Surviving the Dead 03: Warrior Within

by James N. Cook

  I was still in bed at noon the next day when a loud knock from the foyer sent peals of agony tearing through my skull. Cursing the offending party, I lurched to my feet and stumbled blearily into the living room to see who it was, praying that it wasn’t Allison. Bright sunlight lanced through my eyes, sending me back a step when I opened the door.

  “Jesus, Riordan. What the hell happened to you?”

  I was still blind, one hand held over my face to ward off the pain, but I recognized the voice.

  “What does it look like? I got drunk.”

  Steve stepped inside and shut the door behind him. “All things considered, I’d say you were entitled to it.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m regretting it now.”

  I walked over to the couch and collapsed onto it face first. A rustling sounded from across the room as Steve sank down into a chair and regarded me in silence. A couple of minutes passed while I breathed in the stale odor of upholstery and listened to the house creak around us.

  “Grayson Morrow is quite an interesting young man.”

  I shifted enough to peer at him with one eye. “How so?”

  “He told us a hell of a story this morning.”

  “And?”

  Steve smiled. “Maybe you should take a few minutes to get yourself together. You’ll want to have a clear head when you hear all of this.”

  I sighed and sat up, wincing at the increased pounding in my head. “All right. Give me ten minutes.”

  “Take your time.”

  Standing up took far longer than it should have, and on the way outside to the outhouse, I had to pause a few times to allow the dry heaves to run their course.

  Thoroughly emptied of everything in my stomach and bowels, and after expelling putrid liquid from every orifice in my body capable of doing so, I stripped down, poured a bucket of cold water over my head, and swallowed a couple of prescription pain killers. After drinking enough water to nearly turn my stomach again, and shamelessly violating the ten-minute restriction I had placed on myself, I reconnoitered back to the living room in marginally better condition than when I had left it.

  “Not bad,” Steve said, nodding in approval. “You are now well on your way to merely looking like shit.”

  “That’s what I like about you, Steve,” I said as I collapsed back down onto the couch. “Always quick with a kind word and a smile.”

  He ignored me. “You up for a little walk this morning?”

  “Probably not, but I have a feeling I’m gonna do it anyway.”

  “Good.” He stood up and walked to the front door, stopping to look at me. “You coming?”

  I groaned, sat up, and got my feet underneath me. The day was going to suck no matter what I did, whether I went with Steve, or stayed home. So I figured I might as well get off my ass and do something useful.

  *****

  Morrow looked small in the wide confines of his cell.

  The bars on the door were haze gray, like the color of a warship, and the surrounding walls were cold and unyielding, made of chipped white cinderblock with all manner of obscenities carved into the paint. It was designed to hold several inmates at once, but rarely saw use other than the occasional drunken brawl or domestic dispute. Today, Morrow had it all to himself.

  “Got someone here to see you,” Sheriff Elliott said, unlocking the door.

  I passed under the Sheriff’s disapproving glare and sat down on a bench opposite the prisoner.

  “I appreciate you meeting us here, Walter,” Steve said. “I know you have a lot to do. If it’s all right with you, we’d like a few minutes alone with Mr. Morrow.”

  Elliott shifted his stern gaze from Steve, to me, to Morrow, and then back to Steve. “Suit yourself. Cohen will be here to lock up when you’re done.”

  Steve nodded, and the Sheriff turned and left, shutting the door to the cell behind him. I faced Morrow and leaned back against the wall. Steve took a seat on the other side.

  “Good to see you still breathing.” I didn’t quite manage to keep the venom out of my voice. Steve glanced in my direction, gave a slight shake of his head, and mouthed, “Not yet.”

  Morrow missed the exchange, being too busy staring at the floor and avoiding eye contact.

  “I know you’ve been through a lot since yesterday,” Steve said. “But I need you to go over everything again with Mr. Riordan here.” He waved a hand at me.

  The boy asked, “What do you want to know?”

  “All of it. Everything you’ve told me since last night.”

  Morrow sat up and eyed me from across the cell. His eyes were red and sunken, and the bones of his face stood out in gaunt relief, casting shadows on his hollow cheeks.

  “It’s a long story.”

  I crossed my arms and stretched my feet out in front of me. “I got nothing to do today.”

  He sighed, and looked desolately at Steve before launching into it. He spoke slowly at first, then faster and faster until the words tumbled out of him almost too quickly for me to keep up.

  By the time he was done, I didn’t know quite what to think of him. If everything he said was true—and I wasn’t quite ready to bite on that just yet—then this kid was as much a victim of the Legion as he was an accomplice to their crimes. It was enough to make me feel sorry for him.

  Finished with his story, and leaking silent tears down onto the floor between his feet, the kid looked imploringly back and forth between us. “What’s gonna happen to me? Whatever it is, just tell me. Anything’s better than sitting here not knowing.”

  Steve gave him a flat, reptilian stare, allowing a small smile to creep up the corners of his lips. I had seen that smile set hardened men to shaking in their boots, and the effect was not lost on Morrow.

  “That’s entirely up to you, Grayson. The information you have is invaluable, assuming it turns out to be true. If you help us bring down the Legion, I can arrange to have you taken back to Colorado, and you’ll have a chance to start a new life. But if it doesn’t …” He shrugged. “Your fate will be at the discretion of Sheriff Elliott. I think you already know how that will end.”

  “Look, whatever you want to know, I’ll tell you,” Morrow said. “There’s nobody in this room that hates those fuckers more than I do. You can burn every goddamn one of them alive for all I care.”

  Steve’s smile broadened, but it was devoid of humor. “Get some rest.” He stood up and patted the kid on the shoulder. “I’ll send someone around to bring you some food and some hot water for a bath. The guards should be able to scrounge up some clean clothes for you. Get yourself together, and I’ll be back tomorrow. We’ll talk more then.”

  *****

  “I don’t feel quite so bad now about not finding their base of operations,” Steve said.

  I nodded, staring mutely at my hands. We sat on a bench in front of the Sheriff’s station trying to glean some warmth from the clear, cloudless sunshine. It was the kind of day that was warm on your skin as long as you stayed out of the shade.

  “We’re going to have to move up our timeframe for that thing we talked about.” He leaned forward and kicked at a piece of gravel with the toe of his boot.

  I turned my head to look at him. “You still expect me to do that? After everything he just told us?”

  “You got any better ideas? Morrow only knows about the one tunnel entrance. He can’t tell us how big their network is, or how far it extends. The fastest and best way to find that out is to infiltrate them.”

  I thought about it for a moment, and finally shook my head. The only other option was to send Morrow back, and that, quite simply, was not going to happen. Not after everything the Legion had put him through.

  “You can do this, Eric. You’re smart enough, you’re tough enough, and no one on their side knows who you are. You can help put an end to this fight.”

  I stood up and walked across the parking lot to the street, stopping next to a willow tree. The bark was rough against my hand as I leaned against it an
d gazed at the houses lining Seminary Road. Just looking at them, quiet and scenic under the late September sky, you would never have known that the Outbreak had ever occurred. That the world had ended, and that none of the houses on this street had electricity. I reached out to a willow branch, broke off a slender twig, and threaded the soft, vinelike wood between my fingers.

  “You know, pharmaceutical companies used to get salicylic acid from this stuff,” I said, half turning to Steve and holding up the twig. “Used it to make acne medicine.”

  He continued to stare at me, his yellow eyes waiting for an answer. I dropped the stick and looked back out at the road.

  “I have a few conditions.”

  Steve left the bench, walked over, and stopped a few feet to my right. “Okay.”

  “First, if there really are innocent people involved, we need to do everything we can to save them.”

  The Green Beret nodded. “My thinking exactly.”

  “And the Legion is fucking done. No taking prisoners, no options for reform, no reparations, and no fucking apologies. We wipe the bastards out. Root and branch.”

  Steve frowned and made an impatient gesture with one hand. “When do you get to the part where you tell me something I wasn’t already going to suggest to General Jacobs?”

  “If anything happens to me …” I clenched my teeth for the space of a second, then turned to Steve and put a hand on his shoulder, leaning close. “Allison will need someone to look after her. You keep her safe, you hear me?”

  His eyes were steady, hiding nothing. “I can do that.”

  I watched him for a moment, gauging his sincerity. He didn’t budge. Satisfied, I stepped away.

  “And help Gabe get to Colorado, for Christ’s sake. If you can get a Chinook and all those guns and shit all the way out here, then you can get one man to Colorado Springs.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Good.” I walked back to the bench and sat down again. Steve followed and sat next to me.

  “So how are we going to do this?”

  Steve laid out a plan. It took him the better part of an hour to do it, and I had to stop him about halfway through because I had to take a piss. My watch—a windup piece that had survived the end of the world with me—told me that it was just after two in the afternoon when he finished. My stomach came back to life and told me that I needed to find something to put in it, pronto.

  “Do you think you have a handle on all of this?” Steve asked, getting up from the bench.

  I nodded. “For the most part, yeah. We’ll have to go over it all again before I leave.”

  “You’ll have time.”

  “Okay.”

  Steve looked at his watch. “I’m going to go find the general and see what resources we can scrounge up, and get on the radio back to Central Command. We’re going to need their help with this.”

  I nodded silently, staring at the space between my knees and trying to stem the growing tsunami of anxiety that threatened to clench my bowels in its grip.

  “I’ll come by and see you this afternoon, or maybe tomorrow, depending on how things go. Try to be at home as much as you can, okay?”

  I nodded again. Steve watched me wordlessly for another moment, then turned and strode away, leaving me alone on the bench. When he was out of sight, I stood up, shoved my hands in my pockets, and started walking down the road toward home.

  Chapter 10

  The Journal of Gabriel Garrett:

  Job Prospects

  General Jacobs was in a grim mood.

  He had requisitioned the administrative office in the VFW hall, and sat behind the desk in a comfortable looking leather chair, the kind with little brass studs running along the outer seam. A cup of instant coffee sat on the desk in front of him, half-empty and forgotten. He pressed a button to turn off his hand-held voice recorder, leaned back in his chair, and stared at me.

  “Mr. Garrett, I don’t suppose you have any interest in coming back onboard with the military, do you?”

  I hesitated, surprised by the question. “It hadn’t really occurred to me, General.”

  “Call me Phil.”

  “Okay, Phil.”

  His face lightened into a brief, tight smile before he picked up his coffee, sipped at it, and grimaced. He put it back town.

  “I can’t offer much in the way of pay, things being what they are. But I can offer you a field commission as a captain. We need someone to help coordinate reclamation efforts in this part of the country, and I think you’d be perfect for the job.”

  I stayed deliberately quiet for a few moments, holding his gaze and weighing carefully what I should say next. It was no accident that Jacobs had sprung the question on me out of nowhere—he wanted to catch me off balance. Probably thought he could fast-talk me into agreeing to his offer. Put it on the table, and make it sound like he was doing me a favor. It was a smart strategy, and it had probably worked for him with other people. But this was not my first rodeo.

  “Phil, before I first came to this town, do you know what I was doing?”

  His granite-colored eyes stayed steady as he shook his head.

  “I was leading a small group of survivors westward, bound for Colorado. We weren’t going that way to join up with the military and fight the infected, or marauders, or anything else. We were trying to find a safe place to put down our guns and live in peace. That’s what we wanted.”

  Jacobs tilted his head at an inquisitive angle and leaned forward, crossing his arms on the desk.

  “I keep hearing you say ‘we’ this, and ‘we’ that. Is that really what you wanted? What were you going to do, be a farmer? Raise chickens and grow potatoes? Maybe sign on with a public works crew and dig ditches? You really think any of that would be the best use of your talents?”

  I smiled, and shook my head. Bum-rushing me didn’t work, so now he was attempting good old-fashioned manipulation. I had to give the man credit. He was persistent.

  “Aren’t we getting off topic, Phil? I thought I was here to talk about the skirmish yesterday.”

  The old soldier picked up the voice recorder. “I have your statement right here. I’ll hand it over to Captain McCray when he gets here and let him decide what to do with it.”

  He saw me arch an eyebrow, and understood my question.

  “I’m not here to lead the fight against the thugs plaguing this town.” He explained. “That’s McCray’s job, and I trust him to handle it. What I’m here to do is gather information, make an assessment of what this town needs, and make sure that the beancounters back in the Springs get off their asses and send it. My presence here is as much diplomatic as anything else. Command figured that showing up in person, bringing in supplies, and waving my star around would show the people here that we’re serious about helping them. Hell, I got two more communities to visit before the end of the month.”

  “And the men you brought with you?” I asked, “What are they here for?”

  He frowned, knowing I was trying to change the subject, but went on anyway. “They’ll be staying behind to help you train your militia, and to help cripple the insurgency.”

  “Insurgency? Is that what we’re calling the Legion now?”

  Jacobs shrugged. “It’s a term with a very specific resonance. Lets people know where the federal government stands on the issue.”

  “And what about those communities that don’t want anything to do with the federal government? Are they insurgents now, too?”

  His gaze turned to flint, and his scowl deepened. “What we’re trying to do, Mr. Garrett, is prevent this country from descending any further into chaos and bloodshed. Right now, there is a gigantic power vacuum out there, and a lot of forces are vying against each other to fill it up. I don’t know about you, but I’d hate to see this nation reduced to a bunch of scattered outposts constantly warring with one another over resources and territory. I would rather see the people of this nation come together to rebuild, and bring it back
to something like the place it was before the Outbreak. I believe we can do it. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here. But we’re going to need the right kind of leadership to make it happen. Quite frankly, Mr. Garrett, what we need is people like you.”

  I shook my head, and gave him a tired smile. “That was a nice speech, Phil, but you didn’t answer my question. What about those communities in the Midwest and California that have told the government to stay out of their business? What’s the president’s plan for them?”

  Jacobs was quiet for a long moment. The hardness in his stare diminished, and the lines of his face seemed to deepen.

  “Diplomatic efforts are ongoing,” he said. “Ambassadors have been sent to begin negotiations.”

  I snorted. “You know, Phil, when people start talking to me in the passive voice, and regurgitating hackneyed political buzzwords, my bullshit detector starts beeping.”

  His jaw twitched a few times, and he turned his eyes down from mine, suddenly finding the surface of his desk interesting. He didn’t say anything.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

  The general nodded. “They’ve held elections.”

  “Which ones?”

  “The two biggest ones,” Jacobs said. “There’s a network of small, fortified city-states that stretches from Ohio to Illinois that call themselves the Midwest Alliance. They’re the biggest threat, and the most hostile. Then there’s the Republic of California. We don’t know much about them yet.”

  I absorbed that for a moment, and said, “You think it’s going to come down to a fight?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. They haven’t tried anything yet. If they do, we’ll be ready, but everyone back in the Springs is hoping that it doesn’t come to that.”

  “You think they could win if it does?”

  He shook his head. “Doubtful. We have pretty significant resources ourselves, and we’re actively working to get access to more. Unlike the other groups, we know where all of the doomsday stockpiles are. It’s just a question of reaching them. And both groups know that even if they do manage to win, they would take such heavy losses that it wouldn’t be worth it for them to try. Not yet, at least.”