The Dealer of Hope_Adrian's March_Part 1

by Chris Philbrook

  I watched as his eyes got thin and he got angry. I called him out correctly. He had expected me and wanted this to be intimidating. My laughter and honest assessment took the wind out of those sails.

  “Well, new group with unknown threats. Figured it’d be safer to move out with a larger force in the event of an ambush. You wouldn’t know about any ambushes happening today would you Mr. Ring?”

  I shrugged, still looking him in the eye. “Adrian is fine, Captain. I appreciate you having the patience to chat with me like this.”

  “I appreciate you hiding in a building then coming out like a ghost while my back I turned. Doesn’t speak to your honesty.”

  I shrugged again. “It does speak to how I didn’t shoot you in the back of the head though, doesn’t it Captain? The trickles of people coming down from the north and what they say doesn’t speak well to the caliber of people who you represent. I’d rather play it safe and do things this way on the first hand shake. I hope you can understand not revealing your hand when you told you’re playing against someone who has dealt from the bottom of the deck before.”

  “Plenty of unhappy people have left Calendar Mountain and the NVC. I can’t control people’s opinions about our methods, or how predecessors acted. Gossip happens.”

  “But you’d like to, am I right?” I winked at him.

  He chuckled. That seemed to burn off some of the animosity we’d suddenly developed. “I’m an officer Mr. Ring. You served right? That came to us from someone heading north from down here. Army if I recall correctly. What rank did you achieve? What unit did you serve with?”

  “Doesn’t matter anymore Captain. I don’t represent the Army and I am not the man I was when I served. I protect the people who I live with, and I try to be a good man. That’s all.”

  “Hm,” Picarillo replied. “Well, what do you think? I trust you listened to what I said to Miss Carleson earlier. Have you and your group considered joining the NVC? What we offer is tremendous. Safety, food, fuel. Everything you need for happiness and growth. I could arrange a meeting with some of our group leaders. They could answer any questions you might have.”

  “It’s a pretty picture. Thank you for the offer,” I said. “A tour might be more convincing.”

  He looked around at his men and women in salvaged military uniforms, as if their presence would help sway any decision I might make on the subject. I already knew a tour was out of the question. You don’t lead your potential enemy around your home in the hopes they join up.

  “Is that a ‘thanks, but no thanks,’ Mr. Ring?” he asked me.

  “Captain I don’t fully represent the settlements I am sort of speaking for. Any decision would be made after lengthy discussion. We don’t do things hastily. I hope you understand.”

  “Settlements? Plural huh? More like this one here?”

  “More like this one here, yes.”

  “How many?” he asked, resting his elbow on the Browning machine gun mounted on his tank. Another gesture designed to throw me off.

  “More than one, less than fifty. Book keeping was never my strong suit. More of an infantry kind of guy.”

  His face changed. “I thought you were supposed to represent a better way? A shining beacon of our future. And here you are, acting dodgy, avoiding my questions, hiding in the shadows. If you ask me Mr. Ring, you’re not much of an example to follow.”

  “And to think you’ve only just met me, Captain. Imagine the possibilities I could sink to.”

  “I don’t like your attitude,” he said.

  “People in positions of authority rarely have, and that’s not me saying you have any authority, Captain. I don’t want this to be testy, and it’s getting testy. I never once said I was a good role model, but I was chosen to lead a better life and do the right thing and so far, I’m a better man, doing the best I can, and that’s enough for now. I hope. We’ll see what the future brings. As far as you and your APCs and your heavy handed diplomacy here, I recognize you are carrying a big stick and appreciate you not swinging it. Now to move forward, we can chalk this up as a fresh new day with fun neighbors with great senses of humor. You’ll have to stomach the idea that I do not bow easily, even in the face of tank treads and belt fed machine guns.”

  As I spoke he picked up a small handset from inside the APC and said something short into it. By the time I finished talking, I heard an odd humming, or thunking sound in the air. Now that I think about it, I had heard it the whole time under the grumbling tank diesels idling. I couldn’t place what the growing noise was until I finished.

  That’s when the helicopter flew over our head, fast and low.

  I couldn’t identify the exact model in the quick flyover. A blue and white civilian bird with the side doors removed. I saw manned, mounted guns in the doorways, probably welded on. It did a loud circle over our positions and then climbed to an elevation that’d make shooting it nearly impossible from the ground. It circled above, watching us like a vulture over a doomed animal in the desert.

  Air superiority is theirs. Our resident Air Force pilot Kate only got a Cessna up and running at the tiny airport near us, and that’s not military in any way. A fast moving, maintained helicopter with even light machine guns on it says a lot, and changes the game. What would’ve been an uphill battle became a suicide situation.

  Then the prick says, “Well Adrian, so long as you understand who you’re talking to.”

  I could’ve punched him in the fucking throat.

  “Absolutely Captain. Can we schedule another meeting just like this in another ten days? Maybe with some other representatives from the NVC? I’ll arrange for others of my people to be here as well? Maybe we can agree on something that’s mutually beneficial?”

  “That’d be a good start. I’ll see what the Council says. Ten days. It was a pleasure Mr. Ring,” he said with a smile that was as fake as a porn star’s tits. He turned to Celeste. “Good day, Miss Carleson. Spin us up. Everyone aboard.”

  The young soldier who shit himself when I said my name looked at me with eyes made of adoration before he loaded back onto the small APC. I knew he was fascinated with me, fascinated with what I represented or who I was but I let it slide. No sense pushing that. Not at that moment. Not yet.

  The convoy left with the clanking of treads and the steel whine of heavy diesel engines, but the little helicopter with its strapped on machine guns stayed above watching the Factory for half an hour before peeling away and heading north, presumably to cover the convoy’s egress.

  The ride home last night and the talks today have been… Animated. My hands hurt. I’ll write more about in a day or two once we’ve talked more. Otis seems nervous. Michelle definitely is.

  -Adrian

  A City Laid Asunder

  Mid July, 2010. Afghanistan.

  What was supposed to be a single day’s rest turned into five, then into seven, and finally into eleven out of necessity. The following morning after the men cleared FOB Forrestal, Rasa’s skin felt cool to the touch, yet she shed sweat as if her tiny body sat buried in coals. Her wound had become infected overnight, and the SEALs worked with great intensity to purge her body of the toxicity, or else she’d die.

  Medically the men had little resources to work with. Thomas followed a primary rule of medical care; hydrate. He kept Rasa’s body plump with fluids, flushing the evil out of her slowly. He also used as much of his remaining antibiotics as he dared, leaving some for he and Glen should they need similar care. It seemed an eventuality.

  A few days into Rasa’s suffering at the cliff side base, Thomas opened her wound, and found bacteria thriving there. Disgusting films of varying colors and a distinct odor told him the form of the infection, and he was able to more accurately treat her. A change in antibiotics after a thorough and horrible scrubbing of the interior of the wound led to a rapid improvement in her condition. A day later she was conscious and able to tell them she felt better.

  Only a few days later, the two men sat i
n a room a few feet over from where she slumbered. Glen’s patience had run its course.

  “We need to leave her,” Torrance said flatly. Thomas knew that Glen had taken quite a bit of time building up the nerve to say something so bold.

  “Not an option man. She comes with us,” Thomas said to Glen. His tone was firm, but friendly.

  “She’s nothing but a burden, brother. We’d be in Kandahar right now if it wasn’t for her. We’ve been sitting here for how many fucking days waiting for a deaf Afghan girl with a blown apart hip to heal up? It makes no sense tactically. She can’t even put a barrel downrange for us if shit gets thick. We should slip her a few shots of morphine, put her in the ground, say a few nice words about her, and move the fuck on.” Glen made his point emphatically with a MRE fork, stabbing it into some form of colorless and flavorless meat.

  Thomas nodded, hearing the sense in his partner’s words. “It doesn’t have to make sense man; it’s the right thing to do. We’re U.S. Navy SEALs. We don’t leave the wounded behind. We don’t abandon children, and don’t give up. We never give up. You hear that? We. Plural like a motherfucker.”

  Glen stared at Thomas, angry that the man had gone for such strong reasons. Reasons that he knew Glen would have a hard time arguing against.

  “Tommy you know as well as I do we don’t leave our own behind. But she ain’t American. She isn’t a warrior. She’s making our chances of surviving this bullshit world drop every day we’re tied up taking care of her. I get it. She’s a little girl. She needs help, but so do we. We need to cut her loose, ease her misery, and move on.”

  “Answer me one question Glen.” Thomas said as he felt his temper begin to flare. He physically swallowed it down, and kept cool before saying anything else to his best friend.

  “You got it,” Glen said confidently.

  “If we leave her behind, or we put her down, even gently, how are you going to explain it to your wife? You going to tell her that a little girl’s life was less important than ours? You gonna be able to look her in the face, and be fucking proud about leaving Rasa behind?”

  Glen’s lip twitched. Thomas knew he’d struck the right chord.

  “Fuck you Tommy, bringing up my wife. Fuck you.”

  Thomas nodded, unhappy with everything. “Yeah. Fuck me Glen. Fuck everything.”

  The men waited without talking about it again until the girl was able to move.

  “Alright, the best way I can pack that motherfucker gives us a shitload of 5.56, 7.62, 9 mil, and two cans of M33 .50 cal for the turret Ma Deuce. We’ve also got forty remaining IV bags, all the med supplies they have here, plus two spare M4s, a SAW, three packs of water bottles, spare batteries for the radios, NVGs, et cetera et cetera, four jerry cans of fuel, and all the remaining MRE cases. There’s also one of those tree air fresheners that smell like pine and ass, and space for the three of to exist uncomfortably,” Glen said as he sat down in the room with Rasa and Thomas.

  Thomas laughed at the bad string of jokes. They already knew the humvee they’d be using would be packed full of supplies. There was little sense in leaving anything behind that the two men could pack into the truck. This would be a one way trip, and the two were well aware that they’d need everything the FOB had to offer.

  “When can we roll out? Thomas asked as he handed Rasa one of their handwritten messages. The two had been discussing their childhood experiences. Rasa took great delight in hearing about Thomas’ brothers, and how they tormented one another. A story about how Thomas’ older brother Adrian had slipped and fallen in the winter resulting in him shitting himself was of particular enjoyment to her. Thomas loved it as well.

  “Maybe half an hour. I don’t know what good the cover of darkness will offer if we wait. We haven’t seen or heard anything in a very long time. My gut tells me we’re very much alone in this neck of the woods.”

  “Alrighty then. I’ll get Rasa ready to go, and as soon as we can, we bug the fuck out.”

  “Kandahar here we come,” Glen said.

  Thomas stood outside the driver’s side of the humvee moments after shutting the flimsy FOB’s gate. A few feet above him Glen sat in the turret of the truck behind the .50 caliber Browning monster that would provide them with heavier firepower for their journey. Inside the truck sat the frail little Rasa, sitting uncomfortably in the passenger seat, looking out the windshield at what the two men were watching. Her eyes struggled to focus through the thick fog of painkillers Thomas gave her.

  Far down the slope where the base sat heading towards the village was a scattered line of shambling people. From where the two SEALs were it was clear the people moving were not alive. Their disorganized gait, missing limbs, and complete lack of self awareness in a war zone told them as much. Thomas watched as the six figures stumbled closer and closer to the dirt road that would lead them up the ravine’s edge to the base, directly towards them.

  Thomas heard over his shoulder as Glen climbed up into the vehicle’s turret and chambered a massive round into the machine gun. The zombies were well over five hundred yards away, and only barely a threat to them, but their presence was highly off-putting.

  “Light ‘em up. Let’s see how the dead measure up to a fifty,” Thomas said.

  “Roger that,” Glen said. Glen had spent a huge amount of time in their pre-deployment training working on operating the massive vehicle borne weapon he currently sat behind. Thomas and Glen’s SEAL team knew far ahead of time they’d be working with the huge gun, and Glen was a stickler for preparation, especially when it meant he got to fire hundreds of rounds out of a massive weapon. Glen’s time with the weapon meant he was not only proficient with it, not only highly skilled with it, but more of a… surgeon with it. Glen Torrance, PhD. in heavy ass kickery.

  Glen let fly a controlled burst of four rounds, and watched them impact the dry, grassy turf near the dirt road less than five feet from the closest zombie. Thomas knew that’d be the last miss, and he was proved right when the next burst of four rounds absolutely liquefied the zombie he’d just ranged in. One moment the Afghan zombie was there, and the next all that remained was a pink cloud filled with tiny shreds of body parts flying through it. The power of the .50 cal was enormous.

  Glen pivoted the weapon minutely to the right and squeezed off another handful of rounds, annihilating another zombie. He moved on to the next target, and the one after that until nothing remained of the undead threat.

  “I’d say the combat effectiveness of the Ma Deuce is very high against the dead, Tommy. I mean, this wasn’t a real big test group, but the results look pretty fucking conclusive,” Glen said through a grin. Vaporizing the undead was a mood enhancer.

  All Thomas did was nod, and get into the truck. They had a long drive, and the road to Kandahar would be very, very rough.

  If the Afghan idea of roads were perfect, it’d take the trio ten hours to drive straight to the city of Kandahar. It was a true pity that the roads in Afghanistan were far from perfect, even before the world was overrun with the dead. Under what passed for ‘perfect’ or just ‘acceptable’ in the Afghanistan Department of Transportation manual was a wide variety of road conditions including but not limited to the following features; holes, dead bodies, destroyed vehicles, craters, shambling undead, road blocks, IEDs, beggars, insurgents, thieves, donkeys, and much more.

  The misfit trio didn’t see any donkeys, but they saw each and every other thing at least once. Kandahar and the roads to it were flat out shitty no matter how you looked at it. The group stopped about five miles outside the city to take shelter for the night. They had struggled with taking increasing amounts of fire from hidden locations as they got closer to the city’s frayed edge. Buildings already demolished from the years of war gave shooters infinite places to hide, and it was all made worse by the incredible amount of dead bodies scattered about, as well as the forms of the not-quite-dead rummaging about looking for living victims. Thomas and Glen didn’t engage the undead as they drove; there we
re simply too many. They did return fire when they were shot at by the living however.

  At one point early in the journey they were passing through a small village that sat affixed tightly to the road passing through it. Glen and Thomas weren’t familiar with the area, having only flown over it in Blackhawks. They risked driving through the small town’s center. All was well until they passed under the narrow, looming minaret of the local mosque.

  The town and those living in it had likely seen nothing move through it since the end of the world on June 23rd. Weeks of complete abandonment had driven the locals to extremes, and when they saw the lone humvee come through, they struck at it as if the desert patterned camo-clad vehicle was an entire caravan filled with the riches that would save them.

  Two shooters opened fire directly down on the top of the truck, patiently waiting to stand up until Glen moved his weapon off the top of the mosque. The heavy AK rounds impacted the roof of the humvee in a rapid, clanging burst. It sounded like a hundred men with hammers and bad aim for nails.

  Thomas reacted instinctively and floored the truck, grinding more life out of the motor and sending it further away from the mosque, giving Glen the much needed distance to elevate his barrel to the threat. Thomas cut the wheel around a conspicuously large pile of debris on the side of the street just as it exploded. As the dirt, wood, and metal fragments tore upwards through the sky a fraction of a second too early, both SEALs thanked their good fortune that the explosion was fairly small and badly timed. They’d seen truly large IEDs before, 155mm howitzer shells linked to blow together, and this was perhaps a land mine or something only slightly more powerful.

  Rasa, mercifully deaf could only react to the visuals of the situation, and the vibration in the metal of the humvee. She looked to Thomas’ face and saw his grim determination. She held a scream and the urge to flail her arms about in check. Rasa felt the huge gun above shake the truck as Glen got it on target at the mosque, ripping the entire top of the minaret apart brick by brick with the massive gun. She couldn’t see the men destroyed by his fire, but she knew from the shooting before what the shaking meant. Death to those that threatened her safety. She felt a strange calm come over her as dirt, rocks, bits of brick and stone and other refuse showered down on the hood of the vehicle she rode in. She was scared, but not afraid of dying.