by JT Sawyer
She slowly lowered her rifle, glancing again at his hat, which clearly bore the rank of a warrant officer, and then looked up into his hazel eyes. “Carlie” she said, noticing the hint of tattoos along his wrists, mostly covered by his oversized shirt sleeve that looked two sizes too large. The man had the forbearance of someone in the military but there was something about him that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. The rest of the men beside the Humvees were wearing similar clothing except for one who was dressed in all-white dress regalia typically worn at military ceremonies.
“We’re on our way back from Mexico. That’s a Maritime Security helo that we snagged back in Cancun.”
“It’s been a long time since we’ve seen anyone land here. Probably going on ten weeks now. That’s when Coronado fell.”
She waved her hand back towards the beach. “You know anything about the graves here? Did they belong to a particular unit here?”
“Not sure. Those graves are everywhere on this island. Ya know, there’s probably some record of it back at our command building. My, uhm, boss kept detailed records on such things before he died.”
“Your ‘boss’—you mean your C.O.?”
“Yeah, my C.O.”
The man tucked his hands in his pockets below the two .45s on his hips. She could tell he was nervously fidgeting with this fingers below the fabric as he tried to keep the strained smile on his face.
“So how did you guys make it?”
He shifted his weight to his left side and Carlie could see his men in the distance start to move, angling their bodies slightly. Something is off with this guy. She could tell Jared was getting entrenched in his position to her right but could no longer see Shane out of the corner of her eye.
“We were all away on the mainland doing some R&R, ya know, just before the virus hit. I just, uhm, gathered my men up and then we hacked our way through those creatures trying to get here, ya know. Then we sealed off the entrance routes and have been here ever since. That’s how it all went down.”
“So you’re the captain of these men here,” she said, nodding towards the hat under his arm.
“That’s right. Yes, ma’am,” he said, placing the hat back on his head in a clumsy motion. She could see how loose it was and then noticed his long fingernails were encrusted with dried blood. He rotated his hat slightly and then turned his head to the side, pushing up on the brim and tilting the hat back. Carlie saw the other men by the vehicles move again slightly at his posturing. She could smell his fetid breath and tilted her head slightly to avoid the lingering odor.
“You want to telegraph your intentions any further or do you just want to shout back at your men to launch their assault?”
He smirked and raised an eyebrow as he turned towards her, glancing at her hips and tracing his eyes up her figure. “Not sure what you’re referring to, ma’am.”
She could now see that Shane had crept along the series of berms until he was positioned at her two o’clock. “How about this, Captain,” she said, raising the barrel of her rifle at his head and stepping forward. “You tell your men to place their weapons down and move to the left of their vehicles or my friends and I will blast you into so many pieces even the undead won’t know you were here.”
His right arm was twitching and his smile fading. A bead of sweat rolled off his right temple and he let out a deep breath. “You’ve got some cajones for a woman—thinking you and your two gimps can take on all of us.”
“It has nothing to do with cajones—just with taking the pack leader out of the equation. That can often tilt the odds, ya know,” she said, firing a round into his forehead as he started to move for his pistol. His head exploded in a pink mist and his rigid body careened back onto the blacktop.
Jared and Shane had already started shooting at the other men with short controlled bursts as Carlie dove next to a sand berm and unleashed a volley of precision shots at the nearest men. Four men were dead from her team’s collected efforts before the rest began returning fire. Some stood behind their vehicles while others remained in the open, shooting over the airfield.
The man in the white dress garments fired off two random shots and then sprinted towards the sand dunes to Carlie’s right. With the majority of the men dispatched, she took off running and intercepted the lone shooter as he made it to the beach. She fired off one round at his upper leg, causing him to tumble onto a dirt mound. His pistol had fallen out of his hand, landing nearby on a clump of grass. As he struggled to crawl and retrieve his weapon amidst a trail of blood-coated sand, Carlie came up and stepped on his hand. The man winced and recoiled into a fetal position. She picked up the Springfield XD pistol and tucked it into her belt.
The man also had blood-encrusted fingernails and the foul stench that came from his open mouth as he bellowed almost made her gag.
“You’re going to answer me a few questions. If you do so correctly then I will give you a quick death. Otherwise, I will string you up off the pier and let the sharks take you apart slowly.”
The man had both his hands up, pleading with her. “Please, please, I only did what the others told me to do,” he said in between grimacing and holding his wounded leg. “I’m not a bad person. I was a college student before this—I was gonna be a filmmaker.”
She lowered the barrel of her rifle to his neck. “What happened to the navy personnel here?”
“They’re all dead. We showed up here about six weeks ago. We were luring survivors over to our camp, letting them think we were military.”
“How?”
“There’s a radio station a few miles south of our hideout at the elementary school. We’d listen in on the airwaves for chatter and then fool people into thinking the navy still had a small outpost here.”
“Are there any other survivors here—any more of your men?”
“No, it’s just us. You were the first people we’ve seen in over a week.”
The man paused and his eyes shifted along her boots. She stepped on his injured leg and he shrieked.
She looked up and saw Shane and Jared walking over, then glanced at the row of graves to her left. “And what of the graves here—who are they—what do you know about them?”
“Those were here when we arrived. They’re all over this island. Who the fuck cares, they’re dead.”
She squatted down beside him and put the pistol to his head. “I care, and you would too if you had a conscience. What little you probably had was lost when you joined up with these guys.”
“Please, don’t kill me,” he said while sobbing and clutching her ankle. She pushed him back onto the sand, knocking loose a leather pouch on his belt. It spilled open, revealing a dozen dried human ears. She raised a hand up to her mouth and the muscles in her cheeks quivered. Carlie turned away to the sand dunes and then glanced back down at the wretched figure beneath her.
“Please, miss, have mercy on me. We were starving. There wasn’t anything left to eat.”
She leaned forward and lowered her barrel. “Mercy is not feeding you to the sharks,” she said, pulling the trigger.
Chapter 30
Thirty minutes after the battle, Matias circled back around and landed the helo. Carlie, Jared, and Shane had already gone through the vehicles and the contents of the men’s pockets for any tactical goods.
Matias walked over and stared at the bullet-ridden corpses. “Not who we’d hoped they were, eh?”
“Nope,” said Jared. “Looks like flesh-eaters aren’t found just among the undead.”
“They mentioned having a building nearby they were holed up in,” said Carlie. “Did you see anything that was intact we might have missed on our arrival?”
“No, but I did locate an aerial tower at a radio station a few miles from here. We may be able to use that for boosting the signal on our comms in the helo.”
“Alright, why don’t you head there and we’ll follow behind in one of the Humvees just in case we end up needing a vehicle.”
**
**
Twenty minutes later, they had cleared the tiny radio station and Matias had gone to work on the radio transceiver. Meanwhile, Carlie and the others set up a perimeter around the cinderblock building and did an inventory of their weapons and ammo count.
The rest of the group waited outside as Matias went to work on jerry-rigging the various radio devices to try and connect with any military frequencies along the west coast.
Carlie was sitting cross-legged on the dirt, eating from a can of pork and beans, still pondering what had become of her brother. I know Matt would have gotten out of the city early with his family when things started falling apart. He would have beelined for our cabin in the mountains—question is, did he make it there in time before the highway was gridlocked from everyone else fleeing? God, a person’s soul could be torn apart just trying to fathom where their loved ones ended up when all this went down in the world. She stopped eating and leaned her head back against the warm concrete wall, closing her eyes. I can’t give up hope—he has to be up in the mountains and I’ll find him—somehow I’ll find him.
Carlie opened her eyes as she heard Jared sit down in the shade beside her, and he looked at her with a crooked smile as he spoke. “So, I’ve been curious about something—something that’s of real concern but that no one has brought up yet.”
She stared at him, forgetting her worries for a moment, and responded in a monotone voice. “Go on—I’m sure this is going to be life-altering.”
Amy smirked. “Or make you want to end his life to be free of his humor.”
“So, we’re hopefully headed to Fort Lewis in the Pacific Northwest, right?” said Jared. “Do you think that our missing link pals have been affected by the virus? I’m talking about Bigfoot of course. Washington State is supposed to be the epi-center of the Bigfoot population in the world and we’re going there. Doesn’t that worry any of you?” he said with a serious face. “What if they have also mutated and are now Sasquatch zombies?” he continued, raising his hands and clawing at the air while snapping his teeth together.
“This fucking guy—how does he even have the energy to think up such shit?” said Shane, tossing a pinecone at Jared’s head.
“You joke now, amigo, but when we run across one of those nine-foot, shaggy undead freaks, you’re not gonna be laughing.”
“Got that right,” Shane said. “I’ll be shooting you in the leg and then running so I get a head start on my escape.”
Pavel stopped eating and nudged Jared with his elbow. “My friend, everyone knows that Bigfoot was created by Russian scientists to spy upon you Americans. Surely they must all be dead by now.” The older man looked at the others and grinned.
“If you run into one, Jared, I think you’ll be safe because Sasquatch don’t eat junk food,” chuckled Amy.
Carlie was laughing so hard she had to put her can of food down. “Damn, I’m going to miss these wilderness therapy sessions that I’ve had to endure these many months. You guys kill me,” she said, holding her sides as everyone joined in the laughter.
****
Three hours later, after many attempts at improvising with the radio console and antenna, Matias made contact with a repeater tower in central California that brought in a garbled transmission from an Air National Guard base near Klamath Falls, Oregon, south of Portland. Matias then used the unlock codes Carlie provided to access the secure channel at Fort Lewis, allowing him to connect to his intended location.
As Carlie and the others were snoozing in the late afternoon sun beside the ashen-gray concrete building, Matias yelled from the inside, “You’re going to wanna hear this.”
Everyone gave sideways glances and then sprung to their feet as they rushed into the back room. There in the small chamber, coming over the ceiling speakers, was the gravelly sound of a man’s voice. “Go ahead, Coronado Island. This is Fort Lewis, over. We have you loud and clear.”
Chapter 31
The morning after her attack on the riverside encampment, Eliza gathered with the four other survivors she had freed and they quickly departed in a truck, heading northwest along country roads that one of the women knew. They had secured a few dozen rifles, ammo, food, and supplies from the camp before setting off as an approaching herd of zombies was moving in on the smoldering wreckage. They made one stop a few miles from the camp so Eliza could retrieve her pack with the laptop, which she had stowed in a hollow sycamore tree.
Darcy, a gray-haired woman in her early fifties, sat in the middle beside Eliza, who was in the passenger’s seat. The wispy man driving was Mitch and had grown up in Yakima, where they were headed. The other two survivors, Candice and Josh, a couple in their mid-twenties, sat in the rear seat in the Ford F-250, wrapped in blankets, asleep.
Eliza was exhausted, having spent much of the night awake, tending to the survivors, who were severely dehydrated and malnourished. Mitch spoke with them about heading to Yakima, Washington where he, Darcy and a few dozen others had an off-grid Forest Service logging camp they had been using. Eliza had told them that she was traveling with some friends enroute to Fort Lewis when they were attacked. She kept her answers vague and always diverted their questions so she wouldn’t have to reveal who she had been in her previous life.
As they barreled down the two-lane road through the forest, Darcy kept looking at the gauze on Eliza’s forearm, which had soaked through again. “You gonna be OK? That one looks like a doozy.”
“Not as bad as my back. That’s the one that keeps reminding me I’m still alive. Besides, I can’t complain compared to what I’m sure you’ve all been through.”
Mitch just clenched his jaw and gripped the steering wheel, staring at the road ahead. Darcy threw her head back and forced out a breath then wiped her forearm along her misty eyes. “Those bastards are dead and gone—that’s all that matters.” She placed her hand on top of Eliza’s. “You’re a savior, you know that, right?”
Eliza didn’t know what to say and found herself struggling for words. She just squeezed the woman’s hand back and looked out at the trees lining the road to her right. Twenty-four hours ago she was driving in a car with Willis, talking about all the food they were going to eat back at Fort Lewis and how they were going to enjoy a romantic dinner. Now, he was gone and she was adrift, surrounded by strangers. Life no longer held any certainties, no predictable outcome despite all of one’s planning and desires. Now life was a daily battle against those hellish creatures, the elements, and even other human beings bent on savagery. The fire of revenge from the day before had burned itself out, leaving a chasm in her soul. I should feel some guilt over what I did, executing those men, but instead I feel nothing. What’s wrong with me? I could have driven on, away from that camp and made my way alone. She glanced around the truck at the others. But now, these people are free—imagine what would have happened to them if they had remained prisoners. The images of the exploding vehicle, the deafening hail of gunfire, and the lingering odor of smoldering wood—all of it unspooling in her head like a reel from an old movie with someone else playing the lead character. Eliza thought back to her previous life in D.C. when she was involved in her parents’ fundraisers for humanitarian causes. Now she was this person who had pre-meditated a murderous attack on others, however much her logical mind tried to justify their ending. She thought of a Sunday School saying she used to hear when she was little and uttered the words to herself: ‘He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.’ Eliza thought of Willis and Carlie and other agents she had known, reflecting on their mental fortitude and prowess. ‘He who lives by the sword lives one day longer’; that’s how it has to be now.
The truck came to a halt at a rural intersection. An abandoned feed store was on the right corner with an antique wagon sitting on its wooden wheels in front. A faded sign in the front window read, “Fresh hay.”
“How far to Yakima from here?” Eliza said.
“Mmm…about another seventy miles or so. Our camp isn’t exactly in Yakima. It’s on
the outskirts in the mountains, about eighteen miles from town.”
“How did you end up getting captured so far south?”
“Me and a few others were doing a run for medical supplies, sweeping through some cities in the tristate area when we ran across those inbred bastards on the highway. That was two weeks ago.”
“Where were those guys from?”
“Walla Walla,” said Darcy. “They were convicts.”
“Why were you…” Eliza motioned with her hand around her neck, “chained up like that?”
“They used us as bait to lure the flesh-eaters towards us. Then they’d move us a half-mile back in the truck and keep luring those creatures until they had hundreds of them heading in one direction, usually towards a town they wanted to sweep through,” she said, hanging her head in her hands, trying to calm her voice. “Once they had the locals on the run, their guys would descend upon those fleeing, taking who and what they wanted. There used to be ten of us—now we’re all that’s left.”
“God, I’m so sorry,” Eliza said, turning to look at them both. “I came across a dead zombie, one of those super-fast ones, a few weeks back. It had a collar on its neck too.” She swallowed hard, recalling the adrenaline of that incident.
Darcy looked at Mitch as they both exchanged grim looks. Mitch leaned his body forward on the steering wheel. “I never saw any of those things but one of the thugs at the camp was talking about how his boss in Walla Walla had captured a few of the fast ones using nets and Tasers. He’d take them to small towns and turn ’em loose, then come back the following day and kill the thing once it had wiped out all of the locals.”
“Someone is using these creatures as weapons. That’s sick—who could think of such a thing?” said Eliza.
“The guys out of Walla Walla were survivors from the military penitentiary up there. They’re some scary bastards,” said Darcy.
“And your place in Yakima—how far is that from those dudes?” said Eliza.
