Surviving the Dead 03: Warrior Within

by James N. Cook

  Allison Laroux, M.D. is, for the most part, a gentle woman.

  At least until you piss her off.

  When that happens, her temper comes boiling to the surface, and when it does, it is a hell of a thing.

  A few days after I talked to Gabe, Allison and I went for a stroll along the walkway that connects all the guard towers. The evening started out amiably enough. We held hands and talked about little things, like how cold the weather was getting, how encouraging it was that there were so many pregnant women in town, what was going on with all the single folks, who was sleeping with whom, that kind of thing. We had fallen into a comfortable silence, both of us smiling and watching the sunset, when I had to go and ruin things by bringing up my mission against the Legion, and when I would be leaving.

  I had practiced this conversation and, at least from my perspective, it boiled down to a series of salient points:

  Where am I going?

  To infiltrate the Legion and spy on them.

  How long will I be gone?

  I don’t know. As long as it takes.

  How am I going to accomplish this without getting myself killed?

  I can’t talk about that.

  Am I out of my goddamned mind?

  It is a possibility.

  I should have prepared better, and maybe solicited a little advice from my friends because, to put it mildly, things did not go well. In fact, I’m fairly certain that if she had been strong enough, my petite girlfriend would have lifted me bodily, hurled me over the wall into a ditch full of sharpened stakes, and saved the Legion the trouble of wasting ammunition on me.

  And that was before she started yelling at me.

  Long story short, she kicked me out of the house and refused to talk to me for a week.

  You might have thought, with Gabe being my oldest and best friend, that when I asked if I could crash in my old room for a few days, he might have offered a little sympathy. You know, cut an old buddy some slack.

  You would be wrong.

  Instead, I endured jibes, barbs, thinly veiled sarcasm, and Gabe snapping his hand forward in a whipping motion and making an annoying wha-pssshhh, wha-pssshhh sound every time he asked if Allison had agreed to talk to me yet. All I could muster in response was an irate glare and the extension of my middle finger.

  He was not deterred.

  As bad as that was, waking up alone in my bed every morning without Allison there was even worse. I missed being able to reach out and touch her hair, or wrap an arm around her and pull her close. I missed her warmth, her smell, and the softness of her skin. I missed talking to her, laughing with her, and seeing her smile at my stupid jokes. And yes, I missed making love to her, but that wasn’t the most pressing thing on my mind.

  What bothered me most was that I didn’t know for sure if she would ever get over it. Time was growing short, plans were moving forward, and the current of events was sweeping me inexorably along. What would happen if I had to leave before we had a chance to patch things up? I couldn’t stand the thought that if something went wrong, I would leave this world knowing that Allison, the only woman I had ever loved, thought badly of me.

  It didn’t take Gabe long to recognize that my mental state was deteriorating rapidly. I wasn’t eating. I hardly slept. My frame grew gaunt, the hollows under my eyes deepened, and no amount of levity on his part could get a rise out of me. Finally, he agreed to have Liz talk to Allison for me to see what she could do to help. (Mayor Stone and I got to know each other during that time, and she insisted on first-name status.)

  As it turned out, Allison wasn’t doing so well herself. Liz gave me very specific instructions, reminded me that Allison was a good friend of hers, and laid out the consequences for failure to comply. Not wanting to add any more names to the list of formidable people pissed off at me, I swallowed my pride, screwed up my courage, and did as I was told.

  I went on a short expedition to the greenhouses on the south side of town and, after paying an exorbitant sum of tea and sugar in exchange for a dozen roses, I left a bouquet on Allison’s front porch along with a handwritten note:

  Allison,

  I get it.

  I understand why you’re mad at me, I really do.

  I walk into your life, I let you care about me, and the next thing you know, I’m about to leave on some dangerous, stupid assignment that is as likely to get me killed as it is to succeed.

  I’m not asking you to forgive me, all I’m asking is that you try and understand why I am doing this. It’s not just for the Army, or for the people of this town, or even for retribution against the Legion for everything that they have done to us.

  I’m doing this for you. Because I love you, and I want you to have a safe place to live. Giving you that is worth fighting for, and if it comes down to it, worth giving my life for.

  Even if I don’t get to spend it with you, I want to make sure that you have a future.

  I miss you.

  I’m sorry.

  E.

  The next morning, when I got up to leave for training, Allison was waiting for me on the front-porch swing. When I froze in place, she looked up at me with her soft brown eyes—eyes that looked nearly as red, haggard, and exhausted as mine—and patted the seat next to her. I sat down slowly, not daring to make a sound for fear that I might scare her off.

  “You’re an asshole, you know that, right?” she said, softly.

  The sun rising over her shoulder shone through her eyes, her pupils isolated tiny and clear in the golden light. The tightness in my chest became sharp, like fabric stretching around the tip of a knife. I looked down at her hands, and saw that her skin was dry and cracked. Probably from all the hand washing she had to do at the clinic. I wanted to reach out to her, but the timing didn’t quite feel right.

  “I have been told that, once or twice,” I said.

  Her lips turned upward, ever so slightly. “You know, it occurred to me this morning that I hardly know anything about you.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “It also occurred to me,” she said, as if I hadn’t spoken, “that you don’t know much about me.”

  I shook my head. “I know everything I need to know about you, Allison.”

  She turned her shoulders to look at me fully. “Like what?”

  “You’re kind. And strong, and caring, and you deal with situations that would send most people running for the hills like they’re no big deal. You have courage, and grace, and you’re about ten times smarter than I could ever hope to be. I don’t know what you’ve done in your life, or what kind of person you were before the Outbreak and, to be bluntly honest, Allison, I don’t care. You’re here now, you’re the best woman I’ve ever known, and all I want is for you to love me half as much as I love you. Without that, not a whole lot else matters to me anymore.”

  Allison’s hand came up to my chin, and when she lifted my face with one delicate finger, I saw that her cheeks were gaunt, her hair was a mess, and the cold, dry air had carved a thousand miniscule fractures deep into the pale flesh of her lips. She wore no makeup, her clothes were rumpled and threadbare, and she looked painfully thin under her oversize jacket. But when she smiled at me, it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

  “Okay. That’s good enough. You can come home now.”

  *****

  During my brief exile from Allison’s good graces, Steve began the process of training me to infiltrate the Legion.

  To say that he grew frustrated with me during that first distracted, listless week would be to understate the issue by a significant degree. Most of those days ended with him being fed up and disgusted with me, and questioning, quite loudly, my commitment to not getting myself killed. He even threatened to call off the mission if I didn’t pull my head out of my ass and get serious. At the time, I had just shrugged. The whole thing was becoming less and less important to me as each day passed and Allison refused to see me.

  The day after we patched thing
s up, and I showed up for training with some of the old spring back in my step, Steve was relieved and we got down to the business of preparing me for what lay ahead.

  His first order of business was to coach me on establishing my cover. We kept the story simple so as to make it difficult to screw up, and we spent long hours in conversations where he tried to get me to trip up and say something that would give me away. As it turned out, I was surprisingly good at lying. The trick, I learned, was to get into character and tell myself that everything I was saying was actually true. Really believe it, to the point of feeling raw emotion when I talked about my fake past, and my not-so-fake dead family. Within a couple of weeks, Steve was satisfied that I could hold my own, and he is not an easy man to convince.

  I have a talent for acting. Who knew?

  While this was going on, the militia members returned from their short leave to resume training. Gabe had been worried that not many of them would want to continue on after their first taste of real combat, but on the appointed day, much to his surprise, every one of them showed up. I had to hand it to those kids, they had grit.

  Their first phase of training had consisted of—in addition to a brutal conditioning regimen—basic marksmanship, unarmed combat, an introduction to squad tactics, land navigation, camouflage, cover and concealment, and low-crawling.

  (Why so much time and attention was devoted to a skill as simple as low-crawling, I have no idea. But apparently, it was important.)

  Phase two was set to include advanced weapons training, combat marksmanship, tactical formations, advanced land navigation, countering booby traps and explosive devices, defending positions, and patrolling.

  Urban combat had originally been scheduled for the end of phase two, but at Steve’s request, Gabe moved it up to the beginning. The militia relocated to an abandoned portion of town just outside the wall that had been refurbished for just this purpose.

  Much of the training I received with the militia in those two weeks I had already learned thanks to Gabe’s diligent instruction, but it was a good opportunity to practice that knowledge in a team setting with experienced trainers. I got to know the new instructor during that time, Marshall, the Navy SEAL, and found him to be patient, knowledgeable, and highly effective. He had trained other militias in the past, and his experience shined through. I walked away from those weeks a much-improved gunfighter.

  The other SEAL, Great Hawk, remained aloof. I tried to engage the big Apache in conversation a few times, but only managed to get a few grunts and single word answers out of him. According to Marshall, this was quite remarkable. Most people he simply treated as if they weren’t there.

  While all of this was going on, Steve and I continued to map out the details of how I would carry out my mission. We spent a lot of time with Grayson Morrow, and if everything he told me to expect from the Legion was true, then I was going to have my work cut out for me. Assuming they didn’t just kill me outright, the initiation process was going to be prolonged, and possibly quite brutal.

  And lest anyone think that I didn’t have enough to do, I also kept up with Tom and his efforts to improve the town’s defenses against the infected. I had hoped to head that project up personally and oversee most of the work, but my other commitments simply took up too much of my time. Instead, I met with Tom every morning before he left for work, discussed what progress was being made, and offered suggestions. Other than that, it was his baby.

  Time went by quickly during all this, and before I knew it, all the pieces were in place. As I looked at the date on my clock one morning, I realized with a jolt that I was set to move out in less than seventy-two hours. I spent half of that morning panicking that I had so little time to get ready, but as it turned out, Steve had already taken care of everything. For my part, I only had one last order of business to attend.

  It involved Allison, some local anesthetic, a small incision, and an electronic device about the size of a nickel. I would rather not mention into which portion of my anatomy the device was inserted, but suffice it to say, it would stand up to all but the most vigorously thorough searches.

  After that, I had the next two days to say my goodbyes, get my affairs in order, and get ready to go for a ride on a stealth helicopter. I devoted most of my time to Allison, but I also informed the Glover family and the guys at my poker game that I was going out of town for a while. They were curious, but understanding enough not to push when I told them I couldn’t talk about it, other than to say it was for the Army. When they wished me luck, I had smiled, thanked them, and thought to myself that I was certainly going to need it.

  *****

  We set out under cover of darkness, a couple of hours before dawn.

  The stealth helicopter looked like something out of a science fiction movie, all smooth lines and sleek angles, and I could only imagine how expensive it was to build back before the Outbreak. Steve told me that it was really just a heavily modified Black Hawk.

  I told him I wanted one for Christmas.

  “Not likely,” Steve replied. “Do you have any idea how many strings I had to pull to get Command to send us this thing? If General Jacobs wasn’t back in the Springs lobbying for us, it probably never would have happened. I’d have to teach you how to parachute and drop you out of a Chinook at fifteen-thousand feet.”

  I thought about that and couldn’t quite suppress a shudder. Fast-roping—one of my newly acquired skills—was scary enough. Jumping out of a perfectly good helicopter, with only a thin balloon of fabric separating me from certain death, was enough to give me the dry heaves.

  “Well, let the old man know I’m grateful for the help,” I said.

  Steve nodded and turned to face me. The helicopter’s blades were winding up, and a faint whining sound was beginning to thrum from the engine. A man in unmarked black fatigues and night vision goggles made a signal that they were ready for me to board. My heart began to beat a little faster.

  “Good luck, Eric,” Steve said, holding out a hand. “Watch your ass out there.”

  I shook his hand and felt my face tighten into a strained smile. “I always do.”

  I grabbed my small pack, took a deep breath, and boarded the chopper.

  *****

  The flight to the drop-off area was mercilessly uneventful. I sat with my back to the wall—or bulkhead, as the aircrew called it—and concentrated on controlling my breathing. I had never ridden in a helicopter before, and I can’t say that I am in a hurry to do it again. Air travel and I have never exactly been on the best of terms, and the bumpy ride in the high-tech Black Hawk did nothing to sway my opinion on the subject.

  Thankfully, however, the ride was short. They were only carrying me a little over thirty miles, and the helicopter covered that distance in just under fifteen minutes. The pilot maintained altitude at over eight thousand feet for most of the flight, and only brought the chopper low when it came time to disembark. A crewman, whose name I didn’t even bother to ask, helped me connect my harness and kept a hand on my shoulder until it was time to go. When the pilot brought us down to hover at thirty feet, the crewman slapped me on the shoulder and motioned for me to get moving.

  I slid down the rope as fast as I dared, heat building in my gloves from friction, and hit the ground just a bit harder than I meant to. Recovering quickly, I dropped my harness, signaled that I was clear, and watched for a few moments as the helicopter gained altitude, turned back the way it had come, and drifted silently off into the night sky.

  Gotta love technology.

  As cool as watching the chopper was, Steve’s axiom about surviving insertion in hostile territory rang loudly in my ears: When your boots hit the ground, get your ass away from that LZ. You never know who might be watching.

  I scanned the landscape around me, and while I’m sure that during the daytime it looked exactly as it did in all the satellite photos, at night, it just looked like a big-ass empty field. Thankfully, the grass was low because of wandering goat herds that wer
e once domesticated but now ran wild around the county. I strained my ears to listen, but didn’t hear any of them.

  Good.

  Goats would only draw the infected, and that was exactly what I wanted to avoid. At least until I ran out of food. Then I might have to find out what goat steak tasted like.

  Behind me, and circling to my right across dozens of acres of field, was a large swath of uncut forest dotted infrequently with houses. It may as well have been the border to hell itself. I had no intention of going that way. Not only did my goal not lie in that direction, the woods were probably infested with walkers.

  To my left, the field terminated at a road with no visible structures on either side of it as far as I could see. Flat, level ground marched away into the darkness, only dimly illuminated by pale moonlight. According to the maps I had studied, there were three places less than a mile away where I could take shelter for the night.

  I took a few moments to check my weapons and equipment, what little I had, and set out due south. The cold, spongy ground ate up the sound of my boots as I jogged along, constantly scanning my surroundings for movement. Every hundred yards or so I stopped, checked my compass to make sure I was still on track, and then took off again.

  After twenty minutes of setting an easy pace, the blurry outline of my destination revealed itself against the unrelenting blackness of the night. Where the field terminated at a natural depression lined thickly with trees, shrubs, and tangled vines, there was an old cinder-block utility shack surrounded by a rusty, half-collapsed chain-link fence, and piles of long-forgotten electrical equipment. Vines and creepers twisted up the walls like skeletal fingers, nearly obscuring the lone steel door that permitted entrance to the building. I cleared them away and then tried the door handle.

  Locked. But that was okay. I had a trick up my sleeve for just such an occasion.

  From a pocket on my web gear, I produced a small can of rust-breaking compound, and a lock-picking device that Gabe had graciously loaned me. It looked like a tiny gun with a big trigger, and a needle in the place of a barrel. The needle was the part that did the picking, and it had several different attachments I could swap out for different kinds of locks. I sprayed a little of the compound into the lock, waited a few minutes for it to soak in, and then tried the pick. It took some jiggling and twisting back and forth, but eventually I managed to work the compound into the rusted internal components and threw the bolt back with a satisfying click.