraging expeditions in what was left of Burlington and Champlain in New York, we made it through. Eating badly for six months convinced everyone else to clear their own land, get together to clear marginal land and acreage that belonged to people off-island. The next fall, we had a surplus, and no one has starved. Even with that third handed over to General Asshole, we’ve done fine.”
She wasn’t kidding. What had struck me from the first person I saw that morning was that everyone here was healthy. It wasn’t the stick-thin-barely-surviving that my team and I looked like on a diet of MREs, and it wasn’t the almost-obesity you saw among cannibals surviving on an exclusively meat diet. Everyone here had real muscle, the strength that came from eating well and working hard. As we trotted past well-tended fields and over the one bridge, spanning a wide creek whose sides were carefully brick-lined, I was impressed again at the strength of will it took to organize an entire community in the face of overwhelming odds and succeed, especially in a world where the normal rules had gone out the window when the Undead started hunting the living. I suspected, looking at her upright back, it cost her more than she would admit to keep six hundred people working together, particularly with zombies not more than two or three miles offshore, the last military presence gone. Whatever her feelings about the General, I knew in my gut that he had still supplied them with security, even if it cost more food than they had wanted to give.
But she wasn’t a dictator either. Anyone could see that. The men and women working in the fields waved and called out when they saw her astride the horse, and she waved back. More than once she enlisted us to help a farmer pull a stuck machine out of the mud. Kids chased after us as we trotted down the road, and when she checked on the guards along the wall in the late afternoon, they spoke to her with real respect. Everywhere you looked, her hand was on the community, and it was a hand they evidently welcomed. Brit pushed her horse up next to mine as we waited while the Sergeant Major spoke with those guards, perched on the wood scaffolding that placed them just high enough they could sprawl out in the prone, their bodies protected by the wall, and snipe anything they could see with minimal danger. “We should stay here,” she said softly, her knee touching mine. “We could live here, Nick. No more fighting, no more starving, no more nothing. This place is paradise compared to what we’ve been through.”
“What about the Army? What about all the Soldiers we’ve supported for the last four years? Major Flynn down in Fort Orange is still waiting for our report.”
She gritted her teeth. “We did our part, Nick. And she’s right, she needs more people. Six hundred isn’t enough, this place has to be at least thirty square miles to farm, fortify, and patrol. Six more who can train dozens is a godsend to her, you can see that.”
“Let me think about it.” I cut her off as she opened her mouth to argue. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just saying we may not be able to ride off into the sunset just yet.” She grimaced but shifted her horse away as the older woman trotted back to us.
Later that evening, I saw what the woman had meant by surplus. She led us back to the main house to check again on Doc and Ziv but also to gather up supper, and Brit damn near swooned when she went into the pantry and saw floor-to-ceiling shelves of canned food. Our resident vegetarian started crying as she looked over the long lines of every vegetable and fruit you can imagine, all pickled or canned or piled in baskets. We all stood there in stunned silence for a while, I don’t mind telling you, because it was more food than any of us had seen since before the plague. “You weren’t kidding,” I said softly. Brit had already snagged a bag of dried apple slices and was alternating them with a huge potato that she simply bit right into, making grunting noises of appreciation.
The Sergeant Major shook her head, her expression a mixture of amusement and exasperation at Brit’s antics. Red was busy destroying a can of what looked like sliced peppers, and the only one who seemed determined to keep his hands to himself was Ahmed, his arms folded as he stared in mute fascination at a jar of diced tomatoes. His favorite, I knew; his wife, long ago, would make him a dish of stewed tomatoes on his birthday, or he had once told us on a long-range patrol. I hadn’t eaten a fresh tomato in three years.
Our host just shook her head. “Grab whatever you want, within reason, and I’ll start on dinner.” We needed no encouragement, and presented her with twelve different vegetables and six bags of various dried fruit. We followed her like ducklings back to the barn, and to our absolute delight found Pierre grilling steaks on the second-story deck. She had Red spear the vegetables onto sticks for grilling, and after a whispered word from me, cooked a dish of stewed tomatoes with curry sauce for Ahmed. He did not say a word when she set the bowl in front of him, but the hidden expression in his eyes told me his undying loyalty had switched to her. Traitor.
Doc was carried upstairs on a litter and was able to join us at the table, although an IV bag was hooked over a nail on the wall and Brundage gave him some sort of broth to sip, so he could at least feel like he was part of the celebration. Ziv’s arm was in a sling but he took to the steak with uncivilized gusto. There was nothing said for at least an hour, but we all ate as we never had before, not even in Seattle. Everything was fresh, except the meat, which had been frozen immediately after slaughter and tasted like the cow was still mooing downstairs. Nothing I ever ate before that night, not even before, tasted like that food. The Sergeant Major ate sparingly, although her companion went through his steak with the same enthusiasm we did. Brit had commandeered the largest bowl in the kitchen and was rapidly destroying the biggest salad I’ve ever seen. When we finally sat back, full, the table was almost empty, the sink was full of empty jars, and I had had to remove my belt. Red let out a long, loud, appreciative belch, apologizing sheepishly when the Sergeant Major gave him a dirty look.
An awkward silence fell. Pierre stood, and Brundage excused himself after adjusting Doc’s IV. Pierre said something in French that we didn’t understand, but it seemed to be friendly. We all gave him a short wave before he went inside to clean up. I saw Brit and then Ahmed glance my way, and I gave in to their stares. �
��You said last night that you know how the plague hit.”
Three empty wine bottles cluttered the center of the table; her collection in the main house was impressive, and even though I had preferred Jack Daniels back in the old world, it wasn’t bad. She lifted her glass and swirled the red liquid around before draining it. “I did say that,” she admitted as she carefully set the glass back on the table. “Perhaps a better question would be: Do you want to know what I know? You won’t forget it, and I may not be doing you any favors by telling you.”
Chapter 23
It was Brit who broke the silence, and in her haunted expression I saw the girl Doc and I had rescued from the remains of Syracuse years before. “I was going to the stars, Lady. I was the top of my class in Physics, I was a week out from an internship at NASA when the zombies showed up. I want to know what stole my future.”
The two women shared a long, considering glance. I thought that perhaps the Sergeant Major, a woman who had somehow retained the vestiges of real elegance despite the dirt under her fingernails and the world-weary expression that creased her forehead, was the kind of woman Brit would have admired, if the world were sane and God paying attention. Finally the older woman nodded.
“If you insist. My last assignment, as I told you last night, Sergeant Agostine, was at Fort Detrick. By then I was twenty-six years into the Army, and I’d gone as far as I could, even among Sergeant Majors. I had no intention of continuing, and the only logical assignment left for me would be at Division level. But I had dropped my retirement packet after Bryan was diagnosed with brain cancer, our dreams of building a farm here to putter around gone along with his health. For the last nine months, ticking down to the day I’d leave, they asked me to run the Inspector General’s Office. Hardly a glamorous assignment, and not the one I should have gotten, but by then the only thing a bad NCOER could do was give me a paper cut.” Doc and I chuckled, Doc’s ending with a wince as he curled one arm around his ribs.
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