Surviving the Dead 03: Warrior Within

by James N. Cook

  I shined the light on a piece of paper stapled to the front. It looked like some kind of shipping label, and unlike Chinese glyphs, the writing on it was blockish rather than spidery. It definitely was not Japanese—I’d traveled to Japan a couple of times when I was younger, and I would have recognized Kanji, Hiragana, or Katakana—so maybe Korean? Having never been to Korea I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like a logical assumption.

  Not having any use for the weapon, I put it back in the crate and continued searching. There were ten more crates full of rifles, and an equal number filled with twenty-round boxes of ammunition. The writing on the ammunition crates was Cyrillic, meaning they were clearly of Russian origin.

  “So, we got Chinese rifles, Korean shipping manifests, and Russian-made ammo.” I reasoned aloud, shining my light on the crates. “Where the hell did you Legion guys get this stuff?”

  That was the million-dollar question.

  The rest of the cache yielded first-aid supplies, vacuum-sealed bags of some kind of jerked meat, and cardboard boxes full of vegetables canned in Mason jars. I didn’t quite trust the jerky, but the seals on the jars were intact, so I grabbed a couple filled with cubed potatoes and carrots and set them aside. Behind a stack of boxes in the back, I found two small propane grills, and a canister of fuel for each one.

  “Sweet Mary, please tell me you’re full.” I picked one of the canisters up and hefted it a few times. Yep. Definitely full.

  Behind the grills, three large, black cases leaned against the wall. My headlamp reflected off the checkered plastic, and I passed a hand over the surface.

  “Well, what do we have here?”

  I picked one of them up and carried it to the table in the kitchen. When I opened it, I found myself staring down at a Stryker hunting crossbow, complete with a ten-bolt quiver and a low-power scope. I let out an excited laugh and picked the crossbow up to look it over.

  I didn’t know much about crossbows, but this one seemed to be of good quality, and the scope was a Leupold that I knew for a fact was expensive—I had an identical one in my own collection. The other two plastic cases contained the same equipment, but I only took the bolts, giving me a total of thirty. It would be extra weight for me to carry, but the ability to hunt game in silence was well worth it.

  After emptying one of the crates full of rifles, I threw in my new weapon, the bolts, canned food, and one of the camping grills, and carried it all outside. To make my presence less obvious, I put the chain and padlock back on the front door on the way out. Not that it would have stopped anyone from getting in if they were really determined, but there was no sense making it easy on them. And if any Legion troops happened along, leaving the lock off the door would tip them off immediately that someone else was here. Better safe than sorry.

  When I got back to the furniture store, I set up the grill, poured some potatoes and dried venison in a small pot, and left them to simmer for a while. As they cooked, I kept thinking about the writing on those crates, and the weapons inside. I thought about General Jacobs, and the reports he’d read about the Republic of California, and their weaponry. I thought about Grayson Morrow, and how he’d heard some of the Legion leadership talking about weapons shipments, but never who was bringing them, or where they came from. Finally, I thought about the map in my pocket, and how I could best make use of it.

  I turned off the heat and set the stew aside to cool, along with thoughts of the Free Legion. If all went according to plan, I would be their guest at some point in the next two days, and if I played my cards wisely, maybe I could find answers to some of these questions. I ate my stew, curled up in my bedroll, and slept.

  Chapter 16

  Fearful Symmetry

  I awoke to the sound of clattering on the pavement.

  After loading the crossbow, I crept slowly to the window, crouched down beneath the sill, and peeked outside. On the street below, an eight-point buck stepped gingerly through the collection of scattered corpses, limping heavily on one of its hind legs. Through the crossbow’s scope, I could see a large gash on the injured leg, and above it, what appeared to be a huge bite wound.

  “Wasn’t a walker that did that,” I whispered. “What got ahold of you?”

  The deer’s path was going to take it directly in front of the furniture store. I aimed the crossbow through one of the broken windowpanes and waited.

  Come on. Just a little closer.

  I held still, controlling my breathing and not moving a muscle. The wind picked up and whistled through the broken glass. The deer, with its finely honed instincts, knew danger was near and stopped every couple of steps to look around.

  Clip-clop. Clip-clop.

  Scan left, scan right.

  Clip-clop. Clip-clop.

  Scan left, scan right.

  I ignored the heat in my bladder, the stiffness in my back, and applied careful pressure to the trigger. I hadn’t practiced with the crossbow, so I just had to trust that the scope was zeroed, and that the trigger pull wasn’t too heavy. The deer took a few more steps, stopped, and raised its nose to test the air.

  Perfect.

  The crack of the string was surprisingly loud. The buck started, and then took off at a broken sprint for about forty yards before it faltered and pitched face first into the blacktop. I left the crossbow in the furniture store, grabbed my hunting knife and the M-4, and set off after it.

  The buck was dead by the time I reached it. The bolt’s razor-sharp broadhead had punched through his heart, shredded it, and kept right on trucking. I was amazed he had run so far, considering the damage. A pool of thickening blood spread out from beneath the buck’s chest and began to widen, staining the pavement crimson. In its smooth surface, I saw my reflection looking down, darkened and featureless. The hair on my arms stood up, and I wondered what it would be like if the tables were turned. If the last thing I ever saw was my killer gazing down at me, blade in hand.

  I put my hunting knife back in its sheath for the moment, and inspected the damage to the buck’s hind leg. As I had suspected, it looked like a large dog bite. I’d seen plenty of deer branded with them over the last few years, victims of wild dogs, wolves, and other predators.

  Worried that the dead buck’s attackers might still be in pursuit, I stood up and scanned the periphery of the street. For a few seconds, all was quiet. Then I heard a rapid clicking, several in number, and moving closer. Like the sound of hard nails running over pavement, gripping for purchase.

  The clicking increased in volume until, from behind a building up the street, a familiar black-furred shape came running around the corner, spotted me, and skidded to a halt. It glared hatefully at me, its tongue lolling from the corner of its mouth, flecks of foam caked around its snout, flanks heaving with labored breath. I leveled my M-4 and took a few steps toward it.

  “You’ve been chasing this thing a long time. Haven’t you, boy?”

  The mastiff lowered his scarred head and growled, not quietly like before, but viciously, and with murderous intent. I strained my ears for more clicks, looking around, left, right, and behind, waiting for the other three who were no doubt closing in.

  “Tell you what,” I said, stopping. “I don’t need much. Let me cut off a leg, maybe a tenderloin, and you guys can have the rest. How about it?”

  The big dog took a few steps forward, testing my resolve. I raised the rifle and fired a round into the pavement in front of him, spraying his legs, chest, and snout with shrapnel. He yelped, and began backing off. As he did so, two more of his pack rounded the corner and stopped to survey the scene. I shifted my aim and triggered a few rounds close to them as well, peppering them with bits of pavement. It had the same effect as with their pack leader, startling them and taking them out of hunter/killer mode. They began to ease back, tails down, watching me with thinly veiled malice.

  The Rottweiler was last to arrive. His shorter legs didn’t allow him to run quite as fast as his companions. As soon as he saw me, he switched direc
tions and barreled for me at top speed, mouth open and trailing streamers of saliva. He was probably forty yards away, but as fast as he was coming, he would cover that distance in a few seconds.

  With no time to think, I raised the rifle, put the front sight on his chest, and fired four times. The massive dog yelped, stumbled, and hit the ground, rolling to a stop just a few feet in front of me. The other three dogs stayed where they were.

  The last report echoed away into the distance, leaving the feral pack and me in silence. The dogs stared nervously at their fallen pack mate, as unmoving as statues. I knelt down beside the Rottweiler and touched his side. He did not stir beneath my hand.

  His skin was warm, almost hot to the touch from chasing the deer. Blood poured from two wounds on his chest, and another on the back of his neck. One of the shots I fired must have gone into his mouth and penetrated straight through his head. The dog’s eyes were still open, but there was no light in them. His mouth hung open, his big tongue limp and lifeless. Gone was the fearsomeness, the sharp fangs, and the murderous eyes. The immense power of his muscles lay flat, like a discarded weapon. The silence pressed in on me, gathering pressure between my ears until it became a ringing, rising and falling with the pounding of my heart. A slow heat began to spread in my face, and through my chest. My boots grated on the pavement as I stood up, a bleak noise in the gore-strewn square.

  “Are you happy now?”

  My voice was barely a whisper, struggling to escape the tightness in my throat as I walked toward the three wild dogs.

  “You know what this is, don’t you?” I shook the rifle at them, and they flinched. “You know what it can do, right? What the hell were you thinking?”

  My words grew in volume until I was shouting. I ran at the dogs, intent on kicking them, but they trotted away, keeping their distance. Finally, I stopped and lowered my voice.

  “When you see a human with a gun, you stay the fuck away. Haven’t you learned that yet? How the fuck are you still alive?”

  I shook my head and stared at them. Their ears were flat, tails down. One of the mutts let out a barely audible whine. The pressure in my head receded, taking the ringing in my ears with it, draining out of me and leaving a cold hollowness behind. My legs became shaky, and I swayed a bit on my feet.

  “Get out of here. I’ll take what I need from the carcass, and you can have what’s left. Come back for it later, when I feel a little less like killing all of you.”

  They stood still, understanding my posture, but not my words.

  “GO ON!” I shouted. “GIT! FUCK OFF!”

  That got them moving. They set off at a trot to the edge of town and disappeared around one of the gas stations. I walked back to the deer, set the M-4 on the ground, and drew my hunting knife.

  *****

  Later, I sat alone in the furniture store eating a plate of grilled deer steak and boiled potatoes, and waited.

  While I had been butchering the buck, my thoughts kept turning to the creature that had followed me here, the one I had first glimpsed back at that nameless town. I didn’t doubt that he was still out there somewhere, maybe waiting for me to move on again.

  Here, I had the advantage. If it came into town, I had places to go where I could reach it, but it couldn’t reach me. If it caught me out in the open, well … I didn’t like to think about that.

  Time to get creative.

  Using my hunting knife, I carved off one of the buck’s legs, tied it off to a length of para-cord, and threw it over the arm of a streetlight, paying out the cord until the dripping meat was just a few feet off the ground. The streetlight was just across the way from the furniture store, giving me a perfect vantage point from which to watch. I left the deer’s guts on the pavement and dragged the remainder of the carcass with me to my hiding spot. I still planned to let the dogs have it after I was finished but, for now, I had to deal with more pressing matters.

  The bait set, it was just a matter of who would show up first: the feral dogs, the beast, or the infected. I didn’t have to wait long to find out.

  The first moan carried to me from the eastern side of town. Another answered it, followed by a few more, and in short order, a horde began to gather in the streets. Thankfully, the Legion had been diligent in their efforts to clear the countryside of walkers, and there were only a two dozen of them. I let them have the deer guts and the dead Rottweiler for their last meal, and then watched as they followed the scent left behind from when I had dragged the buck’s carcass away. It led them to the furniture store, and as expected, they noticed the leg hanging from the streetlight.

  It was the work of a minute or two eliminating the first batch, the .22 rifle sending hot lead into their craniums from less than twenty yards away. Others straggled in over the next hour or so in ones and twos. I dealt with them, and eventually, things went quiet.

  I had expected more ghouls to show up, drawn by the crack of the Ruger, but it didn’t happen. When Scar (as I’d come to think of him) and the two mutts showed back up, I figured I was in the clear. They nosed around where the infected had eaten the deer guts, then approached the haunch hanging in the street. A single shot from the Ruger and a couple of shouted threats dissuaded them, and they bolted away.

  The seconds slipped by in silence while I waited, the emptiness around me punctuated only by the occasional birdcall, a breeze, or the creak of wood shifting in the walls around me. The relative warmth of the last couple of days had been nice—it had actually stayed in the forties when the sun was up—but the good weather had moved on for greener pastures. My breath made frost-white spouts in the frigid air.

  I stayed that way for hours, hardly moving, only getting up to answer the call of nature or munch a few handfuls of jerky and potatoes. Impatience began to nag at me, reminding me that I was already a day behind, and that I couldn’t afford any more delays. The sun crept farther to the west, shifting the shadows of the buildings as I watched the street. Nothing happened. The beast didn’t show up.

  “Well, Eric. Failure is a part of life,” I said to the empty room. “You gotta know when to cut your losses and move on.”

  Grabbing the buck by his antlers, I dragged him back down to the first floor and out into the street. His coarse fur rasped on the sidewalk, then the pavement, and then I dropped him just beneath the streetlight where his leg was hanging.

  “You know, I’m really sorry about all this.” I said to the carcass as I cut the para-cord hanging from the post and carried the leg back to its former owner. “You got the shit end of this deal, my friend. But at least you died quickly. You weren’t going to last much longer anyway, with that torn-up leg.”

  One of the deer’s empty eyes stared up at me, unseeing. A fly buzzed around it, landed on it, and crawled over its glazed surface. I tossed the leg down and turned to go back to the furniture store. Just as I was opening the door, I heard a sound behind me. Like someone running a hand over a piece of coarse cloth, faint and rasping.

  I moved unhurriedly, my hand inching for the M-4 hanging from my back. I gathered it and brought it to my shoulder, careful not to make any sudden movements. Slowly, I turned and faced the street. Not twenty feet away from me, standing over the dead buck and sniffing at the incision where I had gutted him, was the most terrible, magnificent thing I had ever seen.

  A full-grown Bengal tiger.

  All six hundred pounds of him.

  His paws were the size of dinner plates, his tail was as thick as my forearm, and I had seen boulders that were smaller than his head. The tips of his shoulders came up almost to my chest, and all along his frame, powerful muscles rippled like steel cables under a glossy coat of black-striped, reddish-orange fur.

  My knuckles went white on the rifle’s grip. I stood rooted to the spot, listening to my hammering pulse and the quickening rasp of my breathing. Coldness settled in my stomach and began spreading upward into my face, down my arms, and into my hands. Somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind, in a place that still
remembered fleeing from sharp teeth on some distant, long-ago savanna, a voice began to cry out. It was a voice that knew why people feared the dark, why we find safety in numbers, and why we scream when we’re in danger. The voice began pounding at me, growing insistent, drumming against the rational surface of my mind with a single, urgent command: RUN!

  But I didn’t listen. Running would have just provoked the creature, and there was no way I was going to get away from it if it decided to give chase. Not from this distance, anyway. So I did the only thing I could do. I stood perfectly, absolutely still.

  The tiger took a half step to his right, pushed his blunted snout under the flap of the buck’s flank, and began licking at the muscles along its ribcage. After a few seconds of this, he began to gnaw at the meat, his massive fangs easily tearing through tendons and sinew. A few bites seemed to excite him, and he began chewing away at the carcass with gusto.

  In a rush of thought, as I stood there watching one of the largest apex predators in the world snacking on a deer as big as a full-grown man, several things occurred to me at once. First, if the tiger had wanted to kill me, he could have done so. Easily.

  Second, it didn’t take me twenty seconds to walk from the deer’s carcass to the furniture store. But that was enough time for the beast to emerge from his hiding spot, trot across an unknown expanse of street while dancing over a slew of rotting corpses, and approach with such stealth that if he had not stopped to sniff at the deer’s carcass, I never would have known he was there.

  Third, I had a decision to make. Stand here and hope he goes away, or take a chance and ease my way into the store. Maybe the fresh meat in front of him would keep his attention and allow me to slip away. Maybe not.

  My plan had been to kill the tiger from my perch in the furniture store with the M-4, but standing there looking at him, I realized how foolish that idea had been. The .223 rounds in the M-4 were simply not designed to tackle a big critter like a Bengal tiger. Hell, they were only marginally effective against people. Unless I caught the big cat behind the ear, or managed to split the difference between a couple of ribs and take out his heart, shooting him would have done nothing more than piss him off. And an injured, pain-maddened tiger on my trail was the last thing I needed.