by SD Tanner
When he was five feet away, he said, “On your knees, hands on your head.” Turning to his shooter, he said, “You cover him. You tie him. But for fucks sake, both of you stay low. We dunno where the rest of ‘em are.”
Not bothering to watch his men, he continued to scan the forest warily. He guessed there were at least ten riders left, and they had either dismounted and were somewhere in the forest, or they were gone. It didn’t really matter, they’d disrupted the enemy convoy and there was no way the Crusaders could attack the refinery.
Figuring he should check the other side of the road before calling the bird to take him to the rest of the fight, he ordered, “You. Take this idiot back to the others and stay with ‘em. Hold the perimeter. I’ll be back for ya’ll.”
Grabbing his last shooter, he said, “We’re gonna cross the road.”
His shooter shrugged and began to walk towards the road. Yanking him back, he said sternly, “That ain’t how we cross the road in a combat situation, son. The way this works is, I’m gonna cross first and you’re gonna cover me.” When the man looked at him quizzically, he sighed and said, “That means shoot at anythin’ that looks like it might fire on me. When I get to the other side, then you cross the road while I cover you. Got it?”
“Yeah, guess so.”
Wishing he’d taken BD with him instead of this clown, and staying in a low crouch, he quickly ran across the two-lane road, bursting through the bushes on the other side. I’m pretty sure my ass was hanging out, he thought dourly.
Waving at the man to follow him, he pulled deeper into the bushes, and watched for any movement until the man burst into the bushes next to him.
Elbowing him away, he said irritably, “Not so damned close. If anyone shoots at us, they’ll get two for the price of one.”
Still using the ferns for cover, he felt the claws of thorns clutching at his ACUs and came to a stop. “Listen,” he whispered.
Slowing his breathing until all he could hear was the quietness around him, he heard the distinct click of metal on metal. As he half stood, he took aim in the direction the sound came from and fired rapidly, making sure he was firing ten, twenty and then thirty feet out. His efforts were rewarded with the sharp cry of a man, and he heard the crack of return fire. Gunfire erupted to his left, and his shooter was standing tall, wearing a grim expression, unloading his ammo in the direction of the enemy shooter. Suddenly his shooter jerked, and then fell to the wet ground clutching at his throat.
He opened fire in the direction of the enemy shooter, and judging by the return fire, there was more than one of them. Still using the greenery as cover, he quickly ran over to the body of his own shooter, but with almost no cover, there was little he could do for him. Letting his gun hang, he pulled an M67 grenade from his tactical vest, and pulling the pin as he ran, he thought he saw a flash of a weapon fifteen feet away. Lobbing the grenade at the movement, he shielded his head and turned his body away from the blast. After the loud explosion, the forest grew silent again.
Moving his gun back into a firing position, he quickly moved through the forest until he saw a man lying face down in the mud. Cautiously approaching him, he jabbed him with the end of his gun. When the man didn’t move, he dropped to one knee and pulled him onto his back with one hand. With one glassy eye and the other a bloodied hole, the man must have been hit with shrapnel and was clearly dead. About six feet away from his corpse, was another man lying on his back with his mouth wide open and obviously not breathing.
Worried about his own shooter, he ran back to his original position. The man had pulled himself under a cluster of low bushes, and when he came closer, he found himself looking at the wrong end of a gun.
“Easy. What’s your status?”
“Gotta bullet to the leg and one on the neck.”
“Okay, but you’re still awake, so that’s a good thing. What the hell were ya doin’ standin’ up in the middle of a gunfight?”
“Trying not to miss.”
“You’re lucky to be alive, son. You got any of that Lake of Life stuff?”
“No, I don’t. You didn’t tell us to bring any.”
It went against everything he’d ever learned to rely on only one way to solve a problem. The Lake of Life could heal his soldiers, but he worried what would happen if they didn’t have any. He wanted his troops to learn how to deal with injuries using reliable and proven methods that didn’t depend on having magic water. Even so, he should have told them to pack a bottle in their pouches.
“Fair point. There’s some on the bird. You stay here, I’m gonna call a bird down to land on the road. We’ll getcha on it and then I need to check on the other squads.”
The birds were hovering nearby and, once they landed, he helped the shooter onto the platform. The man poured the water from the Lake of Life onto his wounds, and was fully healed in less than a minute.
Radioing to BD, he ordered, “Bring your prisoners out and get ‘em on the bird.”
Using the other bird, he flew over the forest, looking for his squads while he called them on the radio.
Benny was the first to reply, “I’ve got three dead and four captured.”
Greg replied next and said, “I’ve got two dead and one prisoner.”
“Are you secure?”
“No,” Benny replied. “The forest is too thick to be sure, but I’m moving around to hold the perimeter.”
Benny was now a hunter of sorts, and he guessed with his improved hearing and speed, it wasn’t a bad tactic and said, “Good plan. I’ll sort Greg first.”
Landing on the road where he assumed Greg’s squad was, he jumped off the platform, ready to fire. Greg and his eight shooters emerged from the bushes around the side of the road and clambered onto the bird, pulling the zip tied prisoner with them.
As the bird lifted into the air, he radioed BD and asked, “What your status, baby?”
“We’re heading to Benny’s position and don’t call me baby when I’m working,” BD replied archly.
BD had only ever been used as a honey trap to help them capture Major major asshole. The Major had killed her and it took a year before she was able to return to him in the body of another infected person.
Having never seen her work as a soldier before, he was impressed by her initiative and replied, “Duly noted. Get ‘em loaded.”
Landing slightly further down the road, they organized everyone on the birds to even the load and quickly took off again, headed for the town center.
Between them, they’d captured nine men and killed at least fifteen enemy. Given the Crusader fighting force looked to be about fifty men, there were still twenty-five of them somewhere outside of the town. He suspected they’d run away and would be impossible to find. With some satisfaction, he realized with not even a day on the job, they’d managed to stop an attack and lost none of their own men.
Pretty good start, he thought, and for the first time since Gears gave him the job of building an army, he thought it might be doable.
Chapter Nineteen: Cain
“What? You were shot at from the air? How?”
The man standing in front of him looked like he’d been travelling rough for three weeks, and he supposed he had. His Crusaders were continuously scouring the land looking for more Sinners and bringing people back to his many prison bases. To date, he’d managed to pull over fifty thousand Followers to his new religion, and fifteen thousand of them were Crusaders trained to fight.
Before the outbreak, and while living in Mexico, he’d become good friends with a man called Miguel. Miguel was the leader of the powerful drug cartel privately nicknamed the Matar Cartel. With his talent for keeping people alive while he methodically removed their organs, he was often called upon to help them to extract information or inspire fear in their enemies. Although he preferred to torture young women, he didn’t care about their reasons for wanting someone hurt, and enjoyed any opportunity to practice his skills.
Miguel was a ruthless m
an who’d built an underground army the authorities could never break. When he stayed at his casa de lujo, they would spend many evenings sitting outside the spectacular home, talking late into the night. It was through Miguel he learned how to run a renegade army. In his thick accent, Miguel would say, people are stupid and all they wanted was a simple mission. Always distribute resources and never centralize soldiers and weapons. Use only men for combat and women for sex, children and work.
One of the most interesting observations Miguel made was the need for God. He said men needed to believe God was on their side, it made them feel safe, bonded them to the cause, and they could justify any action in the name of God. He could remember Miguel’s eyes glittering with amusement when he explained the purpose of customs. He said a ritual was not to appease God, but to entertain man and that man was never happier than when he was watching someone else suffer. He told him that the best ceremony was a cruel one, as it acted as both a threat and would give his loyal followers a night to enjoy.
Despite running drugs into the US, Miguel strictly enforced a policy of no alcohol or drugs. He said an addled mind made for a bad soldier, and he kept his punishments for infringements of his rules simple. Travelling with Miguel, he’d witnessed many floggings and the occasional execution. All reprimands were done in public in front of his soldiers and their families. In this way, Miguel not only ensured the wrongdoers were chastised, but everyone else lived in fear of breaking his simple rules. Occasionally Miguel would ask him to torture someone, sometimes to death and other times only to remove organs they didn’t need while they remained conscious.
Having learned from the best, he strictly applied Miguel’s simple rules. His Crusaders lived in prisons now used as barracks across the west coast. He spent his days travelling from one location to the next, checking on their performance and conducting ritualized punishments and sacrifices to God. With this approach, he was never in one place for very long, and other than himself and his inner circle, no one knew how many Crusaders they had or where they were. All his soldiers were male, and their mission was to capture people and either convert them to become Followers, or slaughter them as Sinners.
Miguel also told him he had a strong network of leaders. To keep his soldiers loyal he made sure they got what they wanted, and that was mostly money and sex. Fewer women had survived the outbreak, and finding even one woman was difficult. Following Miguel’s lead, he made each prison a Crusader battalion headed by the Crusade Commander. His Commanders were rewarded by being allowed to have more than one woman. He told the Crusade Commanders that they were closer to him and therefore God, so it was important they sowed their seed with more than one woman.
Beneath the Crusade Commanders was a hierarchical structure of smaller units, eventually becoming teams of fifty men headed by a Crusade Leader. Based on his estimations, Eden had about two hundred towns and tens of thousands of small communities. Each town had between five and twenty thousand people, but the communities could be as small as twenty people. It was these smaller groups they targeted first, taking many of the people into their religious cult. The towns were proving to be more problematic. Some were heavily armed, and most weren’t willing to let them ride in and take what they wanted. A year earlier, he’d met with the fifty Commanders, each in control of a prison base, and they agreed to stockpile weapons and form larger Crusader Convoys to attack the towns.
A third of his Commanders had some military or police training, and they shared their skilled people with other prison bases. For the past twelve months, they’d continued to accrue more Followers, sacrifice the Sinners, collect weapons and train the Crusaders to work in larger teams. Their greatest weakness was proving to be transportation. Each prison base was capable of maintaining their vehicles and he had a factory producing ammo, but finding fuel was difficult. One of the Crusader teams discovered a town refining oil, and they’d made several attempts to take it by force. They’d failed, but they’d learned a great deal about the strength and preparedness of the town.
Although more than one Crusader team had reported seeing helicopters, this was the first time he’d ever heard of one doing anything other than fly over them. Frustrated, he realized they’d missed something.
Glaring at the trembling man standing in front of him, he asked sternly, “Well?”
“I…I dunno what you want to know. There was a helicopter and it fired on the convoy.”
“With what?” The man sitting next to him calmly asked.
Troy was his second in command, and although he’d never worked as a soldier in the military, he was a contractor with a defense company supplying arms and men to the government. He hadn’t known it before the outbreak, but according to Troy, the government used contractors to conduct their more politically sensitive work. Whenever the military needed to do something that was less than ethical, they engaged third parties. Troy told him his men were used to gather intelligence, engage in extreme combat and kidnap specific targets in whatever way worked. All his work was dangerous, covert and completely outside the public eye and the majority of the government.
Seeing his questioning look, Troy said flatly, “I need to know what weapons they used.”
The man replied shakily, “I dunno, but whatever it was, it blew up the truck. There were guys firing from guns too.”
“Hand held or were they behind a big gun on the bird?”
“Umm, I dunno, all I saw was a big gun.”
“How many birds were there?”
“One.”
“What?” He exclaimed in disgust. “Your entire Crusader Convoy was destroyed by one helicopter.”
“N…no, no, there were soldiers. They were in uniform and then they attacked us on the ground.”
“Soldiers!” He shouted angrily.
In all the reports he’d heard from the Crusade Commanders, they’d never seen any soldiers. How is that possible, he wondered? There was no government for there to be an army. He assumed the soldiers were only men wearing uniforms, but that didn’t explain how or why they had an armed helicopter.
Turning to Troy, he asked, “What the hell is going on?”
Troy waved his hand at the frightened man and said, “Go. Get yourself sorted.”
Still trembling, the man asked in a small voice, “Am I in trouble, sir?”
“No, you couldn’t have known the bird was there.” After the man left their office in the prison base, Troy added, “He might know more than he’s said.”
“I’ll get anything he knows out of him before I kill him.”
Sounding disinterested, Troy asked, “Why do you want to kill him?”
“He made us look weak. He should have died rather than run.”
“If he’d died, then we wouldn’t have got the intel.” With a cold expression, Troy added bluntly, “We need our trained men. It’s better if you don’t kill him. Pick yourself a pretty woman to enjoy.”
He supposed Troy was right, an armed helicopter with soldiers onboard meant there was probably another army somewhere. They needed every man in their army, and for now he’d let the fool live. Useless idiot, he thought dourly, he’ll probably die in combat anyway.
“We need more information,” he said irritably.
“Yes, we do. The problem has always been transportation. It takes too long to get anywhere. We need those helicopters.” Rubbing his goatee thoughtfully, Troy added, “They need aviation fuel and there’s only one refinery we know of. That doesn’t mean there isn’t another one, but we know that one is supplying a lot of towns.”
“Then if we take the refinery, we get the helicopters.”
“Not necessarily, but it means we’ll know where they are and can mount an attack later. They won’t survive long without fuel.” Standing and walking to stare out of the barred window, Troy added, “I know Crusade Commander Thomas sent another recon team to the refinery this week.”
They were continuing to conduct missions to the refinery to learn more about the layout o
f the location and its strength. It was a tricky mission and they couldn’t just storm the site. To gain control of the supply of oil, they needed to take the refinery and its workers without damaging production.
“Do we have an update yet?”
Communications was another weakness. Very few of the prison bases had working radios and mostly they passed messages through Crusader Couriers. These men would ride beasts between the prisons, taking messages from one to the next. If they wanted a message sent faster, they would waste precious fuel travelling by truck.
He usually met with the Crusade Commanders in small groups of five to twenty men. Troy assured him this was the best way to work. Other than the two of them, no one knew everything about their army, and it prevented their Commanders from banding together and overthrowing their control. It had its weaknesses, but he agreed it was a secure approach. Troy had also seeded the prison bases with his own spies, and they monitored the loyalty of the Crusade Commanders and their men. Any potential insurrection was quickly squashed with a public demonstration of his human vivisection skills.
Turning away from the window so his face was thrown into shadow, Troy replied, “No, but I’m planning to head out to Commander Thomas’s base. I’ll send you an update through a fast courier.”
The change in the situation was worrying. It wasn’t so much what he knew, but what he didn’t know. What if this army was better trained and armed than his own? What would Miguel do? Picturing his Mexican friend, he saw the man’s eyes glitter coldly as they so often did. Always be stronger, Miguel would say, you can never be too strong. Thinking of strength reminded him of the dark-haired woman who inspired him to start his cult. Izzie, that was her name, he thought, with a sensual pleasure. The story she’d told while she slowly died included a submarine base. She said the base contained hundreds of nuclear weapons.
“I know how we can improve our odds.”
Stepping away from the bright sunlight streaming through the window, Troy’s bald head and muscular face became visible again, and he asked, “How?”
