MacLaren assigned himself white and repositioned the board while Tom evaded the slightest frown at his etiquette, humming to himself in lieu of total silence as the other troopers bunkered down, one of Pamela’s team of hardened paramilitaries named Ortiz reading a tattered Deadpool comic.
“Can I trust you, Dan?”
MacLaren maintained focus on his opening move and then looked up with a more subdued expression after advancing the pawn. Tom automatically moved one of his direct into the center of the unfolded board.
“Yes,” the other man said.
“There’s something I wanted to ask you about.”
“Sounds serious.”
“Serious enough that I need to know you won’t mention it to anyone,” Tom said. “My children know, and God knows I’ve had the urge to tell someone, anyone, but telling you might actually be some help.”
“What is it?”
“What do you know about military encryption?” he asked. “Like, Government encryption?”
“That’s a hell of a question.”
“You were in the military.”
“Yeah,” MacLaren said. “Not exactly my field though. You know who would know? Councilor Deschain.”
“No,” Tom said. “She’ll tell Wilhelm.”
“Aha, so I’m not the only one with a secret kept from Councilor Wilhelm?”
Tom looked away, momentarily abashed.
“What is it?”
“I found the pilot’s laptop in that crash,” Tom said.
“Why didn’t you tell Wilhelm?” Dan asked. “He was there, right?”
“I dunno,” Tom said. “Something about him. In my gut.”
“Don’t trust him?”
“He’s too . . . nice.”
“Ha,” MacLaren laughed gently. “You sound like one of my exes.”
“I thought there might be something on the computer,” Tom said. “Something we could use. I don’t know exactly . . . like maybe it could tell us something about the rest of the world.”
Tom was reminded of the conversation driving out to the agri-hub, and the feeling of becoming spellbound at the idea of the vast barren mystery encircling the rest of the planet left him morose. MacLaren sensed his gravity and eased off again with his mirth.
“Talk to Shakes Ben-Gurion,” he said softly now, since it was their private conspiracy. “You know Delroy Earle, right? They’re tight. Shakes was a Silicon Valley rock star in his day.”
MacLaren hesitated, then slowly nodded as he became more sure of himself.
“You should tell him,” Dan said. “I think he’d be more interested than you might expect.”
*
HENDERSON REFUSED TO lead them back to the site of the encounter he stubbornly refused to acknowledge was anything other than a wholesale kidnapping, unable to resolve his woman quitting him for a better prospect, however dubious that might prove to be. MacLaren organized a small donation of rations and a bottle of water, and after that they hooked up the radio gear and headed into the pre-dawn dark. MacLaren had maps for the area and they moved cautiously between the big abandoned semi-rural blocks maintaining total silence.
As the sky lightened, they hit a patch of woodland and steered a course towards a bridge crossing beside an adjacent weir where they carefully refilled their water supplies sheltered by a number of abandoned trucks all with their hoods up, pipes and mechanics tools scattered in the dusty parking lot. There were a few corpses decayed and buried in banks of old fallen leaves. Tom emptied his bottle before passing it down the line for its refill, stopping briefly dead in his tracks as he noticed again “HASTUR” sprayed again down the side of one of the deceased trucks.
Pamela and Hollister volunteered to head across the bridge to ascertain their safety, but after making the crossing unimpeded, they camped far too soon to give any Raiders spying on them the certainty they’d moved on. MacLaren muttered instructions into their headsets and it was another hour before they could scurry over the river with the midday sun baking down on their heads. Although they spotted a Fury in the distance down the roadway, the lone creature vanished into the grass as if having better thoughts today than throwing itself against the armed group.
Tom stripped to his singlet and used his grimy shirt as a head cover, noting he was the only one wearing blue jeans given all the others’ military palette. His shoulders were peeling with the exposure, but he kept a check on his water supply, under-prepared for an overland trek and paranoid about the chance of a safe refill on the road ahead.
Not that they were on a road. MacLaren deliberately eschewed the tarmac in favor of hiking up the grassy hillside overcome with a riot of summer flowers overlooking the narrow river. Despite the heat making the field shimmer, it was a beautiful day and hard not to conclude large stretches of the world were much better for humankind not being in it.
Each of the troopers dropped into a crouch at the crest, thick, wild-growing flowers and flowering weeds obscuring sight of almost everything around them below hip height. From the hilltop, they scored a good survey of the land ahead, MacLaren bringing them in on the area Leon Henderson related from the east.
The first thing that struck them was a series of old military tents in various states of disrepair, flapping in the breeze cutting through the next shallow valley. An overgrown road veered down the far slope into a cul-de-sac the old encampment had set up within eyeshot of three abandoned homes and a series of raised water tanks, surrounded by higher ground. Something about the camp’s obvious poor state argued against the presence of any Raiders, and once they’d made a thorough check of the area, MacLaren led them down.
“Fan out,” the command came in Tom’s ear piece.
A number of the others peeled obediently away. Tom stuck on MacLaren’s six as the ex-commando advanced at the lead, shadowed by Hollister, Langhorn and Pamela fanned out behind him. The thick flowers swabbed their legs, leaving pollen like nature’s paint brushes, while bees and summer moths fluttered in their wake.
Tom inhaled the pungent scent and stumbled slightly on the concealed ground.
Milwaukee led one trio off to the far right flank, headed down to check the homes, while Brix signaled the rest of the squad across the overgrown, mostly concealed cul-de-sac and up onto more elevated ground to the south.
The last in the center, Tom hefted his bow up and out of the wildflowers with difficulty, irritation marshaling his attention on the loamy footing of the hidden field. He only noticed the rotting skull a moment before he set his boot on it, overcompensating instead and taking one giant step forward as the skull’s eyes opened and struck an awful whistling noise as it took in a decayed breath.
A shatteringly-loud explosion off to Tom’s right cut through any warning cry he might’ve made, twisting aside as the leprous, mostly-decayed Fury made a lame grab at his boots and a cloud of dirt and disintegrated vegetation plumed across from him, the sound alone blasting Tom sideways as clods rained down and Tom felt wetness hit his cheek as he slapped at his face and bolted instinctively into further cover.
Only to stop himself short.
One of the commandos’ mortified screams came from the direction of the blast and when he touched a hand to his cheek, it came back slick with blood.
For one terrifying heartbeat, he thought it his own – and then the logic struck him the same moment MacLaren’s bawl came as a deafening shriek via the two-way.
“Minefield!”
*
THE SCREAMING MAN was Hollister.
The ground where he lay a distance from the tattered encampment was a churned wasteland, and his right leg had disappeared somewhere along with all the flowers and weeds around him, exposing black earth splashed with blood. Hollister’s black hands clasped the awfully bright red-gushing stump as he scoured bulging eyes around and saw Pamela, MacLaren and Tom frozen where they stood, while Brix’s team watched down on them, scrambling backwards into higher ground.
Langhorn stood on the far side of
the group with his face twisted in terror.
“Nobody move!”
At first it was hard to tell who was yelling, with MacLaren’s commands in Tom’s ear and shouts from Brix, Langhorn, and Cyril, and then from Milwaukee too, two hundred yards away in the yard of one of the first abandoned homes.
As the bulky man waved to call for calm, instead a Fury burst through the rotting front door of the house behind him, hurtling out with two more of the undead things on its heels clad the same as it in mold-riddled Army uniforms.
Milwaukee’s group on the north flank burst into action at once.
The wiry Latino Ortiz turned his silenced AR-15 on the charging Furies, while Pamela’s other men, Roscoe and Carter, broke tail and ran past Milwaukee, who turned too slowly to register the three rotting horrors which were on Ortiz in seconds. Then Milwaukee ran as well.
Ortiz’s suppressed gunfire raked the rushing Furies and took the first in the chest and head, and then the following two threw themselves at him. Otiz vanished from sight in the grass without another sound.
Tom checked back at MacLaren and Pamela stuck in the minefield like him and Milwaukee running uphill into the sparse trees west of the homesteads, while Roscoe and Carter, fleeing the attack, broke straight for the minefield, either panicked or not understanding the unfolding terror around them, conscious only of the two blood-thirsty creatures in their wake. Roscoe’s yells of “Run!” pointed to his terror, and all their noise inflamed the cadaveric remains Tom’d glimpsed just moments before.
Whatever he’d mistaken for a corpse at his feet now pulled itself hand over hand through the weeds towards him with its timeworn jaws agape and questing blindly, its open eyes baked dry in however many years it’d lain in the abandoned minefield.
There was only a second before it was on him, but Pamela’s sudden shrieks drew his attention as the woman moved several paces from her safe spot and poured a burst of M14 rounds into the concealed ground at her feet. The whip-like gunfire made Langhorn move too – whether attacked as well, or simply spooked, Tom couldn’t tell – and then Tom saw everything this time as a second explosion tore the earth and the young man to pieces.
Langhorn’s upper body catapulted into the air followed by a ribbon of entrails as more dirt and blood showered Pamela and MacLaren.
Tom tossed his headset in pain as Langhorn’s screams threatened to deafen him, and he cast the gear aside just in time to see the withered upper body of the near-starved Fury scuttle over his boots.
He drew his ax and didn’t dare take another step as his heels crunched sideways in the dirt and he hacked downwards, the single blow enough to silence the thing, its skull breaking like a bird’s nest.
Roscoe kept yelling as he and Carter ran, loud enough to defeat Pamela’s shouts of warning. The first of the other two Furies popped up from Ortiz’s position like a blood-stained meerkat and started bounding raggedly after them.
The same moment, the boarded-up front window of the same homestead burst outwards and the first of God-knew-how-many undead children forced its vengeful way out of confinement to charge in the direction of their next meal – Roscoe and his ginger wingman Carter running straight through the minefield towards Tom, Pamela and MacLaren.
MacLaren assessed the moment, swiveling on his spot and jogging a few more yards towards the abandoned military tents, but gave an “Oof!” of his own as he sank into a hitherto hidden crater in the grass. He whipped back up a second later and turned his gun to provide covering fire for the other men. Whatever instructions he hissed through the com-link no longer fed into Tom’s ear, and for Tom’s part, he stashed the ax and nocked an arrow and tried not to let his screaming thoughts fly through the numerous follies which’d led to him being in danger far from the sanctuary zone with his children that day.
“Move!” MacLaren yelled.
Trusting to blind luck was about the last thing on Tom’s to-do list when he signed up for letting himself get conscripted into MacLaren’s recon crew. Rather than run, he stayed his ground, scanning the entire valley as quickly as he could, licking parched lips, breath rattling through fear-constricted lungs.
Pamela followed MacLaren’s lead and simply started running blindly in the same direction as him, towards the military tents, and MacLaren clambered out of the unintended foxhole like some Civil War era general with his machete drawn as he chopped down violently into the shredded foliage around him, another of the minefield’s past victims lain in wait so long it barely had the strength left to feed.
Meanwhile, half-a-dozen more decomposing children ran from the closest house hot on the heels of the two military Furies now on Roscoe’s tail. Carter got the message and somehow veered off to Tom’s left, heading for the tents now as well on the presumption that whoever planted land mines in the field did it to protect that safe haven.
For Tom, it was at least seventy yards to the curb of the cul-de-sac, with hip-high growth the whole way. He scanned backwards, taking in the trampled path of his own safe passage from the east, headed completely away from all his comrades.
Pamela and MacLaren reached the tents without getting killed and turned as a unit to unleash gunfire right on Roscoe’s six, but however battle-hardened the handpicked team, fitness wasn’t the same priority. The bullets hit the second Fury, killing it, but not in time to stop the lead Fury throwing its full weight like a rotting linebacker onto Roscoe as he ran.
The pair went down in the grass and immediately disappeared in another thumping explosion.
Tom made his choice, turning to run as daintily as he could back along the path he’d made. Up in the ruined encampment, MacLaren realized Tom couldn’t hear him at about the same moment Tom’s clutching hand confirmed the unit on his belt had come off when he abandoned the headset.
At a glance, he saw the horde of undead children continuing into the field with only one stopping to glut itself wherever Ortiz lay, buried in the grass like a readymade grave. Last to unpick itself from the broken window of the house was a haggard-looking woman in a gore-stained sundress, and somehow in the Fury’s instinctual reckoning of the battlefield, it saw Tom eloping on his own the other way from the rest of the pack and she set off at a staggered run on a vector cutting ahead of wherever the minefield lay.
Milwaukee reached the sanctuary of the scattered trees now almost at the farthest reaches of the scene, experience winning over panic once he’d ascertained a moment’s safe zone from where he could return fire, but the distance he’d covered left his range far too inaccurate for headshots. Tom’d figured on circling up that way, but then kenned the undead woman starting towards him.
He paused eighty yards further back along his path and checked on Carter reaching MacLaren and Pamela, the three of them bugging out to join Brix’s team watching impotently from the higher ground they now sought to improve upon.
“Tom!” MacLaren yelled from halfway up the overgrown feeder road, waving his arms for added effect. “Regroup at the ridge! The ridge!”
The ghastly creature in the sundress had never been a looker, but now most of her face was gone and her elongated teeth formed a gumless snarl beneath eyes contracted into pinpricks of feral hate. She ran at him, ungainly on the uneven ground, never breaking eye contact even as Tom steadied himself and took the first shot from fifty yards.
The arrow hit the dead woman’s cheekbone and ricocheted past, somehow catching in the corpse’s earring and hanging there at a weird angle, thwarted in its flight.
Tom thought of Lilianna with her reputable fast draw and wished for some of that now.
His stiff shoulders didn’t make him so swift, but he blind-drew the next arrow in his quiver and fitted it to the notch as the Fury closed twenty-five yards, close enough now to hear the steam-train whistling of the air the dead creature drew involuntarily through the decaying recesses of its body.
Tom held the shot a moment, knowing it was his last before things went hand to hand, still uncertain of his footing anywhere other t
han the path on which he stood.
With a slow exhale, his aim was true, and the shaft buried itself in one of those shrunken eyes. The dead woman’s staggered run broke and she sagged to one side before collapsing completely into the grass.
Minefield or not, Tom vaulted the distance to land atop her. He quickly crouched and retrieved both arrows, deciding then it might be a good height from which to scan across the top of the grass around him to watch the children Furies change course across the minefield and race into the tattered military tents in hot pursuit as MacLaren and the others reconvened further up the distant slope on a rendezvous with Milwaukee at the ridgeline.
“Some fucking friends you guys are,” he growled to himself.
Tom stayed crouched in the cover of the overgrowth and watched the battered band of children running uphill. The recon squad now numbered seven, Tom not included for fairly obvious reasons. That meant four dead in this one Snafu alone – and those dead likely to re-animate within the next few minutes, whether they retained mobility or not.
Weighing up his options, Tom continued north in a crouch, taking his time to circle around behind the houses and then jogging between several weed-encrusted water towers at the rear of the abandoned estate. There weren’t any fences to slow his passage, but he took the rear path around the three unexplored homes with care lest any more Furies not already drawn to the previous fracas await.
It was five minutes more before he could hike uphill through the same scattered strand of fir trees taken by Milwaukee to the top of the ridge, but searching the path ahead, there was no sign of MacLaren or any of the other crew.
Tom stopped a hundred yards short of the crest, exhaustion rather than any tactical advantage seeing him drop to one knee behind the exposed roots of a fallen tree. Peering over the top gave him a vantage to the crest where the tree-line crapped out into nothing but open sky. Back the way he’d come, he was surprised at the steepness of the slope, but forgave himself his need to pause, no sign of movement anywhere behind.
After The Apocalypse Season 1 Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 39
